Northern Regional Rally – Drive it Day

It was nice to see such a good representation from our Branch at the Northern Regional even if the weather was a little hit and miss! The Saturday was glorious but unfortunately Sunday did spoil itself a little. After the hic up over the original venue of Haigh Hall I think that in the end it actually worked out a better venue. The Standege Tunnel was a great success with 32 Minors and 3 modern cars plus ofcourse our Norm and Jean in there Fig which this year was in the fore front of the line up!!!

Paul, Sheena, Chris, Lotti and I drove over to Chris and Keith’s at Tankersly on Saturday and stayed over with them as we had to be on site by 8.30 Sunday morning as we were marshalling the event and ofcourse gazebos etc had to be erected before everyone started to arrive.

The last time Chris and I were there was a site visit in February with Chris and Keith and there was snow and sleet over the Pennines, even then though we could see it’s potential and we weren’t wrong! Plenty of good walking trails, lots to occupy all and ofcourse very dog friendly, which is always a bonus for us.

I think we all managed to go on the Tunnel trip which was extremely interesting. (except Chris and Keith who manned the ‘fort’ the whole day through – including Lotti sitting) This tunnel is a master piece of engineering. It was built solely by Irish Navvies in the most awful conditions. There were over 200 fatalities in the workforce, very often this was due to down right negligence and greed of the people who were having the tunnel built. A lot of them were blown up, some of the ‘drillers’ one man held a very heavy long solid metal bar with a drill shaped end over his shoulder while another hit the end with a big hammer had their sculls split wide open if his mate missed or their spines broken. (all this work was done by candle light) They suffered from Emphysema (stone lung) due to the dust created by the blasting of the rock. The expression Stone Deaf also comes from the tunnel builders as having a hammer constantly being bashed next to your ear can’t have been pleasant, and all this was done for a pittance of a wage! Where was Health and Safety then I wonder?? The tunnel itself has a huge S bend in the middle due to the fact that two working parties set off from either side of the Pennines but they discovered that they were off course by 35 feet! To rectify this the Boss’s called in a famous bridge builder of the time (sorry his name has escaped me) to solve the problem and his solution was to make a very big sweeping S bend. Which when you have been inside the tunnel is an amazing piece of engineering in itself. When ‘legging’ it through the tunnel to get from one side to the other it took over 4 hours of walking the ceiling. No horses could go through it so they had to be walked over the top in all weathers and very rough terrain, this job was done initially by a 12 year old boy who had to see to it that no barges ever met in the middle. He did this same job for over 30 years before he finally retired!

We took the short walk up the hill to a super little local pub called the Tunnel Inn for our Sunday lunch, the food was superb and Lotti was also allowed in too! It’s a shame it’s not nearer to home I think we would be using it all the time!

Another down pour hit so it was decided to draw the raffle and give the awards out earlier than we had planned. Most people decided to make a move at around 3.15pm but typically the sun came out again about 30 minutes later. Just in time for us to be treated to a display of St George in full suit of armour slaying the Dragon which appeared out of the tunnel on a barge accompanied by the explosions of fire crackers much to all the kids delight.

All in all we had a really good day it promoted the Morris Minor and got us out there.

There were a lot of public about who very much enjoyed looking around our cars and chatting to the owners. Drive it Day proved a very good date to hold this event as the cars were out and about and people were able to see them at close quarters and discuss their merits.

The four of us coming back to Driffield set off just after 4pm the nearer home we got the wetter the roads got, we kept commenting that it must have been far worse over the East side than in the middle. When we got on to the road to Wansford it was flooded! Mike who had stayed at home to house, big dog and chicken sit told us there had been the most horrendous thunder storms, power out, rain coming through the house garage roof and that even the house phone blew up!!!!!! The rain was so heavy it just looked like someone had a hose pipe trained on the windows!!!! So I think that we had been very lucky to be somewhere near Huddersfield!!

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