From the Darlington & Stockton Times

November 27, 1965

“AN officer and sergeant of the RAF were all that was left of a Provost jet trainer from RAF Leeming which crashed on farmland at Boston Farm, near Downholme,” said the D&S Times. Both men had successfully ejected before the plane had crashed between Richmond and Reeth, with wreckage spread across two fields. “Mrs Whitehead of Boston Farm said she heard the noise of the crash even though the washing machine was running,” said the paper.

November 27, 1915

NEWS reached his mother, living in York Square, Richmond, of the death of Pte Richard Thornhill of the Yorkshire Regiment. Pte Thornhill had been a bugler with the Yorkshires in the Boer War. In the Great War, he had been wounded in France. Once he’d recovered from having two bullets extracted, he was sent back out to fight, this time in the Dardanelles, in Turkey. Injured in the field, he was evacuated by ship to Alexandria in Egypt, where he was placed on a hospital train and taken to Cairo. He arrived “weak and exhausted, suffering from diarrhoea and fever”, and “his strength never recovered”, said the hospital matron in a letter. “I know how sad it is to lose one so dear to us, but we must be proud of our brave men and very thankful to them all the time”.

November 25, 1865

ALL the seats in the tiny St Andrew's Chapel in Fencote, near Kirkby Fleetham, had been taken hours in advance the previous Sunday when it was learned that the Bishop of Ripon was delivering the sermon – “a plain and practical extempore discourse delivered with much impressiveness and attentively listened to by the crowded congregation”, said the paper. Those unable to get in expressed disappointment that Kirkby Fleetham’s own large parish church had not been used, but because of “the uncertainty of fine weather” and “the chilly coldness of this time-honoured but dilapidated edifice”, the decision to place the bishop in the chapel was deemed “a prudent one”.