HURWORTH Green is now tranquil and tree-lined, but until comparatively recently there were up to 40 very oily men employed there reconditioning old vehicle engines.

The mechanics worked for Sherwoods, the Darlington motor dealership which is celebrating its 90th anniversary as a Vauxhall dealer this year.

We believe the Sherwoods business started in Hurworth early in the First World War when John Sherwood stabled his traction engine in a yard off the green.

As we told in Memories 222 and 224, Sherwoods showrooms developed in Grange Road, Darlington, but the Hurworth yard remained as workshops. During the Second World War, it came to specialise in a line of trade well suited to the first age of austerity.

“I started a six year apprenticeship with Sherwoods on August 8, 1955 when I was 15,” says Bill Garbutt, of Darlington. “There were 35 to 40 people working there, and they took old engines from old vehicles and overhauled them – reground the cylinders, put in new pistons and bearings, sprayed them orange and then sold them for £28.”

These engines were largely for Bedford trucks but also for Vauxhall’s post-war family cars, like the Wyvern or Velox. Once they had been overhauled, they were transplanted back into a vehicle.

So the yard, at the west end of the village, was an engine production line. It had two-storeys of workshops running its 200 yard length. Each shop had its own speciality, like repairing radiators or overhauling waterpumps and carburettors. At the end of the yard was “the top shop” where the panel beaters went to work, and beside them was the joiners’ shop, where the carpenters built trailers like horseboxes.

Sherwoods also occupied the end terrace house overlooking the green at the entrance to the green. It was painted white, had a large garage door knocked into it, and there were even a couple of petrol pumps standing sentry outside it.

Bill left Sherwoods after 14 years to look after Binns’ fleet of delivery wagons. The garage stayed on the green until 1979, when Sherwoods consolidated all of their operations onto their current Chesnut Street site.

The Hurworth yard was cleared and the ten or so houses of Greenside Court were built on it. The end terrace office had the white paint removed, had the garage door replaced by a bay window and it resumed its residential use. Now no one would ever know that a noisy, oily garage had ever been there.

THE white-painted end-of-terrace property that Sherwoods used as an office overlooking Hurworth green was once the village’s first post office.

In a 1908 booklet on the village, Edith Katherine Harper reported that the postmistress was then Mary Webster.

The writer went on: “Memory pleasantly recalls two dear old dames, Granny Hopper, and her sister, Mrs Davison, who kept a tiny ‘variegated’ shop in the cottage adjoining the post office.

"You could buy sweets, lead pencils, bootlaces, and many other things there, and Granny would spin you a yarn into the bargain, sitting in her quaint high-backed chair by the side of a cosy fire, where the kettle was ever hobbin'."

Presumably, this means that the kettle was always on the hob – part of the metal fireplace – and bubbling away.

When Sherwoods moved into the post office, the post office moved a few doors east along the green, where it stayed until 1993 when it moved into its current location in the village Spar shop.