Last updated 12:02, Tuesday, 18 March 2008

From the files

150 Years Ago

CELEBRATION OF THE ROYAL MARRIAGE IN WHITEHAVEN: The Princess Royal’s marriage day was an eventful day in Whitehaven.

Public enthusiasm knew not where to begin; it absolutely knew no bounds. It is however true that in no part of Her Majesty’s dominion was the marriage of her daughter looked forward to with greater interest than Whitehaven.

125 Years Ago

ELOPEMENT FROM HENSINGHAM: A heartless elopement occurred at Hensingham Thursday last, the parties being a man named Glaister, a mason, and a Mrs Brennan, wife of a well-known miner.

The man Glaister has had the reputation of cohabiting, as chance occurred, with Mrs Brennan for some time past, and on Thursday Mrs Brennan went to Whitehaven and there she was joined during the evening by Glaister and neither has been seen or heard tell of since.

Glaister has left a wife and four children, while his companion has left her husband with a family of five.

100 Years Ago

SHOCKING NEGLECT OF CHILDREN. At the Whitehaven Police Court on Wednesday, Michael Murphy (37) and Alice Murphy (34), his wife, of Bromley-street, Workington, were summonsed by William Payne, Workington NSPCC, for wilfully neglecting their children Alice, Hugh, William, Richard and Joseph.

In the parlour was an old bedstead which was filthy and verminous and covered with grease and dirt. On this was a dirty flock-bed wet with urine and covered in excreta.

In the kitchen was a bed in the same condition as the other bed. Upstairs was a pail of excreta standing in the room. There was a perfectly stinking stench.

William was alive with lice. Joseph had lice on his clothing. He was bitten all over his body and evidently unwashed for a long time.

Mrs Murphy was sentenced to six month imprisonment with hard labour, and the husband to four months.

75 Years Ago

TERRITORIAL soldiers in Whitehaven and district will welcome the announcement by the War Office that the government has decided to include in the Army estimates for 1933 a sum of money to cover the provision of a 15 day camp at Ramsay, Isle of Man.

THERE is a note of confidence in the hematite pig iron market of West Cumberland, but as yet there is no evidence of an expansion of demand such as would require a heavier output.

Business remains at a fairly satisfactory level but it is almost wholly of a hand-to-mouth character, and until users are disposed to buy two or three months ahead, affairs will continue to ran a humdrum course.

A LABOURER has admitted putting sulphuric acid in vinegar at a Workington chip shop. The 28-year-old was given three years probation after the court was told: “He has a low mentality and if somebody can implant in his mind he is easy to lead.”

50 Years Ago

DISCOVERED by Bootle schoolboys has been a cave, sealed up by an apparent fall a few yards inside, is believed to be an exit of some underground passage, either from ruins of a nunnery or the adjacent 400-years-old Seaton Hall.

For many years reputed in the locality to be haunted, the ruin is to Seaton Priory or the Nunnery of the Leakley, founded between 1185-1210, and is one of Cumberland’s least known yet most outstanding antiquities.

AFTER a 12-hour ordeal in the Solway Firth, a Workington Trinity House pilot and his boatmen were taken in tow by a Whitehaven trawler, the Tom Paul.

SAVE water and don’t panic. That’s the North West Water Authority’s message to Copeland consumers, even though many families in more remote parts are now having to boil their drinking water.

Several hundred homes in the Ravenglass, Eskdale and Bootle area, which has a population of about 2,000, were “boiling up” this week as a precautionary measure.

25 Years Ago

BOTH Cleator Moor and Egremont Civic Halls are to get major cash injections for repairs and improvements in the next financial year.

A meeting has recommended that £25,000 be spent on roof and other repairs at Cleator Moor and £15,600 on repairs and alterations at Egremont.

WHITEHAVEN’S fast young lions ran Swinton off their feet and set the Recreation Ground alight with some quality rugby and true promotion form to enter the top four for the first time this season.

Gordon Cottier starred for Whitehaven, for whom Norman Ratcliffe and David Martin scored two tries apiece.