Albert Liversidge

He started work at the paper after leaving Blenheim School in Leeds when he was 14. He began as a clerk in the, Births, Marriages and Deaths announcements.

He always described getting the job in “Hatches, Matches and Despatches” – that department’s better-known title, and always used by him – as one of the proudest days of his life.

He later moved into advertising, his job to take proofs round to advertisers for approval. He would report back to the general manager, his enthusiasm and efficiency often rewarded with a cigarette offered from a silver case.

He was smoking one of these in a room where smoking was not allowed – even in those days – when the deputy manager caught him, and told him he was fired.

Neither cowered nor impressed, Mr Liversidge turned up for work the next day, chatted to the general manager as if nothing had happened, and heard no more about it.

His best friend in the advertising office was one Eric Moore whose sister Vera he wooed and married. They remained a devoted couple until Vera’s premature death in 1986.

Mr Liversidge saved hard as a junior in the advertising department to buy his first car – a Ford for £25. He subsequently drove it to the scrapyard the day he joined the Army. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the war, mostly in Kent which, thanks to the hammering it got, was known by those who served there as “hellfire corner”. He earned medals and stripes along the way, but never made much of that.

The Yorkshire Post kept his job open for him, and demobbed at the end of the war, he returned to it.

Promotions followed and he was made circulation manager for North Yorkshire, based in Harrogate, the office being attached to the railway station. He and Vera moved from Leeds, and in Harrogate raised their daughters Barbara and Jean.

A testing time was the printers’ strike of 1958. Among a handful of people who worked through it, he worked consecutive night and day shifts, for six weeks, to get the paper out.

When it was over, he was rewarded with a family holiday in Majorca – in the late 50s an almost-unheard of holiday destination.

After retiring from the Yorkshire Post, Mr Liversidge set up and ran his own property management company, but his first love was always the newspaper industry and especially the Yorkshire Post.

When he was 88, he moved to Reading, receiving a copy of the paper every week, sent to him by his elder daughter who remained in Harrogate.

A by-product of his career was that he was fastidious about English grammar and had an excellent vocabulary.

True to his heritage, he liked his cricket, and would have said he had a good innings. He holidayed abroad until he was 93; he drove his car until he was 94 and he could still do the Yorkshire Post crossword, follow and discuss current affairs, enjoy a glass of Cote du Rhone, play Scrabble and dominoes when he was 95.

He is survived by his daughters Barbara and Jean and four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.