25 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, April 20, 1972

WHAT has happened to the tu'penny and a penn'orth of years ago? The snowy-white flakes of fish and the forever-burning chips that tasted so much better eaten out of the evening paper?

Well, steel yourselves. That staple of the British diet, the ambrosia of the masses, has been given a trendy image at a new chippy in King's Road, Chelsea. Forget street corner prices . . . the cheapest fish and chips to be eaten there costs 75p!

THE Government will not agree to changing the name of the new Greater Manchester Metropolitan County to South Lancashire, a Government spokesman has stated. But he said there is nothing to prevent the people of Bolton regarding themselves as Lancastrians if they wanted to.

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, April 22, 1947

TWENTY women seated round a table in Bournemouth today heard a man tell them sternly that women are still too much in the background. They were delegates to the Amalgamated Engineering Union women's conference, and the man was Mr Jack Tanner, president of the union. He referred to the fact that Princess Elizabeth is to receive a 'rate for the job' of £15,000 a year at her coming of age, and went on, 'If this lady is worth that amount of money, I am sure the girls working capstar lathes or on a bench, or who are doing a really productive job, are worth the labourer's rate of 37s 6d per week'.

125 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, April 22, 1872

ABOUT four o'clock this morning, a dreadful tussle took place between a burglar and a married woman named Parr, in a bedroom in a house in Lever-street. For the past three weeks, Mr James Parr, coachbuilder, 240, Lever-street, has been in London on business, and on Sunday night, he was expected to return home, Mrs Parr and several children going to the station to meet him. He, however, did not arrive, and the family retired to rest, a boy named James Parr, aged 15, sleeping with his mother in the front room, and the remainder of the other children, five in number, in other rooms in the house. About four o'clock, Mrs Parr was awoke by the falling of a box lid in the room, and, thinking it was her husband returned, called out 'Is that you, James?' A man's voice replied 'Not a word', and in the dim morning light she could distinguish the form of a man standing over her with an upraised poker.

Mrs Parr rushed out of bed and clutched the man by the throat, but the fellow got loose and hit her on the head with the poker, back onto the bed. She told the burglar that no money was kept upstairs, and he went downstairs. Mrs Parr threw up the bedroom window, and getting upon the ledge outside screamed 'Murder' at the top of her voice. Her cries shortly attracted the attention of a neighbour, who entered the house. In the meantime the boy, emulating his mother's bravery, leaped from a back room window onto the roof of a stable, for the purpose of intercepting the escape of the burglars, but he was only just in time to see four men decamp by the back door and run down the street. The police have information of the affair, and it is to be hoped the perpetrators of the outrage will not long be at large.

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