ONE YEAR AGO

July 25, 2007

Residents are unhappy about plans to compost food and garden waste near their homes.

Edwards Waste Management has applied to process 20,000 tonnes of garden and kitchen waste a year until 2020, at Crumps Farm, Little Canfield.

Great Canfield Parish Council wants precautions installed to cut down on odours drifting to neighbouring homes.

* Seven families have celebrated living in the same road for 30 years.

They moved to Godfrey Way, Dunmow, in 1977 and have helped each other through thick and thin over the past 30 years. They celebrated with a party to mark their milestone.

TEN YEARS AGO

July 23, 1998

Work is going ahead on a major £350,000 refurbishment of Witham’s Edwardian railway station.

Roof repairs to the main buildings and the overbridge, repairs and decoration of the overbridge and canopies over the station are expected to be completed in September.

Meanwhile, the Witham and Braintree Rail Users’ Association continues to press for the inclusion of a footbridge linking the station with the Easton Road car park.

* Police were called to Braintree fire station after 30 members of the Fire Brigades’ Union demonstrated at the site.

Firefighters at Braintree station, none of whom are members of the union, were working when the demonstrators arrived, and police were called out after a verbal dispute broke out between them.

A police spokesman said there had been no arrests after the incident.

40 YEARS AGO

July 26, 1968

Building work for Braintree’s new automatic telephone exchange, which will cater for 5,200 subscribers, in South Street is expected to start next month.

Due for completion in 1970, the £500,000 building will replace the manual exchange in the post office building in Fairfield Road.

At the manual exchange, 3,280 subscribers are served by a staff of 35 women at peak hours.

* Cobb’s Pedigreed Chicks will shortly be moving its hatchery facilities from Cut Hedge Farm, London Road, Braintree, to the Anglian Hatcheries’ Rayne premises.

The firm’s hatchery staff will also move, meaning 11 members of the Rayne Hatchery staff will become redundant. Cut Hedge Farm will be converted to laboratories for research, and the office accommodation will also be extended.

50 YEARS AGO

July 24, 1958

The wife of a Witham doctor held her two-year-old son head-high as she forced her way through a stone-throwing demonstration mob at the British Embassy in Moscow.

The mob, demonstrating against British intervention in the Middle East, smashed their way into the grounds of the embassy, broke windows and ransacked residential quarters.

Betty Furlong, 26, and her son John were trapped by the mob. With two other Britons, she forced her way to safety across the compound, holding her child up high to protect it from the demonstrators.

* Two cases of “scratched babies” have been reported to police.

Two mothers came out of different shops in Braintree to find their babies screaming and with their feet bleeding.

One of the mothers, of Pygot Place, Braintree, said she thought it was an accident until she went into a chemist’s shop to have her baby’s foot attended to and found another woman with her baby with the same complaint.