In its heyday, Dickens was a household name in the North of England, the pioneers of the home improvement hypermarket. But for the man at the top, it was sometimes a lonely existence.

Albert Dicken recently took time out from his work for charity and the church to look back over his days in DIY for the North-East Entrepreneurs Forum. Sarah French reports.

THEY are the giants of retailing, their vast metal frames emerging from derelict plots of land before being brought to life with bright orange, green or red branding.

Every town has one and business continues to boom as everyone strives to create the perfect home.

It is hard to imagine life without the DIY hypermarket, but in the North-East of the 1970s, there was only one place to go for your home improvement needs - Dickens.

Its store in Portrack Lane, Stockton, opened a decade earlier - as the company that began as an ironmongers moved into timber.

In responding to the post-war building explosion and baby boom, Albert Dicken and his older brothers, Robert and Terence, suspected they were on the edge of a retail revolution.

They were among the first retailers to stay open until 8pm. Albert said: "I remember standing in our warehouse at 7.45pm in the evening and people were throwing money at us. I knew then we were onto something."

The brothers' great-grandfather, Harry Rogers, a saw doctor from Sheffield, opened the first shop in 1878, later handing over the business to his daughter, Alice. She married a Dicken and then threw him out a few years later, but carried on trading under her married name.

Alice passed the business on to her son, Harry, who died of leukaemia in 1953 when Albert was seven.

The young entrepreneur's first job in the family business was to chop sticks, which were sold by the bag. He started in the shop full-time when he was 15.

In the 1960s, the company expanded the timber business and, by the early 1970s, the Dickens "Mad Mad Sales", advertising supplements that came through the letterbox, and TV commercials, were known all over the region.

"We saw a meteoric rise in sales during those years," Albert said. "We had people coming from all over and we simply fed the demand. People thought we had taken the idea from America, but we hadn't even been there. We just listened to what customers wanted."

It is a recurring theme - the principles and personal service of the traditional hardware shop magnified into what was to become the first of the DIY hypermarkets.

Albert said it was a lesson many large retailers could learn from.

"We were brought up on the shop floor, so it was natural to talk to customers and to relate to them. By keeping in touch with them, you could see where trends were moving. A lot of businesses these days lose direction because they don't keep up."

Dickens' success was manifested in traffic jams outside its store at Stockton and the queues at 6am for its January sale, when customers were greeted with hot soup and bacon butties.

They were the days when the company was at its height - when it chartered Concorde and the Orient Express for competition winners, and took a group of terminally-ill children to Lapland.

By 1977, the business was growing so fast that Albert's brothers were concerned that the bubble would burst and agreed to sell to Montague L Meyer, later part of the Jewson group.

Ready for a challenge, Albert stayed on as managing director only to find that being at the top was a solitary existence.

"It could be very lonely day to day. We were also very much pioneers at that time. Nobody had done it before; there was no Texas, Homebase or Focus."

He drew heavily on his faith, which he calls the secret ingredient, and which came into his life when he was 17.

"I was invited to a Christmas party in Hartburn, where I met people who were different. They had a relationship with God and I knew I had found something very special. I remember feeling like I was walking on air when I left and I have never looked back.

"My faith enabled me to keep my feet on the ground and gave me wisdom and strength on the occasions when I felt totally out of my depth."

The company was 100 years old and employed 250 staff when the brothers sold it. Albert put his share of the proceeds in the bank, where it stayed for the next six years.

In 1980, the first Dickens store opened outside Stockton. The 25,000sq ft store at Shiremoor nearly tripled in size to become the first DIY superstore in the North. TV star Noel Edmonds arrived by helicopter for the opening.

The North Tyneside store was superceded four years later by the biggest hypermarket in Europe on 17 acres of land at Washington.

Then MLM offered Albert the chance to buy the company back.

"I did everything the book tells you not to do to raise the money," he said. "I put my house, my mother-in-law's house, the following year's tax and even a little cottage we had bought in the Lake District on the line. But sometimes, you just know you are doing the right thing."

With help from Barclays Bank and his nest egg, he raised £4.8m, twice what the brothers had originally sold the company for.

By now a prominent figure in North-East business, involved in Teesside Tomorrow and other regional organisations, he said: "The boy who left school with the 50-yard breaststroke as his only qualification had at least achieved something."

But things were about to get difficult.

As the owner of the company, Albert decided to appoint a managing director, George Patterson.

"Up to that point, I had run the business, and when you have been doing everything your way, it is difficult to hand over the reins, even though our MD was very good and did a very good job," he said.

"One of the problems I suffered from, perhaps with having no father nor my brothers around, was a lack of self-belief. It was quite a lonely time.

"To a degree, I lost my nerve with the business, maybe because I no longer had day-to-day control. I was still responsible for the major decisions, but I left the team to get on with it because I didn't want to impose myself on them. I gave them a lot of freedom and, generally speaking, they were very successful."

Into the 1990s, with competition looming large on the horizon, Dickens built its £11m store on the site of the former cattle mart at Scotswood, followed by another at Morton Park, Darlington.

With massive overheads and more than 1,000 people on the payroll, the company went into what Albert describes as financial intensive care, albeit with enormous assets.

With retail space at a premium, B&Q was the first to be offered the chance to buy the business.

"I knew the value of the company was in the properties and it quickly became clear that it was the five retail planning consents that B&Q was really interested in," said Albert.

"They'd had an edict from Kingfisher to get as big as they could as quickly as they could. It was fortuitous, because I was ready to sell."

He did not return to any of the stores. On the Monday after selling the business for the second time, he became involved with Christian TV, which is now broadcast to millions of people in 212 countries.

His time is now divided between the God Channel and the charitable trust he began in 1977.

As one of the founding trustees of the Butterwick Hospice, he has converted a Stockton nightclub into a church and has helped schoolchildren in Uganda, Rwanda and Ireland. By climbing Kilimanjaro next year, he will help raise £5m to supply clean water to parts of Tanzania and £5m for transmitters to spread the gospel across Africa.

He is chairman of the trustees of the Daisy Chain respite centre for autistic children on Teessi de, and is trying to raise a further £7m for a cancer treatment.

"To serve God and my fellow man is my sole purpose in life," he said, "and it's an extremely exciting life."

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