IT’S not every day you make history but that’s what happened this week to Worcester News reader Roger Hughes.

His eye was caught by a familiar story while flicking through the paper’s weekly archive page on Monday.

The snippet, from December 1959, reported the return of the 1st Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment from the West Indies to their barracks at Norton, near Worcester.

Among them was a 20-year-old Mr Hughes, returning from British Honduras – now called Belize. The article prompted him to trawl through his own archives and dig out an old cutting of himself and a friend, published in what was then The Evening News and Times.

Mr Hughes and his friend from Pinvin, near Pershore, were pictured relaxing with the local paper while overseas. Mr Hughes, now 70, said: “My mother used to send me the newspaper every week because I was in Worcester rowing club.

“She sent it to me for the rowing results and I sent her back a picture of me reading it there.

“She then brought it down to the paper. I’d lived in Worcester all my life and used to read the paper. My mate lived in Pinvin so he read the same one.” Mr Hughes, who is still a keen member of the city’s rowing club, has kept the cutting along with the original picture of the two soldiers safe for nearly 40 years. He said: “My time there was good fun. We went to Jamaica and then Honduras.

“I remember the regiment coming back and I’ve only got good memories.”

Mr Hughes, of Sansome Place, Worcester, added he had left the army in 1960 and returned to Worcester where he has lived ever since.