Career
Murray and his family own Andrew Sykes Group, the heating and air-conditioning equipment hire company, and London Security, the Leeds-based fire protection business which includes the Nu-Swift fire extinguisher brand. In April 2015, The Sunday Times estimated his Netto worth at £1.013 billion
Jacques Gaston Murray was born in Paris in 1920, where his father ran a construction company, which built infrastructure such as bridges. Murray was accepted to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Instead, with the start of war, he joined the French Army, and following the Battle of France, escaped on a Polish freighter, and was one of the first Free French to join the Royal Air Force.
Murray flew 38 missions for the Royal Air Force as a navigator. His father died in Auschwitz.
He was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government. In 1982 Murray bought Nu-Swift a Leeds manufacturer of fire-extinguishers then in difficulties, with the businessman Michael Ashcroft.
Murrary later "became irritated" by Ashcroft getting too much of the cr for turning round the company.
