A FORMER Skipton area agent for Refuge Assurance and local steam train worker has died in the Dales Care Home, Draughton, at the age of 92.

James Alfred Simpson, known as Jim, joined the Manchester-based life insurance and pensions company in 1960, and steadily accumulated a book of clients whom he visited regularly to collect their premiums.

And he became known amongst his colleagues for never using a calculator to do arithmetic - all his addition, subtraction, division, percentages and discounts were worked out on pieces of paper. He was never known to be wrong.

This could have been the lifelong legacy of his education at an elementary school pupil in Gargrave and Cononley from 1927-36.

His Refuge bosses asked him to stay on when he reached 65 in 1987, but he said 51 years was enough for anybody having a boss telling him what to do.

Jim was born in Airton in 1922, the eighth of nine children of stonemason Alfred Simpson and his wife Eva. Alfred died of cancer at the age of 52 when Jim was just 11. At 14 Jim got a job at Stells Spinning Mill in Cononley, then with weavers Heald Brothers in Cross Hills. His brother Jack was a mechanic at Pennine Motors in Gargrave in the mid-1930s and Jim grabbed the chance to join him as his assistant.

In early 1939 his brother-in-law Tom Stratton, a Skipton-based train driver, helped Jim get a job as a steam train fireman, where his job was to shovel over five tons of coal into a locomotive furnace on the 120-mile Leeds to Carlisle run. It was a heavy job, and in wartime a sometimes dangerous one, ferrying tanks, ammunition and troops on the route. German bombers that couldn't find Liverpool or Belfast sometimes unloaded their bombs over the North Yorkshire moors.

In peacetime, Jim joined the newly-nationalised Yorkshire Electricity Board and became part of a team putting up poles for the long overdue electrification of the Dales and helped to carry the wires up Wharfedale, before changing the nature of his work entirely and joining the Refuge.

Jim married Kathleen Culbert of Embsay in 1958. The couple had no children and were divorced in 1986. He moved from Overdale, Skipton to Gargrave in 2001 and had triple heart by-pass surgery in at Leeds Infirmary in 2003, then moved to the Dales Care home in 2012.

Information supplied by Michael Green.