MYSTERY surrounds a box full of newspaper cuttings found in a Worcester man's spare bedroom.

Hundreds of articles from the Worcester News and national newspapers were discovered by Anthony Ryland, aged 70, when he was clearing out his late uncle's flat in Cripplegate House, St John's.

He does not know why Gerald Clarke, who died on Thursday, January 5, aged 80, collected the old stories. Most of them are more than 30 years old.

Mr Ryland brought them to the Worcester News office last week. He said: "We found them in a spare bedroom. There are dates hand-written on most of them.

"They were probably in some sort of order but we didn't know what they were at first and just piled them all together."

The oldest piece is from the Second World War. It is dated June, 1941. It says 21-year-old Navy stoker Kenneth Richard Nash was missing, presumed killed. There also are dozens of articles about Worcester's pubs, pictures of ships including the Queen Mary, and local sporting events.

Mr Clarke also cut out pictures of how the city used to look and how it was changing, including an image of Worcester Technology Coll-ege, Deansway, being built.

The most recent piece is a Memory Lane article from November 1998 but most of them date from the 1960s.

Mr Ryland donated them all to the Worcester News and they will now be kept safe in our editorial library.