Arthur Seymour

When he married into the family that built and owned the Expanse Hotel, in 1949, he and his new wife, Winifred Briggs, were planning to buy a house in Mr Seymour's native County Durham. But the sale fell through when, as staunch Methodists they refused the seller's demands that they sign immediately because it was a Sunday.

Two days later Mr Seymour's father-in-law, Edmund Cooper Briggs, who had built the Expanse in 1937, offered him the chance to take on clerical work at the hotel.

The couple abandoned plans to settle in County Durham and moved instead to Bridlington where they always lived close to, or in latter years in a flat at the hotel.

Mr Seymour was born in the County Durham mining village of Ledgate, the youngest of three children of a miner and staunch member of the Methodist church who was determined his son should not follow him down the pit. When Mr Seymour left school at 14 he went to work as a clerk for the Consett Iron Company.

In 1938 he joined the St John Ambulance with the intention of joining the Royal Army Medical Corps if war came. When the Second World War broke out a year later he served with the Corps in India.

It was while both were on holiday with friends at a Methodist holiday home in 1948 that Mr Seymour met Winifred Briggs who was at that time nursing in Grimsby. They married in May 1949 at Bridlington's Quay Methodist Church.

A long period of wartime occupation meant that when the couple went to the Expanse there was a lot of work to be done to get the accommodation fit for business.

Together they oversaw the substantial expansion of the Expanse over the years, including adding a fourth floor to the hotel in the 1950s, and later the building of the popular Marine Bar and the Seymours function suite.

In 1963 the Expanse was licensed for the first time, having until then been a Methodist hotel and alcohol free. They were reluctant to get a licence but accepted that without it the business could not grow and they would not be able to increase their AA star ratings.

It was a mark of the astute business sense of Mr Seymour who was a modest, but very hard working man who ran a good hotel which very much reflected the qualities of the couple.

In the 1970s they were joined in the hotel's management by their eldest daughter, Irene Wilks and her husband Neil, making a third generation of the family to work there. The couple still manage it today.

Mr Seymour did not have the opportunity of university education, but always encouraged learning and was a governor of Bridlington Technical College, now East Riding College.

He was a member of Bridlington Rotary Club for more than 50 years and club president in 1969 to 1970. He also a founder of the town's first Probus Club.

Mr Seymour is survived by his three daughters and eight grandchildren. His wife pre-deceased him in 2008.