The Romford Recorder has raised a welcome £100,000 for a local hospice.

The money, raised as a result of a year-long appeal, will help towards patient care at the Saint Francis Hospice which has annual running costs of £3.2m.

The Help Our Hospice campaign was launched in a blaze of publicity in the Recorder in February last year.

It featured four pages of stories about the hospice and its patients and since then readers have taken the appeal to heart as the paper has continually kept the appeal in the spotlight.

Recorder editor Mark Sweetingham said: “We knew it was ambitious when we started it, but the people of Havering took the cause to their hearts and made it their own.

“We did not think we would make it in a year, but are well pleased at the achievement.”

Throughout the year there has been a wide variety of fundraising initiatives, including an eight-year-old girl who single-handedly raised more than £1,000 by cutting off her knee-length hair.

There was also a school class who raised money by guessing how many gallstones were removed from their teacher, and a sponsored ‘bookworm’ who read more than 50 books during the school holidays.

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