10 YEARS AGO

I DON’T: Would-be brides were turned away from Hexham Register Office, which coupled with the fact that the lease on the Abbey Gate House office ran out the following year, there were fears for its future.

MASKED RAID: Staff at the Premier Store on Prospect Terrace in Prudhoe were left terrified and shaken when two armed, masked men raided the premises demanding cash.

THE WORD: There were tense scenes as Hexham’s award-winning Bouchon Bistrot battled it out with another French restaurant on The F Word, Channel 4’s food programme, for the title of England’s best French restaurant. Bouchon eventually came out on top.

STEAMING AHEAD: South Tynedale Railway was celebrating after it received a £100,000 grant from Groundwork UK’s Community Spaces programme to boost its bid to extend its track to Lintley.

25 YEARS AGO

LOTTERY FLOP: Hundreds of National Lottery punters in Tynedale were forced to travel miles to take part in the country’s biggest gambling event - after three ticket machines were not installed and another broke, leaving just three machines for the whole area.

CONTRACT FURY: Fuming Northumberland county councillors lashed out at the Transport Secretary’s decision to ignore the council’s joint bid to run the A69.

CLOSING DOWN: Prudhoe’s long-established Front Street Co-op was set to close due to falling sales. The six staff were set to be offered posts at other Co-op branches.

POND BOOST: Prudhoe Eastwood County Middle School’s bird and wildlife habitat area was given a double boost, when Northumbrian Water gave the school money to by a pond lining, and Ryton Sand and Gravel donated rocks, subsoil, and -predictably - sand and gravel.

50 YEARS AGO

ALL CHANGE: Hexham Rural Council hosted a meeting between the Hexham MP, Geoffrey Ripon, and local authority delegates to discuss plans to re-organise local government.

PERMISSIVE SOCIETY: Concern about the “permissive society” was expressed at a meeting of Hexham and District Moral Welfare Association. Mr GH. Peile, the association’s president, said: “We seem to be heading down the slope of the permissive society, so that even the most intrepid among us finds it difficult to know where to make a stand.”

NO LIGHTS: The Ministry of Transport announced that a new bridge built at Haydon Bridge would be unlit. “The ministry’s view was that bridge was not a bridge, but a piece of road,” the Courant reported.

BUTCHER FINED: Hexham magistrates fined an Ovingham butcher £15 for putting too much preservative in his sausages.

75 YEARS AGO

FAMILY REUNION: Hexham brothers Sydney and Allen Foxcroft met for the first time in three years while serving in Italy during the war. Sydney, who began his career in journalism on the Hexham Courant, was with the Eighth Army, and Allen was serving with the RAF.

MORE COWS: Northumberland War Agricultural Committee reported that there were 4,000 more cattle in the Hexham district than when World War II began five years earlier, although the county as a whole had 15,000 fewer.

LEGION FUND: Hexham British Legion urged that money donated to the town’s Welcome Home Fund be divided among returning services personnel or their families, rather than spent on a war memorial.

100 YEARS AGO

WAR MEMORIAL: A war memorial to people from Langley killed in World War One was unveiled.

ROOM REOPENS: Catton’s village reading room was reopened after being closed “for some considerable time”.

TOP TEAM: Newcastle United were top of the league, ahead of Burnley on goal difference.

125 YEARS AGO

MOVING ON: The Hexham Courant moved its offices and works from Back Row and Market Place in Hexham to its current Beaumont Street premises.

DRUNK FINED: A “respectably attired” Belgian was fined two shillings and sixpence for drunk and disorderly conduct in Battle Hill, Hexham. The man told the court: “That is not my way of doing.”

150 YEARS AGO

GREAT FLOOD: Five bridges were washed away during a flood on the River Tyne, with inhabitants dismayed at the terrible swollen state of the river.

POOR TASTE: The treatment of a woman proclaiming to be the Countess of Derwentwater was described by a Courant correspondent as a “disgrace”. He wrote: “Countess or no Countess, she is at least a woman, and I could not listen to the details of the proceedings without thinking they had quite forgotten the courtesy which it is usual to extend to one of the opposite sex.”