Saying farewell in style

Most of those years have been spent on or near the High Street of Skipton, judged as the best in the country. He began his first shop with children’s clothes, adding school clothes. Today he’d be fighting the buying and marketing impact of the likes of Tesco.

Thirty years ago, he moved into the best end of the High Street, a fine double-fronted shop where he and his wife Anthea, joined by their daughter Clare (and some top-rate floor staff) have been selling proper ladies and gents country clothes and very little of what you could dismiss as fashion-conscious country clobber.

By the time you read this, it will be just about gone, the Barbour and Aigle and Musto and Trickers and Olney, your Scottish Hodgson and Peter Scott jumpers, your 10 quid Champion checked work shirts for gardening, stiff sticks and stout socks, a bit of Brasher. My last purchase was a pair of Trickers’ waxed laces, reduced to 25p. I’ve kept them with the receipt. Nostalgia in advance.

You see, I’ve been shopping on the cheap here for several years, mostly diving in at sale time for a bargain. Shrewd, I call it. Now I have a lifetime left of quality trousers and shirts and shoes. So, I learn, has David Goldie, who has no plans to shop elsewhere for a few years.

His daughter Clare is starting married life in Ireland. Her parents are in their mid 60s. It’s a fitting time to pack in. It’s one of those businesses that garner loyalty. Customers return year after year. Sales of Wellingtons run into thousands.

“They ask how can I be closing. Where are they going to shop, where can they buy their moleskins,” muses David in an office looking over a scenic branch of the Leeds-Liverpool canal.

He did try to sell as a going concern but there were the familiar nearlys and almosts and maybes until he took the decision to begin a final sale. It started on April 8 and has gone in phases of discounts. Everything must go by July 2. An ambition has been to reach an annual turnover of a million pounds, achieved this May, no doubt helped by the sales clamour.

David’s father was an osteopath and died young, leaving David (and his brother) with the same facial features of high cheek bones under taut skin as a reminder. They grew up near Skipton. Anthea’s father and grandfather were GPs in the town. So was her brother. The town’s oldest medical practice is named after them.

So it’s all well-hefted in the roots and veins of the area. The shop frontage has views of the ancient church, the more ancient castle and, directly across, the town hall and Whitakers, the long-established chocolate makers dating from the late 19th century.

After leaving Scarborough College in the early 1960s David Goldie, 17, got a job at Brown, Muff in the centre of Bradford. This was a department store to cherish in the memory, from the days when Bradford really was somewhere people went to shop. The first curry cafe was nearly a decade away. The mills were thriving. People were in work. There was a defined business and social synergy.

“It was a very well-designed store,” recalls David. “Its lift (with attendant) was only small so you could not get many people in at a time. Rather than wait, people would walk up. It was a spiral staircase which took you through every department with a subsidised restaurant at the top floor.

“The woollen men would go up for lunch and all the department managers looked for them on the way down. I worked in the men’s department and Mr Harry Longfellow, my manager, told me to catch the businessmen coming in and offer to steam their bowlers for them whilst they were lunching.”

The plan was to do a bit of selling when they collected the preened bowlers after lunch. “Mr Longfellow had a phenomenal memory for names. He would link a facial feature with a face and knew things like their interests and holiday plans. He would say ‘going to the Caribbean again this year, sir? I have just the jacket for you.’ He would go to the fitting room with them and offer to have it adjusted if necessary. The store had its own tailoring department and I spent a lot of time taking clothes there to get the alterations done.”

David Goldie left this snapshot world, a harbinger of TV’s Are You Being Served, and within a few years was at Allens, another proper clothes shop, in Harrogate, giving very personal service. “Everything was in drawers behind the counters. One day someone came in and asked for discount. This was unheard of and he was ignored at first. Then the manager had a word with Bill Allen, who came over and quietly asked the customer if he would mind coming with him. He lead him out of the room, through the shoe department and opened a door, asking him to go through it.” The customer found himself back outside.

The Goldies have had to take a more moderate view on discounting, particularly with the shopper who arrives with, say, a Barbour download from an internet supplier, and is versed in the art of bartering, thanks to television. “We’ll usually compromise.”

And what does he make of The High Street of the Year? David Goldie is proud of Skipton and is a long-serving member of the Chamber of Commerce. Customers know him as quietly spoken but he has strong views. He thinks the market stalls need better control which would make them tidier, stop overflowing with products on to the pavements, have smarter canopies, make sure the traders’ vans are out of sight.

“Once the market starts to close at 3.30, there’s all this rubbish. It gives the impression that things are run down. The market is an important part of the town but needs to be properly managed. A-boards on the pavement are now totally out of control. The big signs at the back of the stalls, next to the road, are terrible – two pairs of socks for £1, that sort of thing”. (I bought some: they shrank in the first wash).

He is most vociferous about the removal of the CCTV cameras from the town – because of cost. “It’s a big mistake. They could have at least left them up without film in. Skipton has become a soft target.”

Shop windows are being broken, things stolen. One night this month there were three break-ins. There are also the daylight shoplifters, moving from town to town, pinching things. “I had one the other week. I was aware of someone at the back of the shop and noticed a Barbour had gone. I could see it in his bag.”

A chase ensued, through the back of the shop, David, fit from cycling and ski-ing, on his walkie talkie “radio watch” linked to the police station and the other radio users. The man with the bag was elusive, scampering along the canalside, finding an entrance to an Italian restaurant, up through the kitchens and the startled diners. Other traders were now alert. A couple of builders joined in the chase which went through a cemetery which David didn’t even know was there. Amazing what you see.

By this time the police were in pursuit and the game was up in a field. In a discarded bag they found the Barbour and items from another store. The bag had been adapted to defeat doorway scanners.

David Goldie thinks a lot of offences are not reported because of the time it takes. “The police want the CCTV from your shop – downloaded on to CD in the right format.

“It takes half a day, and what happens? We have someone at the moment with 30 other offences.”

And so it will be goodbye to all that for the Goldies. The property is for sale or lease. Outline terms have been agreed for another quality business to rent the property. It was built in the late 18th century and was variously a house and then for many decades a medical practice. Lord Moran, the son of one of the doctors, was Winston Churchill’s personal physician.

The sell-off has been tiring and draining. “You have to justify what’s happening to the customers. I am ready not to be behind the counter. It has become a lot more stressful. People demand more and more. Some do not have the same courtesy. They do not realise how much you have to put in to it.”

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