10 YEARS AGO

SCHOOL GAMES: While the elite athletes of the world fine tuned their training for the Olympic Games in London that year, it was announced hundreds of schoolchildren from Tynedale would be giving their all in Hexham. Wentworth Leisure Centre was to host the Tynedale School Games, where almost 700 youngsters would take part in numerous sporting events to celebrate the once in a lifetime arrival of the Olympics in Britain - and the Olympic Torch's passage through the district. It was part of a county-wide sporting celebration which would see thousands of youngsters competing against rivals from neighbouring villages in 30 different sporting events.

COURT BUILDING: After standing empty for over a year, the former Tynedale Magistrates' Court building was set for a bright new future, it was reported. Hexham Abbey Parochial Church Council planned to buy the lease of the court building, and turn it into a multi-purpose church hall style function room, with meeting rooms, a kitchen and toilets.

25 YEARS AGO

CAMERA FUND: Hexham and Haltwhistle won £82,000 between them in a nationwide competition for Government cash to install “spy” cameras in the two towns. Haltwhistle was granted £50,000 towards the £71,000 cost of setting up a completely new closed circuit television scheme in the centre, while Hexham was given £32,000 to extend its existing town centre coverage. The cash has come from the Home Office, as part of a £15 million initiative to encourage the use of surveillance cameras as a major weapon in the fight against crime.

BILLS RISE: Householders in Tynedale would be paying an average of 7.9 per cent more after their Council Tax bills dropped through the next month. Tynedale Council approved a budget which would need a payment for an average Band D property in the district of £732.85, compared with £678.94 in what was the current financial year.

50 YEARS AGO

TICKET PLEA: Hedley-on-the-Hill woman Anne Wade Thompson appealed in the Hexham Courant for a benefactor to buy her an aeroplane ticket so she could return to Ecuador and attempt to collar the thief that stole her handbag - containing $334, £12, her passport and “toilet requisites” - the year before.

STATION PLEDGE: Plans to build an £87,000 new fire station in Hexham, near Tyne Green, were announced.

DEMOLITION DECISION: Urban councillors resolved to press ahead with their plans to demolish several houses in Hexham’s Cockshaw and Glovers’ Place despite objections from the town’s civic society.

75 YEARS AGO

OBJECTORS OVERRULED: Hexham’s magistrates granted Riding Mill’s Broomhaugh House Hotel a liquor licence despite objections from Newcastle Breweries, owner of rival village pub the Wellington Hotel, and the parish’s Baptists and Methodists.

COLD COMFORT: Temperatures plunged throughout Tynedale despite a thaw having been forecast. The lowest temperature reported locally was at Park End, Simonburn, where a thermometer reading of -13F was recorded.

HOSPITAL PLEA: Hexham Urban Council set about bidding to have a maternity hospital provided in the town.

COMMONS COMMOTION: Hexham MP Douglas Clifton Brown, then speaker of the House of Commons, fell out with Winston Churchill for the second time in a matter of months when he rebuked the former prime minister for trying to butt in during Parliamentary question time and described him as a gatecrasher.

100 YEARS AGO

STREET DECISION: Prudhoe councillors agreed to name three new roads at the town’s Edgewell area Greener, Ruskin and Tennyson streets. Wordsworth street, an earlier suggestion, was dropped in favour of naming one of new roads after a former councillor, George Greener.

MONEY FOR METHODISTS: A gift sale at Bardon Mill Public Hall raised £75 to go towards clearing the village Methodist chapel’s debts.

REVAMP AFOOT: Plans were drawn up for the renovation of the Plashetts colliery houses at Kielder.

125 YEARS AGO

GRAVEYARD VOTE: Haltwhistle’s electors voted in favour of providing a new cemetery in the town, the 215 ayes having it by a majority of seven.