What was The Saint's star car doing in Darlington?

“The car is a Volvo P1800 fixed head coupe,” says Mike Crawley. “This model was introduced in October 1960. It had a four cylinder 1780cc engine and cost £1,858, with overdrive as standard.”

A Volvo P1800, just like The Saint's in white, at a show in Stanhope in 2009

And as he, and loads of other people knew, it was most famous as the car that a former Darlington knitwear model, Roger Moore, drove when he played the lead character, Simon Templar, in The Saint, an ITV crime-fighting series that ran from 1962-1969.

Roger Moore in The Saint. He's wondering where he left his car keys

“I absolutely loved the car at the time, and never missed The Saint,” says Geoff Carr in Aycliffe, “although seeing one on the roads was quite rare.” Susan Jaleel in Darlington remembers how special it felt being driven in one by a friend.

Originally the producers of The Saint had wanted to use a Jaguar E-type, which was the hot car of the moment, but Jaguar refused to supply a free vehicle.

Volvo, though, were only too pleased to agree to the producers’ request and gave a British-made P1800, constructed by Jensen in West Bromwich. When some nasty villains destroyed the vehicle, Volvo provided a second Swedish-made P1800.

“In total, they supplied five P1800s,” says Mike Walker in Middleton St George. “One, with the reg 77GYL, is in the Cars of the Stars museum in Keswick.”

The glamour of the show gave Volvo’s rather staid image a sexy lift and turned the P1800 into an icon.

Our photo from the Echo archives really has something very curious about it. There’s the lady in her finery, there’re the people gawping on the other side of the street, and there is the Darlington registration plate: 002 HN.

“The car is new, probably unregistered, so it has trade plates on it,” says Mike Crawley. To prevent garages having to tax every car that passes through their hands, they are allowed to tax one number and put that plate on any car as it goes out on the road.

“In the early 1960s, there were strict rules on when they could be used,” says Mike. “They had to be fixed to the car in exactly the same place as a number plate. They usually had a rubber holder that was secured to the car by rubber straps.

“The garage had to keep a written record of each journey in a book specially provided. A docket was filled in for each use and kept in the car. The police could stop the vehicle at any time and the driver could be fined if he couldn’t produce the journey slip.”

Whose trade plate was 002 HN? “I’m not certain who had the dealership then, probably Mill Garages,” says Mark Cooper.

So with the glamorous lady and the trade plates on a new car, our informants all felt that this was a promotional shot. But none of them could tell us where the picture was taken.

Surely there are enough details on the picture – that building behind the glamorous lady – for someone to locate it.

T’AWD ROY was the great Swaledale festival centred on Muker that for centuries celebrated Christmas and the turning of the year. As we’ve been telling in recent weeks, day two of T’Awd Roy featured sports which the Darlington & Stockton Times of 100 years ago said had included “lowping, two hitches, three hitches, hipsy-gipsy, and cat gallows…”

Last week, with the help of readers, we discovered “lowping” was “leaping”. This week, a reader from Barnard Castle directs us to Nuneaton where there is a place on the Coventry Canal called Cat Gallows.

Midlands local historians reckon this comes from the belief in the Middle Ages that black cats were the agents of evil in league with witches, and so they were strung up on a crossbar suspended between two stakes, and hanged.

A line of black cats hanging by the neck must have been a grisly sight, especially if the local molecatcher was displaying his kills on a fence nearby.

So the term “cat gallows” came to mean any rather spindly hurdle construction – Cat Gallows Bridge over the canal looks to have been a rickety affair with ladders up either side to a plank suspended between them.

At T’Awd Roy, the Swaledale celebrants must have gone lowping over t’cat gallows – or the high jump, as we know it today.

East Howle, a mining community near Ferryhill, was demolished in the late 1960s shortly after this picture was taken

THE mine at East Howle, near Ferryhill, closed in 1904 following a horrific incident in which 66 pit ponies were scalded to death underground, but its attached community lived on until it was completely cleared in the late 1960s.

READ MORE: THE SHOCKING DEATH OF 66 PIT PONIES AT EAST HOWLE

The village of East Howle was in two distinct parts with the Byers Green branch of the Clarence Railway running through the middle of it.

On the railway’s north side were four long terraces, containing a total of 90 houses, which, we think, were called Railway, Station and Pit streets. They would have been built in 1872 when the colliery was sunk.

At the west end of them was a Primitive Methodist Chapel and at the eastern end was a Christian Lay Church.

In isolation across the colliery tracks to the east of the terraces was the East Howle Hotel – the only building to have survived the demolition and now a private residence in the post-industrial countryside.

To the south of the Clarence Railway was another group of terraces, each with seven houses, which were built a little later.

“l lived in Grant Street, East Howle, in 1960 with my family,” says Alan Blenkiron, following last week’s article. “It was on the south side of the railway, where there were about eight short streets going over to Dunns shop at the bottom of the bank.

“l can only remember the names of two of those terraces – Grant and Mason. This part of East Howle seems to be totally forgotten. Can anyone name the others?”

LAST week, we told of the strange goings-on at West Layton Manor (above) in 1880, where 37-year-old multimillionaire heiress Emma Easton died in her locked bedroom after a row with her brother John, who was 40 years older than her. In the inquest into her death, John was severely criticised for doing so little to attempt to rescue his sister, and the jury decided Emma had died from suffocation, but could not tell whether it was accidental or intentional.

John died a year later and their only surviving sister, Emily, inherited the manor plus the family’s coal mining fortune, which was based in Ryton-on-Tyne.

West Layton is equidistant between Richmond and Barnard Castle and is high up on the A66 near the Mainsgill farm shop. It is in the parish of Hutton Magna where Emily paid for a vivid stained glass window to be placed in the church in memory of John and Emma.

“She also donated the reredos (the ornamental screen behind the altar) in their memory,” says Marian Lewis, the keeper of Hutton Magna’s history. “It is made of Caen stone, English alabaster, Emperor red marble with a Latin cross of pure white marble, and it was designed by Mr RJ Johnson of Newcastle. There are two plaques with their names on near the altar.”

This is the same Robert James Johnson who designed West Layton Manor in the early 1870s as a country retreat for the fabulously wealthy, but feuding, Eastons.

Mr Johnson had been born in Stokesley in 1832 and had studied architecture in Darlington under John Middleton – the man who built Central Hall and St John’s Church, which is about to close, plus the stations of the Weardale Railway.

Mr Johnson became the diocesan architect for Durham and built churches at Low Elswick, Wylam and Haltwhistle. The Eastons must have known him from his Tyneside work – he also built the imposing Lloyds Bank Chambers on Collingwood Street in Newcastle – and brought him to their country corner of North Yorkshire.

Not only did he design the manor for them in 1872 but he also rebuilt Hutton Magna church (above) in 1878 on the site of a 13th Century church. Two years later, he returned to the church to work on the window and reredos in memory of his wealthy patrons.

Emily, who also donated the organ to Hutton Magna church, was the last of the Eastons. She died unmarried at Ryton in 1913, leaving a fortune of £1m (£95m today).

“I have a copy of her handwritten will on 23 pages,” says Marian. “She left money to her nephew and nieces, to staff, and to churches, schools and hospitals.

“Many vicars got £1,000 – the Reverend AWM Close, the vicar of Hutton, and his wife shared £2,000 and their son, who was Emily’s godson, got £100.”

Much of her money went to Newcastle cathedral, where there doesn’t seem to be a plaque to her, in contrast to the many memorials to the Eastons at their country retreat.

As we told last week, their manor was at the centre of a planning row about whether it should be allowed to continue to operate as a boutique hotel, as it has done for the last seven years. This week it was granted that permission.