We are back riding the Cresta wave of nostalgia concerning old cars. Memories No 15 featured the Vauxhall Cresta (PA model), which was introduced in 1957 and which had a profound effect on all who owned one.

CLIVE TRAVIS, of Ferryhill, was transported back to the day in the early Sixties when he was driving home from Darlington with his father when they saw it… “It was in the window of Fleet Buyers, in North Road; a black Cresta with whitewalled tyres, about six years old, and the original PA model with fins at the back,”

says Clive, the chairman of Ferryhill History Society.

“It was the perfect car for a young chap like myself in my early 20s. It was £250, which was a fair bit of whack when I was on £12 a week underground at Mainsforth Colliery, but I traded in my motorbike and managed to buy it. It was like a dream come true and everyone thought I had won the pools, because it was just a fantastic-looking job.

“I had it for five years until it rotted away – I lifted up the boot and could see the back wheels. I got £50 scrap for it.

“It was a car of its times.”

Phil Gray, in Newton Aycliffe, had a Cresta about the same time and yearned, as he got older, to have one again. He spotted one in a car magazine in Norfolk in June 1992 and arranged for delivery.

“It had been painted matt black by hand, even on some of the chrome, and the interior was ingrained with black dust,” he recalls. “The restoration began, and over the next ten years as time, money, weather and parts availability allowed, the car was slowly resurrected with the intermittent help of my son, Phil.”

The work took place in an old barn, and to save the seats from rat attack, they were stored in the house where Kitten, the pet cat, scratched the life out of them, and so Phil’s wife Karen was enlisted to help with the restoration.

Painted two-tone blue and fitted with a Vauxhall Ventora engine, the Cresta was completed in 2002 and can now be seen at local classic car shows.

ONE of the first of the old cars to catch our attention was the Hillman Imp in Memories No 8, which first went on sale in 1963.

“I bought one from Fred Winter in Darlington in 1967,” says Mike Grantham in High Etherley. “It was a light blue, two-door, basic car with an 875cc engine, about a year old for £400, and four of us went to Austria in it.”

Bravely, with its Darlington numberplate 80 THN, it motored along the autobahns and through snowstorms over the Alps to Saltzburg, with their tent tied on a roofrack.

“Eight hundred miles, and it never faltered,” says Mike, still lost in admiration. “It was a lovely little car.”

He only kept it for a couple of years, though, before “moving up” to a Ford Anglia – one of those he went with was his then girlfriend, Kathleen Dunn, who soon became his wife.

An Imp might have been a good touring car, but it wasn’t really a family mobile.

MIKE’S picture from Austria shows the happy campers picnicking out of the back of the Imp – a classic image of those early hatchback-style cars.

The idea of the rear window opening up and the boot dropping down started with the Austin A40 Farina Countryman, introduced in the late Fifties.

Brian Swallow, in Darlington, was a proud owner of a Countryman. He says that reading the articles and looking at our 1962 parade of cars picture from Northallerton “shows how much the British motor industry has been decimated in a relatively short time”.

He continues: “To add insult to injury, the hatchback idea introduced on the Countryman reveals how inventive British engineers have been over the years only to see foreign rivals picking up the idea later and taking the credit.”

CAR-SPOTTING could become a regular feature. Gordon Dolby sends in this picture of Garden Street, in Darlington – that’s the old Technical College, in Northgate, at the top of the street.

“There are lots of cars and a lorry for people to recognise here,” he says. A Hillman on the right, a Zodiac on the left and possibly a Wolseley radiator in the distance? Someone will put us right . . .

JOHN Tyson, in Eaglescliffe, has had a similar idea, and has sent in a brilliant Thirties picture of Darlington Gas Works, in John Street. The picture was saved from a demolished building by Andy Irwin.

“I have a 1934 Wolseley Model 9,” says John, a member of the Teesside Yesteryear Motor Club, “and the two radiators on the left are similar to mine, but I don’t know if they made a van. Can anyone tell me the makes of all the vehicles?”

EQUALLY brilliant, but with a different kind of motive power, is today’s front page picture which has been sent in by John Barr of Darlington.

One day in 1966 when John was at work, an Evening Despatch photographer spotted his two sons pedalling along their terraced street in Cockerton with some neighbours’ children.

The photographer got them to race up and down and jockey for position, and the resulting picture was published under the headline “Tour de Forcett Street”.

Andrew, who now works at Bowaters, was four, and his brother Aidan, now in London, was two. Also taking part were Christine Caulcleugh, then four and now working at the town hall, and Yvonne Snowball, then two and now working at the Memorial Hospital.

“In those days, you didn’t have maniacs driving at speed in side streets,” says John.