Tag: Jaguar Mark II

Rallying support for Heartbeat jamboree

It’ll be emotional when I am reunited with my dad’s old Jaguar at the Heartbeat Vehicle Rally in June. I’ve not seen it since 2017. If you’d like to help me by sponsoring the event in some way, please get in touch with this paper or through my web page.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for information about a needlework sampler that featured York Minster, as well as information about a group of girls creating samplers around the village of Lastingham. I’d been contacted by Sarah Duce whose great aunt Hannah Stonehouse completed a different sampler in 1808 and which was one of four about which Sarah was trying to find out more. “I believe one might have been by a Mary Wilson who was born around 1791 in Hartoft, and wondered if there might have been some sort of connection…I believe my Great Grandma x5, Sarah Harding (nee Smith), may have been the teacher of these girls…She was schoolmistress of Lastingham following the death of her schoolmaster husband from consumption at the young age of 30.”

The Minster sampler was sewn by a girl called Ann Raw and I wondered if she had actually been sitting in front of the building to create it. Reader Gillian Hunt contacted me to say: “The York Minster sampler – same motif on another sampler, which suggests the girls were following a design by someone else – maybe by their needlework teacher?” It means they probably did it in a classroom setting.

Gillian specialises in researching samplers like this, and two years ago was very helpful in relation to helping me understand the significance of the needlework motifs on one that hung in my mum’s kitchen by a young girl called Hannah Raw. Is she related to Ann Raw? We don’t yet know.

Gillan informed me in 2023: “Hannah’s sampler has two sets of initials after the date – MR and what looks like ER…If ER is in dark thread, they are most likely to have died before Hannah completed her sampler.”

Gillian discovered that the initials represented Hannah’s parents Matthew and Ellis Raw. Ellis’s initials were in a dark thread and further research confirmed she had indeed passed away. Matthew Raw died a few years after the sampler was created, when Hannah was still a teenager.

Gillian’s help, among others, led us to being able to fill out much of Hannah’s life story. Best of all, we found a living relative, a direct descendant of Hannah’s brother John Raw. My ultimate goal is to find a living relative of Hannah herself.

On another note, I took a trip up to Goathland last weekend to meet the posse who are responsible for organising the annual Heartbeat Vehicle Rally. This year’s event is scheduled for the weekend of 27th and 28th June.

The rally has boomed over the years, and last time attracted around 6,000 visitors over the two days. They flocked to the village to meet star guests and to study the collection of wonderful vintage vehicles, some of which appeared in the TV show. The local businesses do a roaring trade, with hotels, B&Bs and holiday homes fully booked many months in advance. The local cafes and shops are overflowing, and with the car parks bursting at the seams, some prefer to arrive by steam on the North York Moors Railway. It brings a huge financial boost into the area, and yet those who organise it don’t make a penny from it (And, for the record, neither does my family!).

It’s a truly wonderful, family occasion, and those involved in its planning put in hours of hard work, as well as their own money, all for the love of Heartbeat. Any profits raised are donated to Goathland Primary School.

As the event grows in size, the work and challenges, both financial and practical, increase. This year we are looking for sponsorship to help with the mounting costs involved. Please contact me via this paper or my web page if you are willing to help. I will also be knocking on a few business doors over the coming weeks as the event looms.

This year there is one particular vehicle that I cannot wait to see. It is my dad’s very own vintage Mark II Jaguar. That car had been part of our family since I was a child, but sadly we had to sell it in the wake of his death in 2017. I thought I’d never see it again. But now it’s been found and is coming to the rally.

It’s going to be one heck of an emotional reunion!

Do you have opinions, memories or ideas to share with me? Get in touch with me using the ‘Contact’ button on the top right.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 27th  and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 25th March 2026

We’ve taken a wrong Turner

(This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times  on 27th July, & the Gazette & Herald on 25th July 2018)

Me, far right, with my late sister Tricia, my mum and my brother Andrew sat on our Jaguar high up Mastiles Lane in 1978
It was a bumpy ride there but the views of the Yorkshire Dales were magnificent
Me with my friends Hayley, Dave, Jane and Barney the dog a bit further down Mastiles Lane just a few months ago. I had no idea I’d been to the same spot 40 years earlier
L-R Dad, brother Andrew, late sister Tricia and myself on the Jaguar up Mastiles Lane in 1978
My friends (L-R) Stefan, Jane, Hayley and Dave with me on Mastiles Lane a few months ago

As I have remarked a number of times before, one of the loveliest things about using my dad’s archived columns from 40 years ago is when I come across a story that he relates about our family life back then. It stirs up and refreshes long-forgotten memories, or enlightens me about events that I have no memory of whatsoever.

It’s particularly thrilling when I can link what my dad is talking about to photographs I have seen in our family archives, and when they are pieced together, it adds a whole new layer of detail to an otherwise patchy recollection.

And so it has happened again this week when I read about a rather curious and adventurous family day out. Dad had decided to keep us entertained by using an old map for a trip up into the Dales, with our intended destination being Malham. All went well until we arrived in Kilnsey, famous for its annual show and impressive crag.

According to Dad’s old map there was a road that directly linked Kilnsey with Malham, but when we turned up the road, we found it was clearly rarely used. After a while, the road turned into cobbles, and as we passed the ‘Unsuitable for Motors’ sign, you’d have thought that perhaps we would have stopped and turned round.

But not my dad. For when he set his mind to something, he could be very determined indeed! What is even more astonishing about this unconventional detour is the fact that we were not driving any old car, but my dad’s pride and joy, his beautiful, sky blue classic 1968 Mark II Jaguar. And if you know anything about these cars, you will appreciate that they are very low slung, and so we bumped, scraped and jolted our way on up, high into the hills along what was no more than a rocky track.

It was only when the track actually disappeared into grass and mud that Dad did finally admit defeat and drew to a halt. But by then, we were so high up that the views were incredible, which of course made it entirely worth it, as Dad explains: “We concluded our journey in a field of cows high on the hills above Wharfedale with stirring views below and the Pennines all around.”

I do have vague memories now of that day, but because I was just 11 years old, I had no idea, and took no notice, of where we had ended up. But reading that column today, I discovered that it was in fact Mastiles Lane, an old drovers’ road that would have been been a busy thoroughfare in times gone by between Malham and Kilnsey.

When I read that, a little light went off in my head, as I knew I’d heard the name before. It turns out that I had recently walked that very same route without realising that I’d already been there, albeit in a Jaguar 40 years earlier!

My friends and I regularly walk near Kilnsey, and it’s a beautiful area to visit. So beautiful, in fact, that artist JMW Turner himself made sketches and drawings in and around the village during his 1816 tour of Yorkshire. His watercolour study ‘Kilnsey Crag and Conistone, Upper Wharfedale’ is now housed in Tate London, alongside books containing other sketches of the area, although sadly a full painting has never been discovered, so it’s unclear whether he did in fact complete one.

Unfortunately for Turner though, he didn’t enjoy the kind of dry, sunny weather that we have been experiencing. For him, it was unrelenting rain as a result of climatic disturbance caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in the Philippines, which led to 1816 being dubbed ‘the year without summer’.

It must have made working rather difficult for him. Indeed some of his sketches and watercolours from that trip are visibly water-stained, and he wrote from Richmond on 31 July 1816 to his friend James Holworthy: “Weather miserably wet; I shall be web-footed like a drake.”

And then in a later letter, he recounts a dreadful journey: “…the passage out of Teesdale leaves everything far behind for difficulty – bogged most completely Horse and its Rider, and nine hours making eleven miles.”

Thankfully our own passage back out of the Dales in our Jag, although rather bumpy, was significantly quicker! (Source: Tate.org.uk)

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