The Cleveland Car Company

The half-timbered garage is one of the buildings I would love to have seen, but it became unsafe in 1974 and what is now Blockbuster's video shop replaced it.

In 2005, when I became intrigued by a tumbledown workshop in Oxford Street in Darlington, I told the story of the Cleveland Car Company. This is it: ======================================

WITHIN a span of 20 years, one of the world's greatest bridgebuilding companies was forged from the meltdown of financial failure.

Its owner came to enjoy the trappings of success: a fine Victorian mansion and one of the first motor cars in the district.

But such success brought its own peculiar problems. If you are one of the first automobilists in town, where do you get your car serviced?

When you own a global engineering firm the answer is simple: create a garage yourself. And so Cleveland Bridge gave birth to the Cleveland Car Company.

This story - triggered by a dangerously throwaway line in Echo Memories three weeks ago - begins on Darlington's Albert Hill in 1864, when the Skerne Ironworks was formed.

These were the days when huge tracts of the world's wildernesses were being rampaged across by railways, and Skerne aided that by building bridges.

In 1874 alone, it built 40 bridges in Denmark and 20 in Sweden. Closer to home, it put up all the viaducts on the Whitby to Middlesbrough line; it threw a pier into the sea at Llandudno and crossed the Tees at Barnard Castle with a footbridge.

It had a huge operation on Albert Hill - 90 furnaces spread across 22 acres employing 1,000 men and boys - and then it bought the Britannia Works in Middlesbrough with a further 120 acres and a wharf on the Tees.

Then it went bust. Big time.

Recession bit, Britannia went down and dragged the rest of Skerne with it.

In 1877, ten of Skerne's former employees set themselves up in business on a few acres of strawberry fields they bought from the Little Polam Estate (readers who were with us during the South Park series will remember that the Thompson brothers who owned Polam Hall went bankrupt in this recession and the liquidators liquidated their estate cheaply).

They called their company Cleveland Bridge, and much of their finance seems to have come from Henry Isaac Dixon, of Stumperlowe Hall, in Sheffield - his family were wealthy cutlers, silversmiths and property-owners.

But within a few years, Cleveland Bridge was plunged into liquidation. In 1885, Henry's son, Charles, who had been the company secretary for three years, bought the goodwill, tools, stock, land and buildings for £10,500 and set Cleveland Bridge going again.

This time it stood on its own two feet. Within a decade, those strawberry fields had built bridges for North and Central America, Brazil, India and Australia.

In 1905 it threw a wonderful bridge over the Zambesi River at Victoria Falls in Africa. The following year, it built the King Edward VII Bridge, in Newcastle, then, in 1911, came the Transporter Bridge, in Middlesbrough.

Naturally, Charles Dixon became a wealthy man. He lived in Raventhorpe, in Darlington's Carmel Road North, which for the past 50 years has been a preparatory school.

And he owned a car.

To service that car, in 1898 he allowed a corner of the Smithfield Road site to be used as a garage.

Then other people in Darlington started acquiring motor vehicles and they, too, required mechanics.

In 1904, with fellow motorist Owen Pease, Dixon formally created the Cleveland Car Company (CCC), which soon moved to a wonderful, halftimbered, mock-Tudor building on the corner of Grange Road and West Street.

A fanciful story suggests this building was once a doctor's house which was jacked up and the showrooms slipped underneath. This was probably the first proper garage in the district. Here, Mr Dixon brought his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost for its service.

And from here, in 1907, the CCC launched Darlington's first taxi and "char-a-banc" (from the French meaning "carriage with benches") service.

The CCC had nine cars which it operated as taxis, and a couple of 18-seater char-abancs, which ran "weather and circumstances permitting".

The weather was an obvious restriction because the charas were open-sided. The circumstances were that it had to have at least 14 paying passengers on-board before it moved.

The CCC became, in its own modest words, "the finest garage outside London". It boasted: "Our equipment enables us to build a complete car if necessary."

And it did. It built at least one complete vehicle: a bizarre electric truck for Charles S Powell of New York (Charles S Powell was the leading land auctioneer of his day, although quite why he wanted an electric truck is unknown).

So this makes our fanciful story of three weeks ago surprisingly plausible. We were reporting on the uncertain fate of a warehouse built in 1869 in Oxford Street, near the River Skerne, on the edge of Darlington town centre.

For the last 75 years of its life, it had been occupied by the Oxford Engineering Works. The fanciful story went that it was equipped with American machinery that had been thrown out by Cleveland Bridge after it had dabbled unsuccessfully in car-making.

But Cleveland Bridge obviously had dabbled in carmaking - through its off-shoot the Cleveland Car Company.

Could the belt-driven machinery in Oxford Street, scrapped last December, have come when the CCC moved from Smithfield Road to Grange Road?

Anyway, in 1940 the CCC split in two. The garage remained in Grange Road and the light engineering side went up to Albert Hill. There, in Allan Street, under the command of Councillor AC Lynch, it opened as Thecla Engineering.

What a great name. Some callers suggested Mr Lynch was inspired by ancient mythology.

Indeed, there is a St Thecla who is the personification of the virtues of virginity.

On one occasion, her enemies - jealous of her chastity - stripped her and put her on a fire to burn to death, only for God to send a miraculous rainstorm that extinguished the flames.

So her enemies stripped her again and threw her to the lions - where she was saved miraculously by a lioness.

But why would you name an engineering company in Darlington after a virginal saint?

Other callers suggested that Mr Lynch named Thecla after his daughters, Thelma and Claire.

The first story is preferable - particularly as in 1973 there was an extraordinary industrial tribunal concerning the dismissal of a Thecla director who, it was alleged, had become far too friendly with his secretary.

This tribunal became known as "the randiest man in town" case. If only he had understood Thecla and the virtues of virginity.

There is still a gearing company that operates from Thecla Buildings on Albert Hill in the shadow of the St James the Great Church.

The CCC business remained in Grange Road until 1971. It regarded itself as the creme de la creme of garages.

Right into the 1960s it refused to accept new vehicles delivered on a transporter because it said the movement of the transporter's floor, to which the car was tied, caused engine oil leaks in later life.

In November 1971, the CCC was transported to Bland's Corner, near Stressholme Golf Club. In 1986 it became part of the Reg Vardy empire which still operates at Bland's Corner (where, curiously, it inflates a giant King Kong every day, but that's another story).

The CCC's mock Tudor home became unsafe and was demolished in September 1974.

In the 1980s, a building now occupied by Oddbins the wine merchant was put up on its site.