FROM this newspaper 100 years ago. - The charming heather-clad hills of Swaledale have gained a rather unexpected triumph, in the way of sport among the grouse.

The season has undoubtedly been one of the best. Record bags of partridge and ground game have been made around Richmond and the fertile Vale of Mowbray, and now we are on the advent of pheasant shooting.

However, sport in this branch will be far from general at the opening of the season. Notwithstanding the plump development and magnificence of the plumage of the most forward birds, which are wondrously strong on the wing, there are numerous backward young, accounted for by the fact that early nests were destroyed. The great enemy - foxes - have played sad havoc in many places.

From this newspaper 50 years ago. - The Darlington firm of Henry Pease and Co, Ltd, wool combers and worsted spinners, is celebrating its 200th year in uninterrupted business. It has faced many crises in its eventful history but today finds its established as firmly as ever.

New workshops, stores, sheds and a schoolroom have been built over the years, and the company extended its activities into mail-order business in times of recession.

Four hundred people lost their jobs when a fire gutted part of a building in 1894, but most were reabsorbed when the replacement building was erected. Another fire in 1933 destroyed an entire wool store, but the raw material was replaced with wool from Bradford.

The firm became a private limited company in the early 1900s, but the whole of the share capital was bought by Lister and Co Ltd, of Manningham Mills, Bradford, in 1920.

From this newspaper 20 years ago. - Leading Labour movement figures who cut their political teeth in North Yorkshire, were at the centre of dramas at this week's Labour Party conference.

Joan Maynard MP, who has a home in Sowerby and many connections with Thirsk, was dismissed from the party's national executive. She was also in trouble for aligning herself with Tony Benn, in his effort to save the Militant Tendency from expulsion. Miss Maynard has long been a champion of North Yorkshire farming workers and is sponsored by an agricultural workers union.

Meanwhile, Sid Weighell, the Northallerton-raised general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, caused a furious row by abstaining from voting for a national executive member from the left-wing National Union of Mineworkers.

The NUR, NUM and steelworkers' union are supposed to support each other for mutual industrial interests.

The refusal was seen as a reflection of Mr Weighell's antipathy toward mineworkers' leader Arthur Scargill