WELL-known York businessman Gerald Gray, the chairman of one of Yorkshire's remaining independent newspaper wholesalers, has died aged 92, following a short illness.

Mr Gray joined the family firm, Grays of York, from school, and founded its successor, Perio News Distributors Ltd, in the 1920s.

He was too old for front-line military service in the Second World War, but volunteered for aircraft maintenance and served with the RAF in Britain and India until demobilisation in 1946.

He was a keen cricket and tennis player in his home area of Acomb, York, in the 1930s.

In the decades before the war, Mr Gray created Sunday newspaper house-to-house sales across wide tracts of the East and North Ridings.

He took deliveries of Sunday newspapers into many isolated villages for the first time - a service that remains within the family firm to this day.

The company has expanded in the past two decades to distribute all the daily, weekly and Sunday regional and national newspaper titles across a wide sweep of North and East Yorkshire, including the Northern Echo and Gazette and Herald.

He leaves two sons. Richard is managing director of Grays Newsagents (York) Ltd, and his brother Quentin is a journalist with the Yorkshire Post, in Leeds.

The funeral service will be held at St Stephen's Church, Acomb, on Thursday, at 2pm, followed by cremation at Middlethorpe, York. Family flowers only, donations if desired, may be made to the RNLI.

Updated: 13:17 Saturday, November 03, 2001