IN the last 40 years, the Kent Messenger has reported on some of Maidstone’s biggest events from wars to floods and fires, but for many readers, it’s spotting someone they know amongst the news pages which catches their eye.

For faithful Kent Messenger reader Jean Archer, it has been snippets of news on people she knows and pictures of old Maidstone which have caught her eye over the years. And most of them have found their way into her scrapbook, which she has kept for more than four decades.

Mrs Archer, 81, started the scrapbook in the early 1960s when she lived in Pine Grove, Maidstone, with her husband Ronald, now deceased.

The book, which she still updates today, includes family photographs of her and her mother, Minnie Norman, but on the first page it’s DJ Simon Bates’ face which beams out at you.

Mr Bates’ appearance in the book is because he met a friend of Mrs Archer’s daughter, Yvonne Lambert, nee Archer. Another more striking image, of a puppy, with the headline “Left to die”, is also cut out and kept in the book. Mrs Archer said: “It is still happening today.”

The scrapbook includes stories about reunions of the Kent Messenger’s children’s club, the Keg Megs, which held a golden jubilee souvenir programme in 1978 at Bilsington Priory, Ashford.

Mrs Archer and her husband received invitations to the event, as they were both Keg Megs, and were featured in the newspaper. Mrs Archer, who still has the programme and invitation, had the opportunity at the event to speak to HR Pratt Boorman, the KM’s owner, as her mother had been his nanny when he was a child.

Mrs Archer said: “I met Roy Pratt Boorman at the garden party. He was in a wheelchair and I told him that my mother was his nanny; he said he remembered her.

“I know she used to have a letter he sent her after he went to Cambridge.”

The scrapbook contains many old pictures of Maidstone, collected through the years from nostalgia articles, including the more recent The Way We Were pieces.

“I have lived here all of my life so it is an interest to me to see how Maidstone has changed. I like to go to the museum when I can get there,” he said.

“They are all just things that have been of an interest to me over the years; usually about people I know, or about the town and how it has changed. I love the old pictures.”

Some of Mrs Archer’s cuttings relate to staff at Leeds Castle, where she worked for a time. She also worked at the Kent Messenger’s offices in Week Street.

“They all had typewriters of course back then; I was a typist. My job was to open the photographs of the actresses, which I rather like. It was an interesting job.”

Mrs Archer has, after more than 40 years, recently started a new scrapbook.