WILLIAM BARKER’S family had farmed to the north of Northallerton for generations, but at the age of 14, William had decided that the land was not for him and so he chose to become an apprentice draper with Oxendale’s in Northallerton High Street.

This meant he moved in with John and Maria Oxendale in their family home in Kingsley House, one of the Victorian villas in South Parade. This was a normal practice for an apprentice in those days.

“He’d been brought up at Wiske House, Birkby, which is now farmed by Grant Tuer, the talented racehorse trainer,” says William’s grandson, who is also William (as indeed was his great-grandfather on the farm in Birkby).

The Oxendales had set up their business in the 1870s. In 1881 – the year before William joined – they advertised that they were selling “at the lowest price…ladies’ jackets, ulsters, shawls and wool wraps”, and, for men and boys, there were “cord mole trousers and munsters, plus reefer, pea and pilot jackets, and dux, drabett and velveteen jackets”.

There are some fantastic words in that advert. Reefer and pea jackets were worn by sailors who worked midships and reefed the sails – they furled and unfurled them to catch the wind. Their jackets were short, so they didn’t get in the way, and were warm and double breasted apparently so the buttons didn’t snag the ropes. Officers wore reefer jackets with golden buttons whereas lower ranks wore pea jackets.

READ MORE: The intriguing history of Durham House, Northallerton

Drabett was “a twilled linen used for making men’s smock-frocks”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and an ulster was the hugely popular overcoat with a cape and sleeves attached – Sherlock Holmes is the most famous wearer of an ulster. What a munster is, though, we have no clues.

 

A 1932 invoice from William Barker & Sons, showing William and his three sons as the partners. Mr Shipton of Thirsk has bought some breeches and leggings

A 1932 invoice from William Barker & Sons, showing William and his three sons as the partners. Mr Shipton of Thirsk has bought some breeches and leggings

 

William Barker would have known, though. He was so successful as an apprentice that in 1907 when John Oxendale retired, William took on the running of the shop with John’s son, Clarence, and it was styled Oxendale & Barker.

In 1919, it became Barker’s with William as the sole proprietor of Barker’s as Clarence left to start his Metropole garage at the north end of the High Street which we have been featuring here in recent weeks. Clarence was clearly a character: he had a reputation as a ladies’ man who was driven around the dales by a chauffeur.

“My father used to tell me that he was a playboy who wasn’t keen on work so grandfather bought him out,” says William.

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Now in charge of his own shop, William married Hannah Meynell, whose father owned Northallerton’s brickyards. They had three sons – Lawrence, Wilfrid and Charles – who enabled the business to become Barker & Sons and now Barkers.

“Unfortunately, I never knew my grandfather as he died in 1946, at a horse sale in Northallerton, when I was eight months old,” says William, but his grandfather had put in place a business that is now a Northallerton institution.