THE story about Middleham racehorse trainers complaining about treacherous road surfaces prompted the D&S Times’ former photographer, Ian Wright, now living in Texas, to look up this picture. He took it in March 1962 on a glass plate when trainer Neville Crump was complaining about treacherous road surfaces.

“Some things never change, and I bet the road has never been repaired since Capt Crump’s days,” says Ian.

It’s a great picture, and it gives us the chance to throw open the car on the right for identification. Does anyone recognise it?

A fortnight ago, we were after the identity of cars in Hawes in 1953 – a request which produced some tall stories.

For instance, Barrie Johnston of The Good Life, a fruit and veg wholesaler in Hawes, said: “On the right is an Austin Lichfield. I had one of these. It cost me £2 10s and I got lots of pleasure out of it. I painted it blue and sold for £25 six months later. I upgraded to another Austin Lichfield which had immaculate paintwork and leather seats which I sold to the postman who repainted it pillar box red which ruined it.

Darlington and Stockton Times:
Hawes from the west in December 1953

“In 1959, I upgraded to a Ford Popular, which is on the left-hand side of the picture. They were dreadful vehicles. In particular, they were dreadful starters – but luckily we lived on a hill near Blackpool, so we’d open the garage doors, push it out and roll it down the hill until it started. This was not ideal.”

Just about everyone agreed with Barrie as to the makers’ names, but Gerry Simpson of Darlington wondered if the Austin was a Light 12/6 Ascot.

And the identification of the Ford as a Popular was not popular with everybody.

“It is a Ford Anglia,” said John Davies in Kirkby in Cleveland. “As a student at Newcastle University in the 1960s, I had one of these and well remember one Saturday night, after he had performed at the union, transporting the 6ft 7ins blues singer Long John Baldry in the back of the car to a party.

“Afterwards I placed a sticker on the roof lining which said: ‘Long John Baldry’s knees touched here!’”

Another discussion point from a fortnight ago concerned Royal Observer Corps underground listening bunkers. In 1955, the ROC was given the job of detecting nuclear explosions, and 1,563 re-enforced concrete bunkers were sunk for them to work in. Each bunker was accessed by a 14ft shaft and consisted of a toilet and a detecting room.

Darlington and Stockton Times:
Long John Baldry

The ROC was stood down in 1991, and most of the bunkers seem to have been abandoned.

In last week’s paper, Cliff Stainthorpe told of three surviving bunkers in the Ripon area. There’s another at Chop Gate on the moors which has been restored and held an open day in 2011 for public inspection.

The bunker that sparked our interest was at Grinton in Swaledale, and a gentleman from Low Row left a message saying it, too, survived (we wish he’d left his phone number).

The Grinton bunker was buried in one of two mounds that can be found on the south bank of the River Swale. These mounds are made of ‘glacial terminal moraine’ – material dropped by a glacier. The eastern mound was turned into a defended hill camp by native British farmers at about the time of the Roman occupation, and the western mound was where the ROC sunk its bunker in 1965.

We’d love to know if it really is still there – in fact, we would love to know the whereabouts of any of these Cold War relics. If there were 1,563 of them nationally, there must still be several hundred of them in our area.

Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or call 01325 505062.