NOSTALGIA: This week in 1918 and 1993

Pictured here in 1993 with then Mayor of Boston Coun Joyce Dodson are members of Blackfriars Youth Theatre. The group had recently reformed and just put on its first public performance, Robin Hood.

* A second German Prisoner of War had absconded from the so-called ‘civilian aliens’ interment camp’ at Boston Dock.

The town had for the past month been acting as a port of exchange for German and UK Prisoners of War.

The inmate had escaped shortly before midnight, having waded through a dyke at the back of the dock’s engine house and entered the nearby People’s Park, where he climbed over the locked gates in St John’s Road to freedom.

The following night he gave himself up – walking into a public house in Swineshead, asking for a drink, and telling the landlord that he has escaped from the camp at Boston. The police were alerted and the man was taken back to the site.

Another German prisoner who had escaped the previous month remained at large.

* Details had been released about how Boston’s Sgt C. Leary had earned a Distinguished Conduct Medal the previous November.

Sgt Leary, of the Lincoln Regiment (Boston), had led the first two platoons of his company in an attack with ‘great dash and determination, and rendered valuable assistance in organising the defence of the captured position’, a statement of service noted.

This week in 1993 ...

* The Government had given the go-ahead to a planned £7million bypass for Wigtoft and Sutterton.

The scheme was among 41 projects announced in spending plans for 1993/4 by Transport Secretary John MacGregor.

The bypass would run from the A17 to the west of Hipper Lane, Wigtoft, cut a swathe through farmland to the west and south of Wigtoft and Sutterton and would cross highways like Hipper Lane, Burtoft Lane, the A16, Broad Lane, and Waterbelly Lane, before rejoining the existing A17 south-east of Sutterton at the roundabout where the A17 crossed the dismantled Boston-to-Spalding railway line.

* Three-times world ploughing champion Graeme Witty was coming to Swinehsead to present the prizes at the fifth annual Ken Porter/Fossitt and Thorne invitation ploughing match. The event was to take place, as usual, on land owned by F. J. Rickett and Son at the junction of the A52 and A17.

* Firefighters rescued a cat which had been stuck up a tree on the Hardwick Estate, in Kirton, for two-and-a-half days.

Crew members found the tree too flimsy for a conventional rescue, but the puss was coaxed down with dishes of food.