“IN the weeks leading up to Christmas, my mam and grandma would travel from Wheatley Hill by the G&B bus to Bishop Auckland to the main branch of Doggarts department store in the Market Place,” writes Margaret Hedley in her new book about the Durham coalfield which is due out next year.
“In the late 1950s before I started school, I went along with them. It was a whole day out, and we had our dinner (at lunch time) in Doggarts café before returning home on the bus.”
As we’ve been telling in recent weeks, Doggarts was the Harrods of County Durham or the Grace Brothers of Bishop Auckland, depending how you looked at it.
READ MORE: DOGGARTS PART 1: THE HARRODS OF SOUTH DURHAM
DOGGARTS PART 2: READERS RECALL THE GOOD OLD DAYS SHOPPING AT DOGGARTS
It grew to have 17 stores across the county, and a visit to the big ones, in Bishop or Darlington, was a treat for members of the coalfield communities.
There were smaller Doggarts scattered across the coalfield, with the closest one to Wheatley Hill being at Wingate, where the full range of potential Christmas presents was spread out.
“The furniture was sidelined as displays of toys, books, games, and play equipment was laid out to attract the attention of children,” writes Margaret. “Trying to choose your Christmas gift was very difficult in the face of so much choice.
“The other departments also had special Christmas gifts and Doggarts windows were full of seasonal gifts, most which would be bought with the help of the interest-free Doggarts Club.”
The Doggarts Club allowed customers to save on a weekly basis or to buy now and pay later.
“This method of purchasing goods was essential for low paid workers who could spread the cost of their expenditure without the need to save up, which was often impossible on their wages,” says Margaret.
“Taking out a club” was a well used Durham phrase meaning to splash the cash.
Doggarts had 800 agents in the county going from door to door collecting people’s club dues, and from 1959, Margaret’s mam was one of them.
“My dad was bringing home £9 a week from his job as a mechanical fitter at Wheatley Hill pit, and the Doggarts pay, while small, would have been welcome,” she writes in what will be her third book looking at the lives of women in the coalfield.
“My mam’s area was the lower end of Wheatley Hill and on a Friday, she visited customers who had taken out a club in order to collect the payments that would reduce their overall balance. During the school holidays I would go with her on these visits and then travel by bus to North Road, Wingate, where she dropped off the payments with Mr Ball, a representative of the store.
“As a result of my mam working for Doggarts, most of our spending was done there and not at the co-operative store, like other people.
“Doggarts had pneumatic change dispensers that travelled across the ceilings of the Wingate shop to a central point, returning your change to the department you were in.
“I also remember that Doggarts was famous for its distinctive green bags with gold writing.”
Margaret’s series of books began with Women in the Durham Coalfield, which told the story of her great-great-grandmother, Hannah. Her second book looked at the life and times of Hannah’s daughter, Sarah, and her third book, Last Women of the Coalfield, looks at the story of the women who were caught up in the contraction of the industry.
It has a foreword written by Hillary Clinton, which is quite a coup and certainly an upgrade on the writer she had compose the foreword to the second book.
It will be out in March when Memories will tell more about it.
“I ENJOYED reading the article on Doggarts (Memories 656) and recalling the happy memories of when I worked at the Bishop Auckland store in 1958 when I was 16 years old,” says Ruth Anderson. “It was my first job on leaving school – my Dad was an agent for the firm and arranged an interview for me.
“I travelled on the bus with the blonde lady in your photo on the left of the basket. She was called Marjorie Cowell then, and she later became my bridesmaid in 1963. She is now living in Australia.”
“I HAVE fond and good memories of Doggarts,” says Mrs J Norman in Crook. “I bought my wedding dress there and in 1975, mam bought a ring there for my 21st birthday. Mr Platt came every Saturday afternoon to collect the club money.”
In Crook, Doggarts had two stores in Hope Street. The larger one on the west side had departments like haberdashery, drapery, menswear, mercery, footware, baby clothes, millinery, mantles… whereas on the east side, now a bookie’s, in 1973, Doggarts opened a hardware store selling decorating items, furniture and carpets.
Both stores closed when the chain, founded by AR Doggart in 1895, went the founder’s grandchildren, Sandy and Jamie, were forced to place it into administration at the end of 1980. The last shop to close was the headquarters in Bishop Auckland Market Place on April 10, 1981.
DOGGARTS are remembered for having their name on a green rally car in the late 1970s. It was a Mercedes 450 SLC that was driven by Nicky Porter, a Mercedes agent, of the Oakley Service Station. Either Sandy or Jamie Doggart often acted as his navigator. Sandy has kindly, and proudly, sent a couple of pictures of the car in action:
BETTER remembered than the car are the pneumatic cash dispensing systems that connected the Doggarts’ front counters to the cashiers’ office out the back.
In pre-computer days, everything was entered by pen into ledgers so that the accountants knew how much was owed on your club, or how big a discount or dividend you were due.
Front counter staff would send your club number, details of your purchases and your money through to the cashiers who would write it all down and then send back any change.
In most Doggarts there was a Lamson Paragon system, made by a company in Massachusetts.
In the Beamish Museum co-op, there’s an early Lamson Paragon system in which hollow wooden balls containing the money and the paperwork roll on an elevated railway track between the counter and the back office.
Later systems had sealed tubes in which pods were placed. The torpedo-shaped pods were either sucked by a vacuum or blown by a blast of air around the shop. Most, if not all, Doggarts branches used these pneumatic systems.
It sounds a complicated and convoluted way of doing business, but they were extremely common. In Bishop Auckland, for instance, there were three stores that used these cash dispensing systems: the co-op and Wilkinsons in Newgate Street and, of course, Doggarts. Shopping must have been so much more fun then with things whizzing around above your head.
This last time we touched on this subject, we discovered a pod from the Bishop Auckland Doggarts Lamson Paragon system being used as a doorstop in Hurworth Place.
The Doggarts pneumatic cash pod above with the door shut tight, and below with the door open, revealing a note. 3D we think was a reference for the department the pod had come from
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