A grocer at heart, who brought a new style of shopping to Hull.

Clifford Dunn began work as a newsboy, then as a shop assistant on 50p a week. In 1953 he started in business on his own account, with a stall on Hull’s open market selling “all sorts of goods”.

It was a hard life: three market days a week in all weathers, each starting in the early morning, and two journeys to London every week to buy stock and seek out new bargains. Once his van was stolen overnight; it was recovered, but the stock it had carried was gone for ever.

The business was built on two rules — keep margins low so the housewife gets value for money, and treat every customer with courtesy. Mary worked beside him, and later their son John joined when he left school. The stall, with its queue of customers, became a Hull landmark.

In June 1958, in half of a warehouse Clifford had bought in Market Place, Savemore Stores opened — Hull’s first self-service shop. Within two years it had taken over the whole warehouse and still could not cope.

In 1960 the Dunns bought the old Curzon Cinema on George Street and turned it into the first fully cut-price supermarket in the North of England, with a conveyor carrying stock from a loading bay on Dock Street. It opened with 4,000 square feet of selling space and grew to 9,000 as the upper floor was opened to shoppers.

A second cinema followed — the Priory, on Willerby Road — reborn in 1962 as the city’s largest supermarket, with its own car park. In November 1963 Savemore joined the Mellin Group, with Clifford on its board.

Then came a non-food variety store at Grosvenor House on Anlaby Road; a Doncaster store on High Fishgate, opened on purpose on Friday 13 November 1964; and a 100,000 square-foot warehouse on Clough Road. By January 1965 the company employed around 350 people, with Mary as co-director, advising on buying and the planning of new stores.

After the sale of Savemore, Clifford started again. In 1968 the former Bladons furniture store on Prospect Street opened as Clifford Dunns, the start of Clifford Dunn Supermarkets — a new business that grew to be a big one in its own right.

Hull remembers the Prospect Street store for its Saturday queues, 10p tins of tomatoes and famously cheap shirts. It stayed with the family until 1984, when it was sold to Gateway Foodmarkets.

The full history of Clifford Dunn Supermarkets — its other stores, its dates and the people who worked there — is being gathered now.