Continuing our series of stories about our archive of historical newspapers, Beverly Abbs speaks to Maureen Ovington about the special significance Worcester News volumes from 1965 and 1972 hold for her

THE Ovingtons, of Henwick Road, Worcester, had a surprise when we contacted them to see why they wanted archive volumes of the Worcester Evening News as they were in Hobart, Tasmania, visiting their eldest son and family.

Maureen Ovington said: "I had applied for four dates and was lucky to get two.

"I married Brian on December 11, 1965, at Ombersley Road Methodist Church, so we celebrated our golden wedding recently.

"I thought it would be lovely to have an archive copy of the Worcester News for the month we were married, and be able to read about other events occurring at that time.

"We were thrilled to see our wedding photo in the copy dated December 16! It was one of three wedding pictures that night under the heading December Brides.

"We haven't had time to read much of the volume yet as we were in Australia.

"It's very interesting to see what films were on at the cinemas, the price of various articles and the different wording for job vacancies.

"We were looking at the 1965 copy and noticed that some world and national news was also reported in the paper.

"It brought back many memories to see the adverts for shops and stores that were in Worcester then. There were three copies of the paper each day – a county edition, a final and a late final!

"The second volumes we managed to obtain were January, 1972, the month our first son was born.

"His birth announcement is in there. Unfortunately, there is no way we could take them with us to Australia (there are two volumes for that month), and I imagine the postal costs would be too expensive for us to post them to him!"