Memory Corner May 30th 2019

Friday May 30th, 1794

ASTLEY’S TROOP OF HORSEMEN – this present Friday there will be a variety of NEW PERFORMANCES at the Circus, near the Welsh Bridge, for the benefit of Mr Hutchinson. Particulars in the hand bills. NB, tomorrow, Saturday, being market day, the company will perform at four o’clock precisely, quite different to what was exhibited last Saturday.

DIED – last week, as Mr John Croxton of Chelmick was busily employed in sheep shearing, he suddenly dropped down and instantly expired.

 

Friday May 28th, 1819

THE CELEBRATED Mrs Charlotte Bird King, who duped the innkeepers of this town, of Chester and Birmingham by fictitious grief and attempts at suicide, has practised the same manoeuvres at Gravesend, Margate, Chatham and Canterbury.  At Portsea she used to throw blood off her stomach and pretend delirium.  She dresses very plain and neat, bordering on the custom of Quakers, and generally in her speech used ‘yea’ and ‘nay’: she said her mother was a Quakeress.  She was confined in Gosport prison.

 

Friday May 28th, 1869

Shrewsbury market – Victorian

THE CLOCK FOR THE NEW MARKET – the subscription list towards the erection of a clock for the New Public Market does not fill so rapidly as it should do, nor as it was generally anticipated that it would.  Nearly three weeks have elapsed since it was first started, and little more than £220 has been promised, and it cannot be too generally known that a sum closely approaching £500 will be required to purchase a first-class clock, with four dials and bells, and to erect it in its allotted place in the campanile tower of the building.  As yet the nobility and gentry of the county have not shown their usual alacrity in heading a subscription list of this character…

 

Friday May 30th, 1919

CROWNING THE MAY QUEEN – the pretty piece of pageantry, “Crowning the May Queen”, together with the maypole dance, were performed at the Lancasterian School on Friday afternoon last week.  The picturesque ceremony has been kept up here for 20 years and has now become a tradition of the school.  The weather was brilliantly fine, and the event, which took place in the boys’ playground, was witnessed by a large number of the parents of the scholars, some of the managers, and by the whole school drawn up in a hollow square.  The May Queen (Violet Dodds) was elected by ballot by the girls of the school, and the crowning ceremony was charmingly done, following which a bevy of pretty little maidens tripped it around the maypole.

 

Friday June 1st, 1979

SHREWSBURY’S HOPES of retaining its grammar schools are fading.  The reason is that Shropshire education chiefs have come out firmly in favour of completing the county’s changeover to comprehensive schools.  The present plans mean that the Shrewsbury Priory Girls’ and Wakeman Grammar Schools would be turned into comprehensives, with the Priory Boys’ School being used as a sixth form college.  Belvidere Boys, The Grange, Harlescott County and Meole Modern schools would also go comprehensive.

 

Thursday June 2nd, 1994

TWO TEENAGE BOYS leapt to safety from the first floor of their Shrewsbury home after a fire bellowed smoke though their home.  The fire broke out in the kitchen at the house in Ragleth Gardens, Monkmoor, on Wednesday night of last week.  Andrew Lawson, 15, and his brother Damien, 13, escaped from their smoke-filled house from first floor windows.  The boys jumped onto a porch cover and a lean-to shed to break their falls. Andrew twisted his ankle when he landed. The pair were taken to the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital suffering from smoke inhalation but were allowed home. Andrew was in bed asleep when the fire started and didn’t hear the house’s smoke alarm.  Damien was in the bath.

 

Thursday June 4th, 2009

Mammoth team Xraying bones

HOSPITAL STAFF were asked to perform tests on an unusual patient recently when scientists asked for help to solve a 13,000-year-old mystery.  Radiographic staff at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital at Gobowen volunteered their own time to help analyse the front legs of a young adult woolly mammoth whose remains were found at Condover in 1986. Daniel Lockett, curator of natural sciences at Ludlow Museum Resource Centre, where the bones are kept, said, “The mammoth was about 28 years old when it died.  Almost the whole skeleton was recovered, and the creature had a healed fracture of one shoulder blade.  Scans of the bones of the lower front leg were needed to help us try to identify if this broken shoulder had led to the creature suffering a limp which could have led to it not being able to survive to old age.”  The scans taken will need further analysis before it is known whether the broken bone contributed to the animal’s demise.