The Suffolk Free Press is celebrating its 150th birthday.

Staff at the paper marked the occasion with an anniversary dinner for advertisers and local dignitaries, including Lord Andrew Phillips of Sudbury.

Readers were also treated to a 20-page supplement detailing the history of the paper, along with birthday messages from some of its former editors.

To coincide with the milestone the paper has also launched its most ambitious appeal to date, in memory of a young businessman who was killed in a car crash last year.

It has joined forces with Dan Thompson’s family to build a community hydro-therapy pool for disabled youngsters at Hillside Special School in Sudbury. The appeal has raised £40,000 in four months.

The Suffolk Free Press was founded by Robert Rudland, and the first edition hit the streets on July 5, 1855.

The title “Free Press” commemorates the abolition in 1855 of the Stamp Tax, which until then had priced newspapers out of the reach of all but the most wealthy.

The Free Press was renamed Suffolk and Essex Free Press in 1856, a title it retained for nearly a century before becoming the Suffolk Free Press in the 1950s.

It is now part of Anglia Newspapers after being bought by Johnston Press in July 1996.