Doggarts department store, the "Harrods of south Durham"

The company’s headquarters was in Auckland House facing on to Bishop Auckland Market Place, but it grew to become such an enormous emporium that it spread around the corner into Newgate Street where it occupied three premises, one of which was known as the “Grand Arcade”.

Doggarts' Auckland House in Bishop Auckland Market Place in the pre-motor age

Top of the shop, though, was the 150-seater restaurant above the floors of haberdashery.

“I remember the café was upstairs where there was a huge stained glass window,” says Sarah Navin. “As you went into the café there was a machine that contained orange juice that was continuously stirred.

“I remember you went through one department which was full of fancy hats, gloves and bags. These were displayed on heads and hands that stuck up from the glass counter.

“I also remember my Dad and another man queueing most of the night for Doggarts sale and I believe they got a mention in The Northern Echo. Dad was queueing to get a Hornby trainset for us as we could only afford it in the sale – money was tight in the 1970s, just as it is today.”

In 1978, Doggarts occupied three premises in Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland, as well as having two fronting the Market Place

READ MORE: THE STORY BEHIND NEWGATE STREET'S NEW KINGSWAY QUARTER

Doggarts was founded by Arthur Robert Doggart (above) who moved to Bishop in 1889 from Glasgow, where he had been an apprentice shop manager, to become a “hosiery and fancy buyer” for the Market Place branch of Hedley, Swan & Co, a Sunderland department store. When they left town in 1895, he put his own name over the door and an institution was created.

A First World War United bus with a gas bag on its roof, and a female conductor by its side. On the front is a board advertising Dainty Rimless Eyeglasses made by Boothroyd, optician, of Bishop Auckland, and on the side is an advert for Doggarts Fine Fit Costumes. The route board on the side says the bus runs from Bishop to Chilton Buildings to Ferryhill to Spennymoor

Doggarts empire grew so that by the 1930s there were 17 branches across the North East, employing 1,200 staff directly and with 800 agents collecting money from customers who shopped at home through the Doggarts’ catalogue. Doggarts had green delivery vans whizzing about the county, and their shops featured pneumatic cash dispensing systems which connected the front counters with the accounts departments at the rear.

Throughout its 86 year life, it had a traditional feel to it – staff, for instance, were never allowed to refer to each other by their Christian names, just like in Are Your Being Served?, the TV sitcom set in Mr Grace’s department store, which included characters like Mr Humphries and Mrs Slocombe and her famous pussy.

The stars of the Are You Being Served? sitcom  in 1975. It was based in a department store rather like Doggarts

Mr Doggart himself moved from The Gables in Etherley Lane in Bishop Auckland to live in Red House on Staindrop Road in Darlington – Compton Grove now stands on its site – as one of the biggest branches was on Northgate. He became one of the country’s leading Baptists, being the national president of the Baptist Union in 1928.

Northgate, Darlington, in 1943, with the new Doggarts store on the left

He donated nearly half of the £5,600 cost of building a Baptist Hall and Sunday School on Geneva Road. When it opened in 1932, a year after he died, it was named after him with “AR Doggart” written in the stone over the door. It was replaced in the early 1980s by the current evangelical Baptist church.

Mr Doggart's name over the door in Geneva Road, Darlington

The Doggarts chain was taken on by his sons, Alexander and Norman.

Two of his other sons, Graham and Jimmy, born in Bishop Auckland, went from Darlington Grammar School to Cambridge University around the time of the First World War. Jimmy, who has an extremely lengthy entry on Wikipedia, knew novelist Virginia Woolf at university. She described him as “"spruce innocent young man; with eyes like brown trout streams”.

Appropriately for someone with fish-beck eyes, he became a pioneering ophthalmologist while Graham had an extraordinary sporting career. He excelled at football at Cambridge, and played for the Corinthians amateur club in London, scoring 160 goals in 170 games.

He also turned out for Bishop Auckland and for the Quakers of Darlington. Towards the end of Darlington’s first season in the Football League in 1922 – a hugely successful season as they finished second in Division 3 (North) – he played twice, scoring four goals.

In 1923, he captained a full England international team in a friendly against Belgium, which ended in a 2-2 draw – he must be the only Bishop Auckland born England captain; are there any other Bishop Auckland born England footballers?

Graham also made seven appearances for Durham County Cricket Club (his brothers Norman and Jimmy also played for the county) and he played first-class cricket for Middlesex before becoming an MCC committee member and a selector at Sussex.

Graham Doggart, right, who once captained England making the FA Cup draw, using the famous balls, in his role as chairman of the FA in the early 1960s

In 1961, he became chairman of the Football Association in 1961, and he died in 1963 while chairing the FA’s annual meeting in Lancaster Gate.

Graham, who remained a director of the family firm throughout his life, was highly regarded as an administrator in both football and cricket circles, and The Northern Echo concluded its obituary by saying: "There has never been a more popular personality."

The Doggarts story comes to an end in November 1980 when Sandy and Jamie Doggart, grandsons of the founder, had the unpleasant task of placing the chain into liquidation in 1980.

This meant the loss of 340 jobs and the closure of 11 remaining stores: Doggarts’ last “super-store” was opened in Peterlee in 1968 selling double knitting wool a shilling an ounce, terylene net curtains 1/6d a yard and Hoovermatic washing machines £59 19s 6d

In The Northern Echo, the Doggart brothers – who lived in Barnard Castle and didn’t drive so were chauffeured into Bishop every day – blamed “ever increasing wage costs and overheads together with the effects of the recession”.

Doggarts, Northgate, Darlington, on the day closure was announced in late 1980

In truth, Doggarts was very much a retail phenomenon of its time when County Durham provincial towns could support large department stores. At the dawn of the 1980s, it was betwixt and between: its huge branches, like the Bishop headquarters, were too large to become self-service, as was fashionable, but with only 11 stores, it was too small to go bulk-buying so it could compete with Binns, Debenhams or the supermarket chains that were starting to sweep aside the local shops.

So a Durham institution died. It was part Grace Brothers, part Harrods and part “the fair deal family firm”, as its advertising slogan put it. It was certainly at the heart of its community and there are lots of stories of how in the 1950s, the glory days of amateur football in south Durham, families would cash in the Doggarts Christmas Club savings to afford the trip to Wembley to see Bishop Auckland, West Auckland or Crook in the FA Amateur Cup finals.

And it left a legacy – even 40 years after its demise, people are known to promise that if something unlikely comes to pass that they will “bare their backside in Doggarts’ window”.

The Doggarts name reappears in Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland, in 2006

• Those Doggarts stores in full: Bishop Auckland, Ashington, Billingham, Chester-le-Street, Consett, Crook, Darlington, Durham, Gateshead, Houghton-le-Spring, New Shildon, Peterlee, Seaham Harbour, Shildon, Spennymoor, Stockton, West Stanley and Wingate.

• Based on original research by Tom Hutchinson and Mike Amos. Have you any Doggarts memories or information – do you have anything that was bought in a Doggarts store? Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk