Swept away by Sherwoods

According to Vauxhall’s records, Sherwood Brothers became registered dealers on January 1, 1925, but we’ve been trying to delve deeper than that.

Sherwoods was originally a Hurworth business, which Memories 222 wrongly located opposite All Saints Church. We should have been further west, nearer the Spar shop. Today, there is no sign of it, but some time before the First World War, the business was established in some sheds at the rear of the extremely genteel Hurworth Green.

Since the 1970s, the Greenside Court development has occupied the site of the garage.

It seems likely that John Sherwood stabled his traction engine in the sheds before his sons, Henry and Allan, took the business on and moved into mechanics. Their telephone number was Hurworth 15.

They are first mentioned trading in Darlington in 1926 when they had the Victoria Garage in Feethams, telephone number Darlington 2711. The Dolphin Centre would appear to be on the site of the Victoria Garage.

After little more than a year, the brothers moved to the Southend Garage on Grange Road, taking over from the Oates Brothers, the Chevrolet dealers who splendidly featured on the cover of Memories 222. The offices of the Southend Garage were in a Victorian villa called Park View – so called because it looked over the entrance to South Park.

Park View had been the home of the fantastically scandalous Darlington MP Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch Lincoln, who is one of Memories’ favourites and who represented the town in 1910. It was demolished in the 1960s, and now a petrol station occupies the site of the Southend Garage.

Sherwoods expanded from Southend Garage into a showroom on Grange Road which is now occupied by Majestic Wine.

Today the business is consolidated in its newly refurbished headquarters in Chesnut Street. Many thanks to everyone who has helped us get this far, and if you’ve got any further information, please let us know.

ONE of the many talking points from last week’s Memories was the throwaway mention of Liddle Towers. He, you may remember, was the last licensee of Coundon greyhound stadium who in July 1960 was fined £100 for serving undercover police officers with illegal after-hours drinks and for “the running of housey-housey”.

To many people, though, the name Liddle Towers meant one thing: a hugely controversial case from the mid-1970s when a 39-year-old man named Liddle Towers died in Durham’s Dryburn Hospital.

This Liddle Towers, a boxing coach, was arrested outside the Key Club in Birtley, Chester-le-Street, on January 10, 1976. Six police officers carried him away in a dog van for being drunk and disorderly.

He was released the following day, and seen by several witnesses, including a doctor, who saw injuries on him consistent with his story of having been kicked by the Northumbrian police officers during his arrest and then badly beaten while in custody.

After he collapsed at his home in Chester-le-Street, he spent three weeks in hospital before dying of his injuries on February 9, 1976.

His last words to a patient in the bed beside him were: “It was not too bad outside the Key Club, but worse in the station. Three or four big fellows came into the cells and laced me.”

An inquest later that year recorded a verdict of “justifiable homicide”.

Calls for a judicial inquiry were refused by the Attorney General and Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, although in 1978, the verdict was quashed and a second inquest was allowed. It was held in Bishop Auckland by South West Durham coroner, Harold Hewitt.

After hearing 57 witnesses over six days, he gave the jury three options. They could either return a verdict that Mr Towers had been unlawfully killed by the police, or they could return an open verdict, which he effectively said was a cop out, or they could return a verdict of death by misadventure.

He told them: “If you are satisfied there was a lawful arrest and the force which was used and which resulted in the injuries which caused the death was reasonable in the circumstances, then your verdict would be one of misadventure.”

The Echo’s reporter wrote: “The coroner said that such a verdict could be returned even if the jury thought that there were some actions during the incident which went beyond the bounds of proper police conduct so long as those actions did not cause the death.”

After one hour and 43 minutes of consideration, the jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure.

The police were pleased because it meant that officers were not to blame; Mr Towers’ family and the campaigners were less so, although their calls for a further inquiry fell on the deaf ears of those in authority.

Punk band the Angelic Upstarts released a single called The Murder of Liddle Towers, and the perceived injustice of his case was also mentioned in song by the Tom Robinson Band and Paul Weller of The Jam.

It can’t possibly have been the same Liddle Towers who, 16 years earlier, had the greyhound stadium at Coundon, can it?