BREAD thieves in court, anger over the price of sugar beet contracts, and farmers owning cows infected with tuberculosis – these were the stories of the day in the East Anglian Daily Times 75 years ago.

Pat Darley, of Petworth in West Sussex, was rummaging through old relics in his attic when he came across this unopened edition of the newspaper, dated Saturday, November 12, 1938.

It belonged to his grandmother, Phyllis Darley, who lived in Poslingford, Sudbury, Suffolk from 1903-1938.

Mr Darley said: “I couldn’t believe it when I came across it. It must have been the last one she received before moving out. It’s a fascinating historical artefact.”

Two of the 16 pages are dedicated to Remembrance Day.

The paper reported that in Ipswich “a great crowd” gathered at the Cornhill where “the streets were flooded with a warm sunshine, as if Nature had lifted a hand to bless the moment”.

The article added: “At the hour when, twenty years ago, the Great War ceased, East Anglia, in common with the rest of the Empire, witnessed the hushing of all human sounds into the Silence.”

Elsewhere, it was reported Harold Tipping, a baker’s roundsman from Chelmsford, was in court after stealing three loaves of bread and two bags of sugar from his employers.

A farmer was in court for possessing a cow infected with tuberculosis and an outbreak of Foot and Mouth meant the Norwich Fat Cattle show was abandoned.

Meanwhile, columnist ‘Old Stager’ observed: “The attempt to dig up Edmund Spenser’s Abbey grave in order to prove that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays has been a fiasco.”

In international news, “Herr Hitler was considering new laws ‘to settle the Jewish question once and for all’.”

Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, told foreign press that he denied Jews in Munich were dragged from their beds in the morning and taken in their night attire to concentration camps.

He said: “It is good for a nation to be able to defend itself against the Jewish parasites. I am quite prepared to give all our Jews to any nation which claims it has not enough of its own.”

The paper was issue number 21,907 and cost 1.5d – worth 24p today.

Mr Darley’s grandmother moved to Basingstoke on the eve of the Second World War following the death of her husband Major George Darley, who served in the Boer War and First World War.