Removing rows from table

[xsiteu]

Any SQL people out there can proably answer this in a few seconds.

I want to remove rows from a table that are older than a certain date.

I am OK building all sorts of select statements but not one for a date range. Part of the problem is probably that this is just a char field and not a date field so cannot to date arithmetic on it.

In fact I would be happy just to delete all record containing "2003"

I have tried the following:

SELECT * FROM `tblTgp` WHERE `date` LIKE '2003%'

will return the rows I would like to delete but

DELETE * FROM `tblTgp` WHERE `date` LIKE '2003%'

results in an error

Here is the table structure but the only item of interest is probably just the date field:

id int(11) No auto_increment
nickname char(30) No
email char(100) No
url char(150) No
category char(100) No
description char(100) No
date char(8) No
newpost char(10) No yes
accept char(10) No
vote int(3) No 5
recip char(5) No
sessionid char(45) No

Here is a typical data field entry

20031224

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