“He used to come into Barker’s shop in Northallerton when I worked there in the 1960s,” says William Barker, who remembers talk of a “car-veyor” that Mr Carter had invented: a transporter that carried many cars.

READ MORE: THE CARTER COASTER AND THE FORD COMUTA

Mr Carter moved from Northallerton to Tamworth, in Staffordshire, to follow his engineering dreams and came up with the Coaster. Colin Narramore has kindly sent in a picture of perhaps the only Coaster ever built.

Nigel Burton, the motoring journalist and editor who lives in Darlington, has written the definitive book about the history of electric vehicles. He says that in the early 1960s, the Electricity Council, which oversaw the regional electricity boards, held a competition to find a “battery car” that would be an improvement on the electric milkfloats that silently, but slowly, went about the streets in the early hours of the morning delivering pintas.

Mr Carter responded to the challenge.

“He’d been working on the Coaster since 1962,” says Nigel, who published A History of Electric Cars in 2013. “It weighed a mere 710lb and used a 6hp motor driving the rear wheels via a conventional axle. The car derived its name from Carter’s idea of using freewheeling regeneration to boost the four 12V batteries. “It had a range of 60 miles and could be charged from an ordinary household plug socket. A full charge was said to cost three shillings.

“The acceleration to 30mph was seven seconds and the top speed was 40mph.”

Although Mr Carter predicted there’d be a million Coasters on the roads by 1970, the Electricity Council wasn’t interested, and so Mr Carter took his idea to the US where it seems to have become very successful as the electric golf buddy – Mr Carter was apparently even invited to the White House as successive presidents liked his vehicle so much. Can anyone tell us anymore about him?

AT the end of the Second World War, the shortage of housing was so dire that thousands of people squatted in disused military establishments. It was against the law, but it had the tacit support of local authorities who would otherwise have had to house these homeless people.

Nationally in October 1946, there were an estimated 46,000 people living in 1,811 derelict military outposts, including the several hundred who squatted in the four airmen’s settlements which had been built around the periphery of Croft airfield to the south of Darlington (Memories 607).

Ed Chicken in Staindrop draws our attention to concrete foundations which can still be seen in the wood on the edge of the village through which the 18th Century Coach Road runs. The Coach Road connects Raby Castle with Selaby Hall, near Gainford, which was often where the Duke of Cleveland’s heir lived, awaiting his turn at the castle.

In September 1939, the Royal Leicester Regiment was stationed at Raby Castle, and used Scarth Hall in the village as its Naafi, and we believe erected buildings in the Coach Road woods beside the Langley Beck.

The regiment left Raby in April 1940, and was sent to Scotland before taking part in the disastrous Norwegian campaign – they were driven out of Norway by the Nazis in just a couple of weeks. In Teesdale in 1941, the military developed six camps – Stainton, Streatlam, Westwick, Barford, Deerbolt and Humbleton – which, particularly in the run-up to D-Day, held thousands of men.

We’re not sure what use the huts in the Coach Road wood had once the Leicester had left, but after the war, squatters pressed them into service as emergency accommodation.

You can clearly see their foundations in the wood on the way to the “new cemetery”.

IN the field next to the Coach Road huts is a lovely, Grade II listed early 19th Century field byre. It is perfectly round and has four evenly spaced Dutch doors in it – presumably, it was once at the boundary of four fields so each could access the barn through a door.

A Dutch door is a half-and-half door so the top half can be open to let the sun and the breeze in while the bottom half can be shut to keep the kids in and the stray dogs out. Rather than be a feature of the Netherlands, the Dutch door was first noted as a feature of homes of Dutch colonial settlers in New England, in the US, which is where the name came from.