DOGGARTS was the fair dealing family firm, the Binns of Bishop, the Grace Brothers of County Durham, the Harrods of the North East.
The department store’s headquarters in Auckland House dominated Bishop Auckland Market Place and, in its heyday, spread down Newgate Street as well.
Founded by AR Doggart in 1895, it grew to have 17 branches from Darlington in the south to Ashington in the north, from Seaham Harbour on the coast to Consett high in the foothills of the Pennines. In its heyday, it employed 1,200 staff directly and had 800 door-to-door agents collecting money from its club members.
It was more than a shop. It was a year-round way-of-life, an institution, a place to threaten to bare one’s backside if something stunningly unlikely came to pass.
“How many of us would not have been clothed and clogged without our Doggarts club’s penny in the pound repayment, interest free?” asks Ted Lickrish, in Darlington.
“In my home village of Witton Park, Doggarts was a saviour to most of the womenfolk,” says Dale Daniel. “It was known as ‘the workingman’s best friend’. To be able to get a club ticket to buy whatever you wanted was a boon to most folks.”
As well as the 17 stores, Doggarts had two sister companies, the Ashton Supply Company and the Economic Clothing Company, that provided financial services to customers for hire purchases and for savings clubs. Agents would call at people’s homes every week to collect money either to cover existing purchases or to go into the savings club.
When club members had saved enough, they would “take out a club” and dash down to the department store with their vouchers in hand and make their purchases.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it is said that many of the Christmas savings clubs were cashed in early so people could afford to make the journey to London to see the south Durham teams – Bishop Auckland, Crook, Willington and West Auckland – play at Wembley.
“We had a lady collector who lived at California and every Friday night she would go out collecting to hundreds of houses in the village,” says Dale. “She would carry a large handbag in which to deposit the cash she collected from people.
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“In the winter, of course, it would be very dark and the village only had a few gas lamps scattered around the streets. It amazes me how she was never mugged or robbed for the bounty she was carrying. She was always on foot and had a long trek back home to California.”
(Although California is an American state, the Doggarts collector was returning to her home in the hamlet of California, which is between Witton Park and Escomb.)
Doggarts clubs were an important way of enabling working families save for big ticket items. Holly Hogarth has kindly sent in the Ashton Supply Company hire purchase booklet (above) that shows how her parents, George and Sylvia Hogarth, fitted out their first home together on the Sherburn Road Estate in Durham in 1963, ordering a dining room suite and a bedroom suite from Doggarts.
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SHEILA CATOR, of Spennymoor, joined Doggarts in January 1955 – “I left school on the Friday and started on the Monday”, she says.
“I worked in drapery where the buyer was Mr Weightman and the manager was Mr Rothwell.” Upstairs was millinery; downstairs was cosmetics and Mr Maughan’s gents outfitters department.
“We all had to wear black and we called each other by our surnames – I was Miss Stewart,” she says. “They were very strict and old fashioned, but you expected it – a lot of the men who were employed there had been in the army so they were used to it.”
For all the old-fashioned formal approach, Doggarts also had an enlightened attitude, employing a young disabled lad as the lift attendant, and in the cellars, having a big recycling operation, particularly retrieving paper.
“I remember the first sale they had after the war was 1959 when everything was knocked down and there were some really, really cheap prices,” says Sheila.
“It was an amazing place to work. My husband, James, was an apprentice electrician and we met there.”
She left in 1961 to double her wage at the Smart and Brown factory.
THE distinctive vehicles of Doggarts drew many comments. In the 1960s and 1970s, the company had a fleet of green Morris or Austin 1000 vans used for deliveries and by store maintenance men. Several people have mentioned that after Doggarts closed in 1980, one of the vans, with the distinctive registration 53 UP, was restored by Neville Wright of West Auckland, and used to be a feature of local vintage car rallies. We believe it is now owned by an enthusiast in Surrey.
DOGGARTS also sponsored rally cars, which had their name down the side. “I used to co-drive for Nicky Porter of West Auckland, who was a Mercedes agent, and he rallied an ex works 450 SLC that was sponsored by Doggarts,” says Robin Rutherford, in Darlington. “He tells a story that the car was so plush, they could listen to the radio on some long stages.”
One Mercedes had the numberplate 50 UP – UP, of course, indicating that it was registered in Durham – but when the numbers and letters were pushed together it seemed to spell “SOUP”.
In the Echo archive is a picture of Sandy and Jamie Doggart, the third generation of Doggarts, in Bishop Auckland Market Place looking at their new rally car, a turbocharged Saab, in February 1980. It was built and owned by Philip Wilkes, who had the Saab garage in Howden-le-Wear.
SADLY, it fell to Sandy and Jamie Doggart to place the 85-year-old famous name into liquidation in November 1980. In the era of supermarkets, it had become too large to function as a family firm but too small to compete with the massive department stores like Binns and Debenhams.
Jamie is now in the Channel Islands while Sandy is in Oxfordshire, and he has kindly got in touch to keep us on the right lines.
“The founder, AR Doggart, my grandfather, and his wife Mary Graham had four children: Graham, Jimmy, Connie and my father, Norman,” he says.
“My father, after training at a department store in London. joined the family business in 1931. A year later, in January 1932, his father died.
“Graham, who was a chartered accountant in London, then took over as chairman of Doggarts Ltd with his brother Norman as managing director.
“Therefore, my father led the company from 1932 until 1973 when he died.
“I joined Doggarts in 1968 having qualified as a chartered accountant in London, and my brother, Jamie, joined me in 1970 having trained at Bentall’s in Kingston.
“It was a great privilege and pleasure for Jamie and myself to keep the family business, which had served the mining communities of the North East through two world wars, going into the 1980s.”
Of course, other well known department stores were available to bare your backside in, should you feel compelled to do so. We think that to people in Bishop Auckland, the phrase always involved Doggarts but in Darlington, the alliterative Binns was probably the place to threaten to do the baring in. Were there any others?
And if you have any Doggarts memories or memorabilia, we’d love to hear from you. Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
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