Rt Rev Graham Foley, former Vicar of Leeds and Bishop of Reading

Such was his popularity with audiences that his fame spread nationally, and he began speaking in London at dinners hosted by the Variety Club and the Professional Footballers’ Association.

In the late 1970s, he was the “turn” at Kevin Keegan’s European Player of the Year dinner.

Born in 1923 in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire, Bishop Foley was educated at Wakefield Grammar, King Edward’s in Birmingham, King’s College, London and St John’s College, Durham, gaining an honours degree in theology in 1949 and a diploma the following year.

In between, he had seen out the war in the RAF, and he met and married Florence, who was serving in the Women’s Royal Air Force.

Ordained in 1950, he began his career as assistant curate at Holy Trinity Church, Blackpool, moving to the nearby St Nicholas at Marton Moss, as priest in charge, and then to Blackburn.

The 1960s found him as director of education in the Diocese of Durham, Rector of Brancepeth and then Canon of Durham Cathedral, before arriving in Leeds in 1971.

It was in Yorkshire that his career flourished. He was Vicar of Leeds and Canon of Ripon Cathedral, and in 1975 was voted Leeds’ Citizen of the Year.

Two years after that, he was appointed Chaplain to the Queen.

He liked to convey modesty about his extra-curricular activities; in Who’s Who he listed his recreations as reading detective novels and watching other people mow their lawns.

But in reality, he was enjoying the plaudits that his after-dinner life had brought. Harold Wilson, professed himself an admirer, and in later life, a framed menu hung in his home in Kirkbymoorside, on which the former prime minister had written: “With congratulations on a great speech.”

Bishop Foley never asked for money, but placed one condition on his appearances: the inclusion of what he called his three-minute commercial.

“It would usually be something which reminded people of their spiritual awareness,” he recalled in The Yorkshire Post, in 2002.

His “routine”, he said, was based around good-natured leg pulling.

“It was part of the job and I discovered I had a silly gift for the humour,” he said.

At one stage, his engagements in Leeds were so frequent that he joked: “I was more the chaplain of the Queens Hotel than the Queen’s Chaplain.”

His advice for other would-be speakers was as follows: “Don’t tell ‘English, Irishman, Scotsman’ ones because there will be somebody who has heard them. The best are ones you make up yourself.

“The other thing is to work hard at it. Go over it time and time again – don’t walk into a room with a sheaf of notes. And If you haven’t got a silly gift, don’t do it.”

During his time in Yorkshire, Bishop Foley served on the council of Leeds University and as a director of Yorkshire Electricity Board, as well as sitting on the governors’ panels of various schools and chairing the Leeds Council of Churches.

He was lost to the county, temporarily, when in 1982 he was consecrated Lord Bishop of Reading, with the responsibility for 210 parishes and 100 clergy.

But he returned in retirement to Kirkbymoorside, with an appointment by the Archbishop of York to be Assistant Bishop in the diocese.

He and Florence had four children, eight grandchildren, 10 great grandchildren and two great great grandchildren. Mrs Foley died in June.