A retired journalist has presented a selection of 50 years of newspaper cuttings to a local museum.

Between 1959 and 2009, reporters working for the Northumberland Gazette kept copies of every story they wrote in a collection of cuttings books.

One of those reporters was Vince Gledhill, pictured below, and he has now presented a selection of his cuttings to Woodhorn Museum in Ashington.

The collection of 49 cuttings books show a daily record of events that happened in the local community with details about events and people who helped to shape the local area.

Vince, now 76, said: “This is the social heartbeat of the district as it happened day by day. Celebrities, heroes, crime fighters and criminals are all there, along with artists, inventors, campaigners and politicians.

“At that time the newspapers had special editions or pages for districts across the region, but only the Newcastle editions were kept on microfilm by the company library.

“When computers and digital storage came along, I continued cutting and pasting stories in the old way, until I retired in 2009.

“I brought my cuttings collection home and over the years since I retired, I have enjoyed dipping into the books to recall big and small stories and some of the fascinating people behind them and help me write a couple of books.

“Originally these books were there to help me do my job by being an easy to access store of information.

“In total, the books contain around 20,000 stories, all of them linked in some way to people in this area, so it seemed to me that the whole collection should be donated to Northumberland Archives at Woodhorn Museum.

“It is the right place for this collection to have a new life as a resource for researchers with an interest in social and family history in the area.

“I hope that when they have been catalogued they will become useful resource for the archives and accessible to all.”