NOSTALGIA: A right royal float for carnival day in 1986

Members of Lakenheath Playschool on their June 1986 Lakenheath Carnival float.

They were looking forward to the royal wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, which took place the following month.

The youngsters took second prize with the award for the best float going to St Mary’s Church, Lakenheath, for a float on saving the church’s bell tower.

The Lakenheath Silver Band led the parade and there were displays of model traction engines and trains by Brandon and District Society of Model Engineers and custom cars.

HEADLINES FROM THE PAST

10 YEARS AGO

It pays to park in Bury St Edmunds – particularly for the borough council which earned £56,687 last year in fines alone.

Drivers parking in the roads around Churchgate Street and Westgate Street should make sure they stick to parking laws. The area saw the most parking tickets issued – 5,754 between March 31 2004 and May 1 2006.

Not far behind was St Andrew’s Street South car park, where 4,529 were penalised. In the last two years, motorists using the car park have paid out nearly £55,000 in parking fines. But no tickets were issued in the road around Victoria Street and Albert Street.

In total, the borough issued 23,458 parking tickets in Bury.

25 YEARS AGO

There’s trouble brewing at t’mill over Greene King’s latest television advert featuring a portrayal of life in northern England.

Publicity chiefs at the Bury St Edmunds brewery have been criticised over the advert in which two smartly dressed southerners don flat caps and braces and discuss their whippets.

Chris Moreley, formerly of Leeds and now a regular at the Bunbury Arms, Great Barton, got reet stroppy.

“The advertising agency has come up with a gross misrepresentation of life in the north,” he said.

Greene King publicity manager Mark Hunt said: “Traditional bitter advertising is entrenched with northern values. It is time a southern bitter brand fought back.”

100 YEARS AGO

It was with the deepest regret that the nation learned on Tuesday of the tragic death of Lord Kitchener and his personal staff, who were on board HM Cruiser Hampshire sunk by mine or torpedo off the Orkneys while on the way to Russie.

Of those on board, not one life was saved.

Although born in Ireland, Lord Kitchener was an East Anglian by descent. At Lakenheath the parish registers and old gravestones in the churchyard tell the story of the family from the later years of the 17th century. The family moved from Binsted in Hampshire to the borderland district of Suffolk in 1663 and, in the years following, the name Kitchener was familiar in many parishes in that district.

-- If you have a nostalgic item or picture you’d like to share, contact Laura Smith