August 20, 1966

FIFTY years ago, the D&S Times published a picture of David Anderson of Richmond who had just become the first man from the town to win the Scorton Silver Bugle since another Richmondian had presented it in 1834.

As the D&S put it, “the bugle is a kind of second prize” in the Ancient Scorton Silver Arrow competition, which is the world’s oldest recorded sporting event.

The silver arrow was first shot for in Scorton, near Richmond, on May 13, 1673.

It was a prize put up by Sir Henry Calverley, the MP for Northallerton, when the arrow was already at least 100 years old. It had become discarded at his family home of Eryholme Manor when one of his predecessors, who had won it at Cambridge University, had eloped with a lowly maidservant.

The winner, who became Captain of the Arrow, organises the following year’s competition in his own home town. He is assisted by the runner-up, the Lieutenant.

Whereas the Captain had the Silver Arrow as his prize, there was nothing to present to the Lieutenant until 1834 when Octavius Lusse, of Richmond Archers, proposed that each of that year’s entrants should subscribe 2s 6d to purchase a bugle for the Lieutenant to blow to call the meeting to order. “The resolution was with great cordiality agreed to,” says the competition’s minute book.

So Mr Anderson became the first Richmond person in 132 years to win the Richmond-inspired bugle.

The contest is still held – in May, 96 archers fired for the arrow and bugle at Bedale High School – and it allows us to repeat one of our favourite pieces of historical trivia: the height of the bullseye on an archer’s target is set at the height of the average Frenchman’s heart. Supposedly.

August 19, 1916

IN the edition of 100 years ago, the D&S reported on the inquest of two boys, Edgar Horn, 13, the son of a Manchester commercial traveller, and Kenneth Wilson, nine, the son of a West Hartlepool timber merchant, who had drowned while bathing in the River Swale near Morton-on-Swale.

The inquest was held in Cross Lanes House, near Scruton, which today is a farmshop on the A684 between Northallerton and Bedale. The Horn family were holidaying in the house, having arrived by train at Scruton station.

Indeed, Mr Horn said the last thing he had said to his son as he boarded the train at Scruton to return to Manchester for business was not to bathe in the Swale.

But the boys didn’t listen. When they failed to come in for tea at 6.30pm, the alarm was raised, and their bodies were found at 11.45pm near a hole in the riverbed where the water depth plummeted from 6ft to 15ft.

“Coroner JE Gardner added that it was probable that the younger boy had got into the hole and had been followed in by the older one who had sought to rescue him,” said the D&S. “Probably the jury men would remember, as he did, that when they were boys they were told not to bathe in certain places, but still they did.”

The foreman of the jury was the Reverend Alfred Thomas Coore, of Scruton Hall, which his family had owned since 1688 and whose name still lives on at the village pub, the Coore Arms. The reverend “said he had been acquainted with the river all his life, and in his younger days had done precisely what these boys had done. There were deep holes caused by swerving currents, and one could go from where it was shallow straight into a deep hole”.

With this sorrowful understanding, they passed a verdict of accidental death.

More light-hearted news came from Thirsk, where the local taxidermist Mr R Lee had placed on view a stuffed sparrow which had recently been killed in the neighbourhood. “It is completely white,” marvelled the D&S under the headline “A rara avis”.

August 18, 1866

"THE case created considerable interest, the court being crowded throughout the time it was heard, even though it occupied five hours,” said the D&S 150 years ago.

“The prisoner was defended by Mr Robinson, and throughout she manifested a remarkable coolness amounting almost to indifference.”

It was said that on August 3, 1866, the prisoner, Caroline Freeman, 19, was seen hurriedly heading south passed the Comet pub in Hurworth Place carrying very little.

She was well known in the area as in July, while she was in the workhouse at Alnwick, she had given birth to a baby named Leonard who had “a sort of ginger cast”.

The father was apparently a young lad from Richmond, “although he had not been kind in sending anything for it”.

Caroline alleged that the baby had died after two weeks because “it had the frog in the mouth” and was buried in Alnwick, causing her to come to Darlington, where she was seen arriving at Bank Top station with several bags.

About the time she was spotted at the Comet, less than a mile up the old coal branchline that once connected Hurworth Place with Darlington, two men out walking spotted some debris in the River Skerne. On closer inspection, the debris turned out to be the body of a ginger-haired baby “wrapped in the clout”.

Floating nearby was a baby’s feeding bottle, referred to as a “tit”. They could also see how some large stones had recently been pulled out of the riverbank near the Blackbank brickworks and deliberately placed out into the centre of the river.

Inquiries at Alnwick revealed no baby had been buried recently, and so Caroline was arrested, and charged with the “wilful murder” of her son. The suggestion that she had created a walkway to the deep centre of the river so that she didn’t get her feet wet while carrying out the dreadful deed made her seem even more callous, and her appallingly indifferent attitude in front of Darlington magistrates clearly marked her out as guilty.

The magistrates committed her for trial at Durham Assizes, and so the case continued…