Town centre ban on youth groups

A counselling agency for young drug-users and 13 other organisations catering for up to 20% of the youth of Watford and South West Hertfordshire will have to find new premises if the Mars I redevelopment plan takes shape in Watford’s town centre. All 14 organisations share the Youth and Community Service building in Carey Place, which will disappear if the shopping centre blueprint from developers Sun Alliance and Watford Borough Council goes ahead. Counselling agency organisers said they want to relieve the uncertainty, which transmits itself to the young people they help.

[June 6, 1986]

Anger over job losses

More than 100 people are to lose their jobs in a massive shake-up at LRT Engineering Works which will close the Aldenham Bus Works and transfer its facilities to Chiswick. But union bosses at the works say they are bitter that they learned about the level of redundancies through television news broadcasts over the weekend.

[June 6, 1986]

Drug Dump yields a ton of danger

Nearly a ton of surplus drugs and medicines has been returned to chemists’ shops and other disposal points during a Drug Dump campaign organised by five Hertfordshire districts. And from the statistics, the councils say, has emerged a picture of doctors over-prescribing courses of potions and pills which their patients then fail to complete, storing up the medicines as if for a rainy day. In some cases, town hall health chiefs warned this week, the drug hoards stand to become more of a curse than a cure, with old medicines turning acid and drugs generally posing risks to children. Some medicines returned to the chemists’ shops were of vintage or even unique quality. They included old apothecary bottles which the health officers dared not open.

[June 13, 1986]

Deadly gas scare

Lethal carbon monoxide gas built to “unacceptable levels” in the basement car park of Watford’s Sainsbury’s superstore, a council pollution control team revealed this week. Extra ventilation had to be installed as soon as the build-up of gas – from car exhaust fumes – was discovered. The build-up happened just before Christmas last year, when festive shoppers filled the store’s town centre car park, and the town’s ring roads were jammed with tailbacks of traffic. Temporary ventilators were installed to pump fresh air into the car park. Sainsbury’s is now working with the Health and Safety Executive to install a permanent system to deal with the problem.

[June 13, 1986]

Parachuting

Four intrepid journalists from the Watford Observer’s C.H. Peacock group of newspapers threw themselves from a tiny aircraft at the weekend in order to raise cash for charity. The fearless four were news editor Frazer Ansell, and reporters Graham Bates, Deborah Huffer and Mike Tubbs. For each of them it was a first parachute jump and for one of them – Mike Tubbs – it was his first time in an aeroplane.

[June 13, 1986]

Gun gang in terror raid

Three raiders armed with handguns and a double-barrelled shotgun escaped with cash yesterday when they pounced on a Post Office delivery van outside a sub-post office in Watford Road, Croxley Green. It was the second armed robbery in the Watford area in a week and the sixth raid by gunmen in south Hertfordshire in the past few weeks. Last Thursday, gunmen escaped with £8,500 from Barclays Bank in High Road, Bushey Heath, and there have been similar raids in St Albans and Borehamwood.

[June 20, 1986]

Girls throng to catch glimpse of Dirty Den

It was like Beatlemania all over again. Hundreds of young girls thronged the gates of Little Reddings School, Bushey, waiting patiently in the stifling heat for a glimpse of their idol. Then a car arrived. Before they knew it, Dirty Den was in town. The promiscuous publican of TV’s Eastenders, played by actor Leslie Grantham, was at the school to open the summer fair. But the crowds were too busy standing on each other’s toes to stand on ceremony and within minutes they had broken through the ropes. They surged forwards and trapped poor Den in a ruck of autograph-hunting bodies.

[June 20, 1986]

Schools crisis in South Oxhey

The future of primary schools in South Oxhey hangs in the balance this week after a county council report predicts more than 600 spare school places on the estate by 1990. Education chiefs are suggested “mothballing” more classrooms in the area – to take one more form of entry out of use for the area’s five to 11 year olds. But members of the county’s education committee this week committed them to conducting an exhaustive enquiry into alternative uses for spare classrooms and an investigation into the future of Hangers Wood School before any decision is taken. Labour county councillors are furious that the moves to re-examine South Oxhey’s primary school system come so soon after the disruption caused by the review of secondary education which closed three schools in south west Herts.

[June 27, 1986]

What was happening in the world in June 1986?

• Jonathan Pollard pleads guilty to espionage for selling top secret United States military intelligence to Israel (June 4)

• Former Wehrmacht intelligence officer Kurt Josef Waldheim is elected President of Austria (June 8)

• The Rogers Comm report on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster blames aerospace manufacturers Morton Thiokol (June 9)

• Patrick Joseph Magee is found guilty of the Brighton hotel bombing and sentenced to life imprisonment (June 10)

• South Africa declares a nationwide state of emergency following revolt against apartheid measures (June 12)

• The Mindbender ride at Fantasyland inside West Edmonton Mall derails and kills three riders (June 14)

• In Britain, Foreign Office Minister Lynda Chalker meets Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, to discuss means of ending apartheid without violence (June 24)

• The Democratic Unionist Party stage a protest at the dissolution of Northern Ireland Assembly (June 24)

• Anne White shocks Wimbledon by wearing only a body stocking (June 27)

• Richard Branson, aboard Virgin Atlantic Challenger II, completes the fastest crossing of the Atlantic (June 29)