YOU can get some fantastic items at a charity shop if you look hard enough.

But even the most ardent of bargain hunters wouldn’t have expected to see pages from The Advertizer from 1902 in a shop in Portsmouth, costing £4!

But that’s what happened to ex-pat south coast resident Christine Farrell who deposited the pages with her cousin Clive Edwards, from Higher Hengoed between Oswestry and Weston Rhyn.

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“This is an amazing thing for my cousin to have found in a charity shop in Portsmouth,” he said.

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“She is into family history and was here to see us recently for two reasons.

“First, she came up to see if there were any more relatives as she’s from Ruyton-XI-Towns and Morda.

“She wants to have her ashes spread at Pont Duncan.

“And she was also up here to see someone from Baschurch, where some of our other family used to live.”

Clive said he was shocked to see the pages and that the news hasn’t really changed over the course of 120 years plus.  

And he was delighted to see how having access to ‘real life history’ shows that while the world changes one way, it doesn’t change at all.

He added: “This is from 1902 and from looking at, it shows the news doesn’t change – crikey.

“There’s news about train crashes, inquests and other things – all happening today.

“I bet modern-day journalists struggle to fill papers but look how much news they have put into those pages.

“I’m holding real-life history – when I looked through it I could see news from the Wynnstay Estate and I saw a business that could be linked to a modern one.

“There was a ‘something and Watson’ estate agents and I wondered if they were linked to Bowen Son and Watson.

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“There’s horse racing in there and you could see the winners getting £300 at Bangor, but I don’t know if it was at Oswestry too.

“When she brought it up, she asked me to do something with it so I’m donating it to the Advertizer.”

Stories set out on the pages included the results of an inquest into the death of two men in a Welshpool rail accident, a smallpox epidemic in Shropshire and a ‘false alarm of murder’ in Oswestry.