Five stories from the South you may have missed

A section of cliff dramatically collapsing onto a beach and a couple being appointed MBEs in the King’s New Year Honours were among this week’s most popular reads.

We have picked five stories from the past seven days across Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Dorset, Berkshire and Oxfordshire to keep you up to date.

A couple who set up a gymnastics club over 50 years ago have been appointed MBEs in the King’s New Year Honours.

Colin and Bernie Wright from Sandhurst, Berkshire, founded the Rushmoor Gymnastics Academy in Aldershot, Hampshire, in 1974 and said it was a “huge honour for the club” to have been appointed MBEs for services to women’s gymnastics.

The couple said they were “quite shocked” to find out they had been recognised and it was a “great surprise”.

The pair thanked everyone who had supported the gym and “the thousands and thousands of children who we hope have benefitted from being involved in sport over the past 50 years”.

A visitor has called it “a miracle” that no-one was hurt when a section of cliff collapsed onto a beach on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast.

Suzanne Sears was taking a walk near West Bay when she heard “a deep cracking noise” coming from the cliffs before the rockfall shortly after 16:00 GMT on Tuesday.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency confirmed a rescue team was sent to a report of a cliff fall at West Bay and “no one was found to be in distress”.

Dorset Council urged people to take notice of warning signs and to stay away from the edge and the base of cliffs.

A stretch of motorway closed for major engineering works fully reopened 24 hours ahead of schedule.

The M27 has been closed since Christmas Eve between Junction 11 for Fareham and Junction 9 for Segensworth and was originally set to reopen at 04:00 GMT on Sunday.

It is part of a £100m scheme to build an underpass to access the new Welborne Garden Village, and saw an 8,500-tonne, four-lane wide structure slid into position.

Lulu Bowerman, Hampshire County Council’s cabinet member for highways, said: “This has been a mammoth engineering challenge, delivered by a dedicated team working around the clock right through the Christmas period.”

Fire crews tackled a blaze at an unoccupied 19th Century country house.

Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service said the first crews at the scene faced a “well developed fire” involving the first floor and roof of part of Bignell House in Chesterton, near Bicester, on New Year’s Eve.

The house, which was built in the 1860s and recently up for sale for £3.5m, was badly damaged in the fire.

The fire service said no-one had been injured.

A man and a woman were freed after becoming stuck in thick mud on the Isle of Wight.

The pair were found trapped off the beach at Compton Bay, on the south-west of the island, on Tuesday shortly before it got dark at about 15:45 GMT.

Needles and Ventnor coastguard rescue teams and firefighters were sent to the beach to rescue the stricken pair.

The coastguard said the man managed to free himself while the woman was pulled to safety by rescue teams.