From Our Files: Ring dug up, sewerage scheme, losing youth, hospital plan
75 YEARS AGO
AN entirely new and revolutionary system of assessing properties under the new Rating Bill, which was to receive the Royal assent last week, was amongst matters raised by Mr J. Walsh (Clerk to the New Forest Assessment Committee) in an informative address on “Rating and Valuation in the future” which he gave at the annual meeting of the Milford Ratepayers’ Association.
Mr Walsh said that assessment of properties for the purpose of rating dated from Elizabethan days of 1601 and the system had become more complicated down the centuries.
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TEN of New Milton’s sports organisations have combined to form a committee to foster interest in sport in the district and to try and ascertain what proposals the Borough Council have in view of providing a sports ground for New Milton.
They also agreed to write to the Hampshire Education Committee to request permission for the St Peter's Club to use the playing field at Ashley Secondary School on Saturday afternoons.
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LYMINGTON and District Sea Fishing Club held their first shore competition of the season on Sunday last at Highcliffe. Conditions for fishing were remarkably good not only from the weather and sea point of view, but also the absence of defence works.
50 YEARS AGO
BURLEY village could die because of the loss of its young people. Mr John Clarke told the annual parish assembly that he recalled hearing of a village with only one child aged below 10 and warned: “This could happen here. We must find suitable housing for our young people. We are losing our young, and we lose their children.”
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ARCHAEOLOGISTS are still waiting to hear the importance of a ring which could be Elizabethan and was found in the dig on the Saxon site near Druitt Gardens, at Christchurch. The ring is now being investigated at the British Museum.
Christchurch Preservation Trust is now more certain of the area covered by the ancient Saxon town of Christchurch – a Saxon wall was also uncovered in an earlier dig on the site of the new Sainsbury's supermarket off the bypass.
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A SEWERAGE scheme for Sopley will be carried out by Ringwood & Fordingbridge RDC, providing they can finance the scheme from the sale of housing land at Martin. The Council’s General Purposes Committee were told at their last meeting that the Department of the Environment could not consider the £60,000-£70,000 Sopley scheme for key sector purposes, unless it formed part of a scheme costing more than £100,000.
25 YEARS AGO
ONE-hundred-and-fifty angry customers who on Wednesday protested on the pavement about the closure of Ashley post office had cause for limited celebration a few hours later, when Post Office Counters announced they had found someone to man it until the new facility opened at the nearby Alldays store.
Colin McConnachie, who owns Ashley Stores, where the post office has been based for years, told the A&T: “Ashley residents achieved what they set out to achieve – to keep the post office temporarily open.”
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AS a statutory obligation, the local Health Authority is now calling on the Community Health Council to carry out a public consultation, asking people in the New Forest for their views to replace Lymington Hospital, with a new £16-million purpose-built community hospital at Ampress. And this week the Hospitals’ League of Friends confirmed its avowed intention to purchase the freehold of the nine-acre Ampress site.
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EIGHTEEN operations had to be rescheduled after Lymington Hospital’s surgical wards were closed for five days due to the outbreak of a potentially dangerous infection.
MRSA has been mislabelled as an “antibiotic resistant superbug”, but although it cannot be treated by the most common antibiotics it does respond well to more expensive drugs.
Duncan Goods, surgical services manager for Lymington Hospital told the A&T: “It is an infection which is common within the general population but it is a problem if it gets into wounds."
