THIS WEEK IN 1961:
THE Ministry of Aviation has won its fight to remove the spire from the ancient St Edburga’s Church at Abberton on the grounds that it poses a serious danger to aircraft landing at the nearby Pershore Airfield. The Ministry’s petition for the spire’s removal was turned down by the Worcester Consistory Court but its decision was overruled by the historic Court of Arches, held at St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London.

THIS WEEK IN 1971:
THE man who has steered the development of Worcester College of Education over 20 years from a row of “emergency”

huts to an establishment bidding for university status has received the CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Edwin George Peirson, who has been principal of this teacher training college since 1951, is made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. A Londoner and wartime REME major, he came to Worcester from Westminster College where he was head of the mathematics department.

When he arrived, the Worcester college in Oldbury Road consisted only of a group of “emergency”

buildings erected in 1946 and catering for fewer than 300 students. Since then the college has rapidly expanded with extensive new buildings added in the 1950s and 1960s, and there are now more than 1,000 trainee teachers studying there.

THIS WEEK IN 1981:
FROM the Crowquill column of Berrow’s Worcester Journal: Congratulations to Metal Box on the 50th anniversary of the founding of their factory at Worcester. Tins, as they used to be known, have been in existence for much longer than most people imagine and they still hold a large part of the food we consume although frozen foods have butted into their sphere of conservation. In my younger days I associated tins with baked beans, Lyle’s syrup and Fray Bentos corned beef, not to mention sardines.

The trouble with the last two was that the means of opening the tins was unreliable.

The keys often broke off only half-way round the tops which meant squeezing or scraping out the contents with great difficulty.

THIS WEEK IN 1991:
THE National Rivers Authority has started to release water from reserves into the Severn to help maintain its levels. The move follows the driest May this century but it is stressed that the “top up” operation is part of normal procedure and is an excellent example of forward planning. Water from the Clywedog Reservoir in Wales is routed into the Severn to meet the demands of abstractors who are licensed to take water out of the river for drinking, power generation and crop irrigation.

It is only because of water resources planning in the early 60s that today’s operation is able to take place at all.