GEORGE and Magdalene Zissler were teenage lovers who eloped from Germany and set up a butchering dynasty that lasted in Darlington for nearly 130 years.
Indeed, just mention of the sizzling Zissler name will have people salivating at the memory of their pies and pork goods.
“Mr Zissler started in a humble way, and by his enterprise and ability became one of the wealthiest businessmen in the town and made his name a household word in Darlington,” said The North Star newspaper on his death in 1912.
The Darlington & Stockton Times agreed, saying his “reputation for all kinds of pork delicacies made his name a household word in the town”.
George and Magdalene came from Niedernhall, a village with a population of just over 4,000, near Stuttgart – in later life, the name of Niedernhall was etched in the glass above the front door of their home in Woodland Road.
They were young lovers – possibly too young for their parents, which may have been the reason for their elopement.
British seamen in the Baltic befriended them and helped them reach West Hartlepool around 1868, when George was 17 and Magdalene was a year younger. They were so grateful for the sailors’ help that in later life they became founders of the Hartlepool Seamen’s Mission.
They travelled the north, learning the language and looking for somewhere to start a business. It is said that they started their first pork butchers in Leeds, in the Jewish area of the city. As Jewish people are prohibited from eating pork, this was not a good move, and they quickly looked to move on.
Their first son, George Henry, was born in Bingley in Bradford in 1872, but by that time George senior had taken on a small “shop with bull’s eye windows” in Bondgate in Darlington. Behind the shop was Coltman’s Yard which contained a slaughterhouse, several pig-sties and a dungheap as well as humans raising families.
It was said that the pigs lived longer than the humans in Coltman’s Yard.
John Zissler, brother of George, is on the right in Coltman's Yard behind the Bondgate shop. He's got an axe, the butcher in the middle has a long knife and the lad on the left has a large metal bowl. It has to be hoped it was painless... Picture courtesy of Janice Atkinson
George did the butchering and Magdalene made the pies, and from the earliest days, they were entrepreneurial. For example, on Christmas Eve 1874, The Northern Echo painted a picture of the Christmas shopping opportunities in Bishop Auckland: “The butchers of course lead the van in the army of raiders on the pockets of the townsfolk, and many a fine piece of beef and pork awaits and tempts the purchaser. Splendid beef is offered at South Road by Mr Gibson. Bondgate is not without purveyors of this edible, having Mr Jewitt and Mr Marwood, while in Newgate Street, Messrs Gregory, Scott and Hill offer an extraordinary supply.
“Pork, of course, and the other concomitants to a good Christmas dinner may be obtained from Mrs Zissler in Newgate Street or from Mr Glattback in Bondgate.”
Gregorys we met in Memories 519, and still trades to this day, but it must be Magdalene who is going head-to-head with the butchers of Bishop only three years after establishing the shop in Darlington.
Magdelena and George Zissler in the 1880s outside their shop in Bondgate - are there any chitterlings in the window?
Her family continued to grow – she had three more sons, Fred, Henry and Albert – and George’s younger brother, John, came over from Niedernhall to join them. John was a pork butcher’s assistant, and he married Sarah Coltman whose family owned the yard. This may explain how the Zisslers came to own their shop and the yard which they rebuilt at the end of the 19th Century.
The brothers all went into butchery business, apparently competing against themselves: Fred set up almost directly opposite his parents’ shop; Henry established himself in Skinnergate in 1883, and Albert took on the Bondgate shop.
The most colourful of the brothers was the eldest, George.
In March 1886, when he was 14, the Echo reported how he’d been skating on a pond near South Park when the ice had given way under a lad called John Pepper. George “went to his assistance and succeeded after repeated efforts in pulling him out… But for the plucky behaviour of Zissler, the boy would probably have drowned”.
Zissler's advert from the front page of the Echo at Christmas 1899
In 1892, George went to West Hartlepool to establish a branch of the business in Church Street. He was a keen cyclist and amateur dramatist, and he combined his two passions by appearing in fancy dress at charitable cycling meets. Indeed, on August 5, 1894, he won first prize at the Hartlepools Amalgamated Cycling Clubs’ Costume and Blossom Parade, which, the Echo said, was “probably the greatest gathering of cyclists ever seen in the locality”.
The following weekend, George was seen entering the Brunswick Hotel “clutching his throat with both hands and staggering a good deal… He exclaimed in a feeble tone: ‘Send a telegram to Zissler, Darlington. Tell them I am shot and dying’.”
It appears that George regularly carried a gun in his breast pocket. “He was seen by a boy named Ferdinand Sleigh to pull a revolver out of his pocket, and a minute later the weapon went off,” said the Echo.
He was treated in the hotel by a Dr Davis, who told the Echo: “Well, the conditions of things are that the bullet had first entered the front of the neck, injuring one of the tubular veins, causing very profuse haemorrhage and loss of blood.
“The bullet had travelled backwards and lodged underneath the skin at the back of the shoulder.
“We could feel the bullet but we did not attempt to remove it on account of the collapsed state of the patient.”
George, 28, was in a critical condition, but by the time his father reached his bedside, there were hopes that he would be able to pull through.
George H Zissler's shop in Northgate won award for its flamboyant celebration of the 1911 Coronation. Picture courtesy of the Centre for Local Studies, Darlington library
Perhaps to recuperate, George returned to Darlington, and over time, he set up his own butchery business in Northgate. It was on the west side of the street, and is now beneath the inner ring road roundabout. Today’s front page picture shows the shop in 1911 when it won the best dressed award to celebrate George V’s Coronation.
A year later, George Snr had an “apoplectic seizure” outside the Bondgate shop and died at the age of 62. The Echo in its obituary noted how he was involved in many businesses, from the bottling company in Gladstone Street to the Darlington Building Society, and how he had quietly given much more to charity over the years – to celebrate his 40th anniversary in the town, he had given a substantial sum to the hospital.
George and Magdalene Zissler's flamboyant angel gravestone in Darlington's West Cemetery
He was buried beneath a befittingly grand stone in West Cemetery – now a little wonky with age – and Magdalene joined him there in 1932.
The second generation of Zisslers had at least four shops scattered around the town centre, but even though two of their sons went off to fight in the First World War, they fell under suspicion because of their German name. In December 1914, half a brick wrapped in paper was thrown through the window of the Northgate shop, outside of which “a large crowd” gathered on Saturday, May 15, 1915. This was a week after the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat off Ireland, causing the deaths of 1,200 people, and tensions were running high.
A Northumberland Fusilier, Pte Daniel Crawford, was convicted of throwing a stone through George’s plate glass window, striking his daughter on the arm.
George was obviously a brave fellow because later that year, he stood for Darlington council in the Cockerton ward. His German connections counted against him, and he was beaten by Clara Curtis Lucas who became the town’s first elected woman.
Looking up Post House Wynd at Zissler's Skinnergate shop in 1981. Picture courtesy of the Centre for Local Studies in Darlington library
In peacetime, the Zisslers were again the flavour of all Darlington, and although the Northgate shop closed before the Second World War, the shops in Skinnergate and Bondgate traded until 1997 and 1999 respectively.
The Bondgate branch of Zissler's on August 29, 1999, in its last week of trading. Jennifer Moutrey took the picture. She explained: “It brought back memories of when I was a small child in the 1950s going into this shop with my mother. We would catch the United bus from Bishop Auckland at the bottom of our lane as we lived on a farm just outside Darlington on the A68." The shop had a shiny metal bar in front of the counter, we think, which generations of young Darlingtonians twiddled with. Picture courtesy of the Centre for Local Studies in Darlington library
- With huge thanks to everyone who has helped us, including Janice Atkinson, who is the great-grand-daughter of John Zissler, and Katherine Williamson, of Darlington library. There must be other Zissler descendants, and Janice would love to hear from them. Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
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