25 years ago

PUPILS’ coursework was destroyed in a fire at a county secondary school, reported the East Lothian Courier on November 24, 1995.

Police are probing an £8,000 arson attack at Knox Academy in Haddington this week.

Damage was confined to a classroom for religious education and pupils’ coursework and books were destroyed.

The alert was raised by school janitor Norman Davie when he went to open up the mobile classroom at about 6am on Wednesday.

Two fire engines from the local station raced to the scene.

It took a team of 15 firefighters, four wearing breathing kits, half an hour to bring the blaze under control.

Chief Inspector Allan Shanks said it appeared that a window was smashed and the classroom forced open.

Paper inside was then set alight.

Detectives are studying tapes from a security camera – one of several installed at the school in the summer at an estimated cost of more than £11,000 in a bid to combat vandalism.

50 years ago

CHILDREN coming home dirty from school led to a mother complaining to her MP, told The Haddingtonshire Courier of November 27, 1970.

A Haddington mother is so annoyed about the dirty state in which her children come home from school that she has written to Mr John P. Mackintosh, M.P., complaining about the lack of an old-fashioned type playground at the town’s new primary school.

King’s Meadow School, which is hailed as being in the forefront of environmental design, has spacious grounds but only a small hard-surfaced area on which the children can play.

Large grassed areas have been provided as play-spaces in contrast to the Victorian-style tarmacadam or concrete “barrack squares” on which countless generations of children have played over the years.

But winter rains have turned them into a mudbath and set parents complaining.

100 years ago

RATS were causing issues for residents in Port Seton, reported The Haddingtonshire Courier of November 26, 1920.

Complaints are being made at Port Seton of the increasing number of hen runs which, it is said, are the cause of an invasion of rats into the outhouses, and even into dwelling-houses, there.

This is the season, however, when rats take shelter, but the numbers, and the mischief they do in destroying nets, seems this year greater than usual.

The matter has already been before the council.