A WELL-KNOWN Huddersfield barber has passed away.

Jack Sykes has died aged 93.

The Quarmby man ran a barber shop at Church Street in Paddock for more than 50 years, retiring at the age of 81.

Mr Sykes was born in Golcar on June 9, 1917, and left school aged 13 to become an apprentice hairdresser.

He worked at J Jenkins on Wakefield Road in Moldgreen from 1935 until he was conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940.

Mr Sykes served as a hairdresser and orderly aboard the hospital ship The Oranje in the Pacific.

His daughter Jacqueline Smart said: “My father had to go into the Japanese prisoner of war camps at the end of the war and bring out those that were still alive.

“It was such a horrible experience, he would never talk about it.”

Mr Sykes married Nellie Wilkinson in Lindley on April 15, 1940.

The couple’s only child Jacqueline was born three years later.

After the war he set up Jack Sykes Hairdresser’s on Church Street in Paddock, working there for the next 54 years.

Mrs Smart said: “He absolutely loved his work, it was his life.

“I think his customers thought he was a bit curmudgeonly but he was a typical right-wing Yorkshireman, always smoking his pipe.

“His regular customers would go in there for a chat.

“Every lunchtime he would spend two hours in the pub because he ate so slowly.”

Mr Sykes married Amy Sumpner in 1961 and the couple lived at Chesil Bank in Quarmby. Both his first and his second wives pre-deceased him.

Mr Sykes moved to Dersingham in Norfolk after he retired.

He moved into a care home in 2005 after developing Alzheimer’s.

Mr Sykes died on March 1 at Nightingale Lodge residential home in Hunstanton.

His funeral takes place at King’s Lynn Crematorium at 1.45pm on Monday.

The family have asked for any donations in his memory to be made to the Salvation Army.