WEEK IN 1988:

A PETITION from a group of supporters calling for the removal of the Worcester City FC chairman Gerald Turner and supporting a vote of no confidence in the trouble-hit club’s directors has been shot down in flames by the city board.

Mr Turner alleges that the campaigners behind the move “have been stopping people in the streets who have never seen Worcester City play and asking them to sign the petition. The whole affair by these so-called supporters is dragging the name of Worcester City FC through the mud.”

Mr Turner said he would not be forced to resign and countered rumours that he favoured the sell-off of St George’s Lane and a move to a new ground, possibly at Perdiswell.

He said: “Once we leave St George’s Lane for a rented ground, the club will be lost forever.”

THIS WEEK IN 1978:

WORCESTER councillors have given planning permission for the continued use of a house in Worcester as a Russian Orthodox church.

They are allowing Father Seraphim de Scouratov to continue using 61 Fort Royal Hill as a place of worship.

This is despite complaints from a next door neighbour about the ringing of bells before and during services.

Father Seraphim has offered to move the bells to another point further away from his neighbour’s home.

● More than 2,000 tourists a day are now visiting Worcester Cathedral at peak holiday times. As a result, the Dean, the Very Rev Tom Baker has set up an informal working party to review arrangements for receiving visitors.

In the current cathedral newsletter, he calls for more people to come forward and offer their specialist skills as volunteers to greet and help tourists on their visits to the historic building.

THIS WEEK IN 1968:

TEACHING must be made much more financially attractive if it is not to lose an alarming number of young people who enter the profession, warned the national president of the Association of Schoolmasters, Bernard Wakefield at a conference held at the County Ground, Worcester.

He pointed out that at present, only 193 women out of every 1,000 remained in the profession more than six years after leaving teacher training colleges. And over the same period, some 340 men out of every 1,000 usually left the profession. Clearly, higher pay scales were vital, he said.

● Worcestershire villages would be far safer places if the police stopped being “a hound to the motorist squad”

and went back to the village bobby system, asserted the chairman, JL Thomas at this week’s meeting of Rushwick Parish Council. Members were discussing their concerns over the recent serious problem of vandalism in the village. Notice boards had been damaged, many glass windows in newly erected houses broken and fencing torn down.

THIS WEEK IN 1958:

WORCESTER Teachers’ Training College at Henwick has been selected by the Minister of Education for a major expansion scheme to meet the anticipated growing demand for teachers in the 1960s. Arrangements are being made to increase the accommodation from 320 students to 360 next year and to 480 by 1962 by building a new teaching block and turning the present one into residential accommodation.

The Minister has also approved the erection of a new Roman Catholic secondary modern school in Worcester next year at a cost of £92,000. This school will be built in Timberdine Avenue and for about 300 pupils.

● Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers, Geraldine McEwan, Richard Johnson, Ian Holm, Patrick Wymark, and Edward Woodward are among the star-studded cast for the new production of Much Ado About Nothing which opens at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon next Tuesday.