WOOLWORTHS stores in Brighouse and Huddersfield are to open today after being given a final one-day reprieve.

All 807 Woolworths shops in the UK were due to close by yesterday.

They have been shutting in stages, with the final 200 – including Huddersfield and Brighouse – due to shut their doors yesterday.

But administrators Deloitte gave these stores a one-day stay of execution to allow them to shift remaining stock and allow final arrangements to be made.

Even the fixtures and fittings of many of the stores have been snapped up by customers.

The 27,000 staff employed by the chain across the UK will be out of work by close of trading today.

Deloitte has not revealed how much money has been raised by the massive clearance sale.

The administrators are in talks with other retailers to take on the leases of the stores and want to sell the Ladybird children’s clothing and Chad Valley toy brands.

Dragon’s Den entrepreneur Theo Paphitis was looking at buying the chain and retaining the Woolworths brand, but talks with Deloitte collapsed.

Woolworths’ UK arm outlived its US parent company by more than 10 years.

The company was founded by New York-born Frank Winfield Woolworth in 1852.

He wanted to get away from his family’s farming background and persuaded his mother to use her savings to send him on a book-keeping course.

He worked without wages as a shop clerk for three months to secure a job and found success with his new idea of displaying goods where customers could see and touch them, instead of having them behind a counter.

He established a thriving chain of ‘penny and sixpence’ stores in Pennsylvania before deciding to try his luck in Britain.

The first branch of F W Woolworth and Co was founded in Liverpool in 1909 and was almost stripped of stock during its first day of trading.

It was the first time people had been able to buy mass-produced household items at such affordable prices.

The first Big W store – out of town shops offering larger goods – opened in 1999 and in 2001 Woolworths Group began trading as a listed company on the London Stock Exchange.

Woolworths hit trouble in recent years, with shoppers turning to supermarkets and the internet.

Trading in its shares was suspended on November 26 this year and on December 11 a clearance sale throughout the outlets began.

A Woolworth originally part of the F W Woolworth company continues to operate in Germany and Austria under the separate ownership of Woolworth Gmbh.