Cars that were once steered like a boat, long remembered football teams and whatever did happen to percussion bands..?

ONE hundred Yorkshire Jowetts will be out on our roads this weekend. They were built near Bradford, in a place called Idle, and they were particularly popular in the North-East – Darlington, for example, had two Jowett dealerships.

Brothers Ben and William Jowett started out building bicycles and began experimenting with cars in 1906, although their first model didn’t go into production until 1910.

“The earliest one in the rally was built in 1913,” says Trevor Bunker of Darlington who is one of the organisers of the Jowett Car Club weekend. “It has tiller steering – there’s no steering wheel but you steer it like you would a boat. The tiller comes up the driver’s side door and goes across the driver’s stomach. You push it forward away from you to turn right, and pull it towards you to turn left. There are only two still in existence.”

The most famous Jowetts were the Javelin and Jupiter which were built after the Second World War, and which did very well in early 1950s races at Le Mans and Monte Carlo.

But mechanical problems and poor management contributed to the collapse of the company in 1953.

The Jowetts’ distinctive shape and name have long made them stand out from the mass-produced crowd. The Jowett Car Club is the oldest club devoted to one make – it started in Bradford in 1922.

This weekend, the Jowetts are based at Redworth Hall Hotel (which, coincidentally, featured in last week’s Memories). They will be on display today in the ornamental gardens outside the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. Tomorrow, they will embark on a scenic run through Teesdale and Weardale – if there hasn’t been too much rain, they hope to be allowed to splash through Stanhope ford.

Monday's programme is up in the air after yesterday's sudden closure of the Tees Cottage Pumping Station in Darlington.

BEAUMONT STREET School has excited lots of correspondence following its appearance here in recent weeks.

The school in Darlington, you will remember, was behind the Dolphin Centre.

It was the town’s first purpose-built state school when it opened in 1886 and it was demolished in 1966, along with the surrounding area ready for a multi-storey car park.

Memories 178 contained a photo of the school’s 1953 football team prior to kick off in the Darlington Junior Cup final at Feethams.

“The final was against Dodmire School who were hot favourites and were beautifully turned out in red, I remember,” says Steve Hodgson. “We were very much a “raggy arsed” collection of lads who had the bare basic kit, and, if I remember correctly, one of our team played in his school short trousers as he did not have any football shorts.”

The photo was kindly lent to us by goalkeeper Alan Barkley.

Says Steve: “Unfortunately we lost 2-1 in a close fought game and as a dashing centre forward, I scored our only goal. A save that Alan made still sticks in my mind: he flung himself sideways to block a point blank shot as Dodmire laid siege to our goal.

“Playing at Feethams as a ten-year-old was a fantastic experience, even down to splashing around in the stone communal bath. Looking back, though, the inside of the changing rooms was diabolical, but we thought it was great.”

The school's catchment area included the terraces along the banks of the River Skerne. They were demolished at the same time as the school as the inner ring road bulldozed its way through.

Steve, though, grew up in Wooler Street, off Northgate, but his mother reckoned that nearby Corporation Road School was far too rough, and so sent him over to Beaumont Street.

“From about six-years-old, I would walk unaccompanied back and forth to school every day until I left for Gladstone Street Secondary School,” he says. “How times have changed.”

MEMORIES 178 also featured a picture of the 1948 prize-winning Beaumont Street School orchestra clustered around their prize: a copy of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s painting, The Red Boy, with their name engraved in a shield on the frame. You may remember that Sylvia Suddes (nee Brook) sent the picture in, and she featured in the orchestra as solo triangle. As befits as solo trianglist, she played an instrument that was a size bigger than the four backing trianglers had.

Wendy Acres adds to our knowledge. Wendy has many of the programmes of the Darlington Competitive Music Festival, which started in 1932 and is still going strong as the Darlington Festival for Performing Arts. The 1948 programme reveals that the festival’s president Lady Starmer, the widow of Sir Charles Starmer who was twice Darlington mayor, personally donated The Red Boy for the winner of the Percussion Bands (aged under ten) class.

“Whatever happened to percussion bands?” asks Wendy. “I know how much we enjoyed playing in them in our music lessons at Alderman Leach School in Cockerton. There were tambourines, castanets, cymbals, triangles and drums. If I remember rightly, the teacher played a recognisable tune on the piano and we accompanied her on the various instruments. I suppose it taught us rhythm and timing, but we must have made an awful noise!”

Especially clanging along to a bit of Mozart, as the programme required the Beaumont Street band to do. Wendy concludes with a tantalising post script: “I competed in the Darlington Festival for the first time in 1948,” she says. “One of the other competitors was Wendy Craig.”

ACTRESS Wendy Craig was born in Sacriston in 1934 – she’s approaching her 80th birthday. Her education began at the Durham High School for Girls, which she enjoyed, but after passing her 11-plus, she went to Darlington High School (now Hummersknott). “I hate it,” she once said. “It was a huge place and I never fitted in.”

She only stayed a few years before her family moved to a farm near Yarm and she attended the town grammar school.

Having been noticed in the area’s drama circle, she left for the bright lights of London at the age of 17.

THE Red Boy also has a local link: it’s title is really Master Lambton. It was commissioned in 1825 by Lord Lambton, the 1st Earl of Durham. His nickname was “Radical Jack” because of his enlightened approach to the miners who worked in his pits and because of his role in writing the Great Reform Act of 1832. He completed Lambton Castle, which is the backdrop to Durham’s cricket ground, and the Penshaw Monument is in his honour.

The subject of the painting was Lord Lambton’s eldest son, Charles. He, though, died of tuberculosis in 1831 at the age of 13.

BACK to the terraces of Beaumont Street, which were home to the Douthwaites before the demolition of 1966. “I lived at No 44 with my mam, dad and sister,” says Caroline McLean. “My gran and grandad Cann lived at No 46, and my aunty Audrey and her family lived at about No 52 on the other side of the back lane.

“Whenever I park in the Beaumont Street car park, I say to my grandchildren that I’m parking on my old house.

“I tell them how the rag-bone man came round with his horse and cart. He used to sharpen the knives and we used to get a free balloon.

“Crow’s fair used to come every year to the waste ground where the ring road is now, and there was a cafe – Ray’s Cafe – opposite the old bus station.”

MEMORIES 175 told of the demise of Eastbourne Bowling Club which has been a feature of Darlington’s East Park for 106 years. “It was so sad to read,” says Jean Breeze. “I have happy memories as my mother and father and two brothers all played, and as children we spent all our time in the park as we lived just round the corner.” Jean has cuttings from the Evening Despatch newspaper of 1960 showing her mother, Margaret Olives, bowling the first ball of the new season because she was club president. The Despatch was The Northern Echo’s sister paper. The headline it put above the lady bowlers must refer to a story elsewhere on the page.