Founding member Andrew Hamilton will be there, but his two 1936 Austin 10s which grace today’s front cover won’t be – one of them, a convertible, has been off the road for nearly 50 years.
“Coming back from taking my daughter and her German pen friend around Durham, the crankshaft broke, and it is still not back on the road,” he says. “That must have been in the mid 1970s – but I haven’t given up on it.”
It was his other Austin 10 that first got him in to classic cars, although he bought it when he was a student because it was cheap.
“I was from Leicester, I was studying mechanical engineering at King’s College London and I had a vacation scholarship with ICI Billingham in 1963, so for reasons of affordability, I bought a 1936 Austin 10 Sherborne,” he says. “I was really looking for something not that old, but a lady who had recently become a widow was selling it and I rather liked it because it was a bit different.
“It is actually a rare car. They only made it for six months, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
The Sherborne was an unusual “six light” design – it has three windows on either side. It has a fashionable roofline and deep rear seats so it was regarded as a “small big car”.
In 1966, it was spotted by a member of the newly-formed Austin Ten Drivers Club when Andrew parked it outside the ICI Synthonia Club, and a note was left on the windscreen. Andrew went along to a meeting, and is still a member of the club which specialises in 1930s Austin 10s, but also became involved with a group of enthusiasts of all makes of classic cars.
“Our first meeting was at the Ship in Redmarshall, there were ten or 11 there, although we didn’t have a name at first,” says Andrew, who is one of the last of those founders. “I was elected publicity officer and I got the first newsletter out in April 1967, and it was suggested that we were going to be the Pegasus Car Club, I think for no other reason that it had wings.
“At the May meeting, four names put forward and one of the members’ wives had come up with the Yesteryear Motor Club and that stuck. It proved very useful many years later when there was a growing interest in motorcycles as it suited them as well as cars.”
Last year’s Hurworth Grange gathering was the largest, with more than 500 cars and 100 motorbikes on view.
The Sherborne had piqued Andrew’s interest, so he decided to get a second classic.
“I was very keen on a convertible, and I thought an Austin 10 would be good for spares for the Sherborne,” he says. “I was looking around up here and I asked my brother in Leicester to keep his eyes open and one day he sent me a letter saying he had followed one home and this was its address.”
Andrew went down and bought it. It is a 1936 Austin 10 Clifton, a two-seater convertible with a dickey seat. A dickey seat is a leftover from the age of horsedrawn carriages when a footman had an uncovered seat at the back. The dickey seat is stored in the boot – “dickey” is an old fashioned word, possibly of Indian origin, for a vehicle trunk – and comes out when needed.
“I used the car for quite a while – my wife, Helen, and I had three daughters and once we all went on holiday to the Lake District in it,” he says. “We had them in the dickey seat wrapped in a double sleeping bag, no seatbelts in those days, and the roof only covered the driver’s and passenger’s seats at the front.”
Both Andrew’s Austin 10s are off the road at the moment, but round the corner from his home in Yarm is another Austin 10, this time a 1934 cabriolet owned since 1983 by Alistair Scott.
“Cabriolet” is another word leftover from the horsedrawn era, and a cabriolet is another kind of convertible, with a soft top that can be rolled down.
“They are very nice to drive,” says Alistair. “You can put the hood down, hear the birds singing and feel the sun on you, and if there’s anything that needs doing, I can do it myself because, mechanically, they are fairly simple.”
They really are vehicles from another age of motoring.
- The Hurworth Grange Classic Car Show, which is run by the Teesside Yesteryear Motor Club, is on Sunday, May 10 from 10.30am, with hundreds of old vehicles on view. Admission is £5. To enter a yesteryear vehicle more than 25 years old, arrive before 11am.
