Lord Stanley Kalms: The retail entrepreneur behind Bradford's Dixons City Academy who helped change the face of shopping

Dixons, now Curys plc, was his father’s photography business in north London and Stanley joined it in 1948, helping to expand the brand from cameras to the whole gamut of electronics.

Always attuned to the latest market developments, in the 1990s he set up Freeserve, the first mass provider to offer dial-up internet access for just the price of the phone call, and gave away the sign-up software free in his stores. Freeserve was later sold to the French provider, Wanadoo, for £1.6bn.

When Kalms announced his retirement at 70 his business empire was valued at around £5bn.

He was active in politics, too, donating to the Conservatives and taking on the party chairmanship in 2001, at which time he was close to the leader, Iain Duncan Smith.

Kalms proved as ruthless at Central Office as he was in business, presiding over swingeing cuts to the operating budget. When Duncan Smith was replaced by Michael Howard, Kalms was among his nominees for the Lords.

He continued to serve the party as vice-chairman under Howard but fell somewhat out of favour when he backed the Yorkshire MP David Davis, not David Cameron, as his successor. Eventually Kalms switched his allegiance to Ukip.

Harold Stanley Kalms was the son of immigrant Jewish parents from Poland and Russia and grew up in Hendon, North London. He was a stamp collector at five years old and in business from 10, setting up the Merit Stamp Company and trading through adverts he placed in philatelic magazines.

Meanwhile, he was helping out at the photographic studio in Edgware set up in 1937 by his father, Charles, who was one of 12 children.

Stanley discovered there was more money to be made in selling cameras than just the photographs and profits doubled when he began to copy the techniques of other camera shops.

He was a millionaire by his late 20s and when he floated Dixons Photographic Ltd in 1962 he had 16 shops making around £160,000 a year. The name Dixons had been chosen at random from the phone book.

It was the £300m acquisition of the electrical retailer Currys in 1984 that brought Dixons into the top flight of retailers. An audacious and controversial but unsuccessful bid for Woolworths followed.

Kalms was also involved in many private charitable activities including the creation of the Stanley Kalms Foundation in London and the Stanley Kalms Readership in Business Ethics and Strategic Management at University of North London.

But the endowment he considered his greatest success was the creation of the Dixons City Academy in Bradford, set up to help teenagers from different ethnic backgrounds and abilities find work – a project he thought of as part of a “virtuous circle of capitalism” in which each generation would train the next.

An arts theatre complex in Bradford is named in his honour.

Lord Kalms married Pamela Jimack in 1954 and they had three sons.