Mildred Foster

Having worked her up from being a junior in a department store in Doncaster by the time she retired, about 40 years later, she owned her own fashion shop in the town.

Customers would come up from London to shop with her because they knew they would get good advice and value for money, while farming families from Lincolnshire were also among her clients.

Mrs Foster was born in Wrexham but went to live in Doncaster when she was two years old when her father, who was miner, moved to the town to work. She was educated at Armthorpe Secondary Modern School, near Doncaster, but when she left her first job was working in the office of the department store of Verity & Sons, on Baxter Gate, which set high standards for its staff.

But she wanted to be in the shop with the customers and eventually she was put on the haberdashery counter. As a keen junior member of staff she later found her way into the gown department until, at the beginning of the Second World War she was put in charge of a new department selling jewellery and handbags. That move was short lived because during the war she, like other women, had to take on war work and she went to Rockware Glass making glass bottles.

Although she returned to the department store for a short time after the war, in 1947 she was the successful one of 80 applicants for a position in fashions at J Jones, in Doncaster where she became a buyer for the gown department.Her breakthrough into having her own business came in 1960 when she opened the first of her own fashion shops and where business boomed.

Six years later she took the lease of a larger shop, Lucille Gowns, from where she sold exclusive labels from top fashion houses in London, Florence, Munich and Paris.

It was during that time that her husband Robert gave up his career as a quantity surveyor and joined her in the business to run the financial side. The couple had met at Doncaster races and married in 1948.

Her final move came 17 years later when she bought her own shop in Doncaster's Scott Lane which she ran until arthritis forced her to retire in 1981.

Mrs Foster is survived by her husband Robert.