KEITH HAMILTON looks through past editions of the Echo and reviews the issues which made the headlines

50 Years Ago Hampshire's apple growers were facing a problem of too big a harvest and not enough buyers.

Discarded apples were piled up all over the county as politician George Brown, from the Ministry of Agriculture, toured the orchards to see the problem for himself.

40 Years Ago Hundreds of sailors from the destroyer USS Mitscher, aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La and British warship HMS Gambia, arrived in Southampton.

A strange "howling" from the direction of Fawley turned out to be the sound of compressors at the new Union Carbide plant.

30 Years Ago P&O's liner Himalaya left Southampton for Australia via the Panama Canal with 1,015 passengers and 50 cars on board.

Himalaya had just undergone an extensive refit by Vosper Thornycroft in Southampton following a season of cruises out of the port.

20 Years Ago Southampton police said from now on they were going to crack down on football fans who sang rude songs at home matches at the Dell.

"People will be thrown out of the Dell and in some cases further court action could be taken,'' warned a police spokesman.

10 Years Ago A baby girl was born in the back of a car as her mother was driven from Aldermoor to Southampton's Princess Anne maternity hospital.

Clowns -131 of them - arrived at the city's Red Funnel terminal from all over the UK for a convention in Shanklin.

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.