A news trove from 1940, stashed inside the walls of a Fairylands home undergoing demolition, yielded an unexpected time capsule for a construction worker and his son.

One man’s trash became another’s treasure as Sanuel Phillips and his son Jeremiah helped to gut the interior of a Fairylands, Pembroke home last week with a team from North Point Contracting.

“It was in the wall — guys were throwing it in the trash,” Mr Phillips said. “I said, I have to preserve this. It can’t be trash. It looked too interesting.”

Newspapers including The Royal Gazette and other publications came to light, although many of the pages had decayed.

But strikingly fresh pages from the New York Journal and American, billed as “America’s Greatest Sunday Newspaper”, emerged almost exactly 82 years after they went to print on Sunday, August 25, 1940.

Coverage included the death of Edna Waldron, 27, a starlet nicknamed “the Gam Girl” who died the day before print from injuries after rescuing a child from a fire.

Other news of the day was a New York painters’ strike and a call from the US Navy’s rear admiral Harry E. Yarnell for aid to Britain, then embroiled in the Second World War.

The US would not formally enter the war until late the following year, although the Americans would begin providing military aid to the beleaguered Allies in September 1940.

Mr Phillips got permission to take the old documents home.

“People asked me, ‘You’re just going to keep it?’ ” he said.

“I told them, ‘Of course. Definitely’.”