ONE of the most fondly remembered stores in County Durham is Doggarts.

There were 13 branches of the “fair deal family firm” – Memories has told the story of Arthur Doggart, who opened his first shop in Bishop Auckland in 1895, before and will post that on the Memories blog.

But there are loads more Doggart memories in A Taste of Crook, a miscellany of anecdotes and potted histories which has been published by the Crook and District Local History Society.

Society member Alan Tarn has written about how he started work at the Hope Street branch in 1952 when he was 16. Just the names of the departments conjure up images of Are You Being Served: haberdashery, drapery, hardware, menswear, mercery, footware, baby clothes, millinery, mantles, furniture, white goods, carpets and lino.

In the haberdashery, you could buy small sewing items such as buttons. In drapery, you bought curtains. Mercery would have been for cloth and textiles, millinery for hats and mantles for ladies’ coats.

Doggart’s green delivery vans dashed about the county, but perhaps the most memorable aspect of the enterprise was its cash-dispensing system. “Sales personnel did not handle cash,” wrote Alan. “The Lamson Paragon pneumatic system transported cash and bills by canister from the counter to the office upstairs. Two copies of a bill were needed for each purchase – one for the store and one for the customer.”

The items were placed in a pod which went into the Lamson Paragon shaft (Lamson Paragaon was a Massachusetts firm founded by William Stickney Lamson in 1879). A blast of air sucked the pod up to the accounts department.

“People also fondly remember Doggart’s Club,”

writes Alan. “This interest free system was introduced when money was short to allow customers to make expensive purchases. Stories abound of people starting a Doggart’s Club and then selling it to raise cash, especially for Cup Final tickets.”

As well as the stores, Doggart’s had two financial companies, the Ashton Supply Company and the Economic Clothing Company, which once had 800 agents operating in County Durham, collecting weekly payments from householders and paying them into the branches.

All of this came to an end on Christmas Eve 1980 when Doggart’s closed.

• A Taste of Crook costs £3 and is available at Hope Street News, Stephenson’s News and The Hive in Hope Street.