Newspaper manager;

born November 3, 1935; died May 12, 2006

TOM McGourty, who has died aged 70, had a long and distinguished career in the Scottish newspaper business. He was a Glaswegian born and bred, from Florence Street in the Gorbals, also home to the country's famous boxing son, world champion flyweight Benny Lynch.

But McGourty's main fights were in the cut-throat Scottish media - he began his career at the Evening Times at the time of a ferocious circulation battle with its rival, the Glasgow Evening Citizen. McGourty was part of the field sales team that ultimately helped win the battle for the Times.

His career also took him to the Hamilton Advertiser, the Lothian Courier, the Wishaw Press, the Rutherglen Reformer, the East Kilbride News and, finally, the Perthshire Advertiser, where he was general manager for a decade until his retirement in 1992. Former colleagues say his calm and clear-sighted leadership made a huge contribution to the success of the parent company, Scottish & Universal Newspapers.

But McGourty was also a connoisseur of great literature and fine wine; he was a talented dancer, sportsman and a lifelong lover of jazz. Friends and acquaintances knew him as a wise and witty man with a rare intelligence and warmth.

He was an elder in the Church of Scotland for three decades, latterly at Kinnoull Parish Church, Perth. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the family lived in Barrhead, near Glasgow. But Italy became something of a second home after his marriage to Viennaborn Marina Meier-Schomburg, who had relatives spread across Austria and Germany, and was raised in Venice. McGourty was just as likely to be found in a gondola as in any of the pubs of his native Glasgow.

He is survived by his wife, his three children - Allison, Christine and Gordon - and by his grandchildren, Ben and Amy.