On this week in King’s Lynn, Hunstanton and RAF Marham: December 10 – 16, 2000 – and step back in time to when students helped elderly of King’s Lynn in 1986
We look back through the pages of the Lynn News on this week: December 10 – 16, 2000.
Holme’s controversial timber circle should be reburied under the beach at the seaside village next June or July, a working group is suggesting. The intention is to re-bury the Bronze Age timbers out of sight beneath the sand at Holme beach to preserve them in the deep clay deposits. But before this happens a host of discussions and studies need to take place, including a full archaeological examination and recording of the timbers. Work will also start this winter on a technical study to establish the extent and depth of the clay deposit; information will be passed on to an engineering consultant to ensure any excavation is undertaken safely. There will also be discussions with the landowner Le Strange Estate, Norfolk Wildlife Trust and English Nature.
More than 500 people, including gipsies from all over the country, attended the funeral service at Walpole St Peter for Eli Frankham, the man who championed their cause. Mr Frankham (72), president of the Romani Rights Association and probably the most respected and important gypsy in the country, died on December 3. All 400 seats at the parish church were full and there were mourners standing at the back and outside in the churchyard paying their last respects.
Group Captain Richard “Dick” Garwood (41) is this week taking over as the new station commander at RAF Marham. He is returning to the airbase for the third time, having previously led the Number Two Tornado squadron when it relocated there in 1991, and was a wing commander there in 1995. The Heacham-born air ace was educated at Hunstanton Smithdon High School and then Lynn’s College of West Anglia where he studied computer science, before joining the RAF in 1979 at RAF Coltishall. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery during the Gulf War when he flew through six ground-to-air missile batteries without a fighter escort and braved anti-aircraft guns to locate a Scud missile site.
Hunstanton Town Council has vowed to double its offer to get CCTV installed in the town, after a borough council report sparked fears the scheme may never get off the ground. Councillors doubled their pledge towards running costs to £20,000 a year – one third of the town council’s annual precept – in a last-minute attempt to sway the borough. Government funding would meet the £345,000 cost of installing 14 cameras in the town, linked to an existing monitoring suite in Lynn, if a bid to the Home Office was successful.
The Lynn area looks set to escape immediate plans to merge the coroners’ service in Norfolk. Three districts – Norwich, Diss and Dereham – are due to amalgamate in April in a cost-cutting move approved by Norfolk County Council’s corporate resource management review panel. The two remaining districts, Lynn and Yarmouth, are so far untouched, but the situation could be reviewed if Lynn district coroner, Bill Knowles, retires.
Health and pollution fears are being voiced on plans for a new rubbish recycling plant at South Lynn’s former Sugar Beet factor. A waste management company has applied for planning permission from Norfolk County Council to convert a hectare of the site to deal with up to 150,000 tonnes of rubbish a year from West Norfolk and parts of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. It estimates the site, on Poplar Avenue, Saddlebow, would be visited by 105 waste-carrying heavy lorries a day
Cycling around Lynn is set to become safer with a new £400,000 cycle track linking the Reffley area with the Hardwick Industrial Estate. Work is planned to start on the path in the 2002/2003 financial year with the costs being shared by West Norfolk Council and Norfolk County Council. Some land still has to be purchased to join up existing stretches of cycleway along the four-kilometre route, which starts at Grimston Road and ends in Rollesby Road.
Members of Pentney and District Women’s Institute held a tree-planting ceremony on the green opposite the church at Pentney as part of their efforts to mark the millennium. The Norfolk Federation of the Women’s Institute has established an 11-acre wood in Elfing, Norfolk, so the Pentney WI members decided that planting a tree would be in keeping with that theme. At the ceremony the tree was presented to the parish council which will now look after it.