POSSIBLY the West's longest serving paperboy Tony Coles of Marlborough, is hanging up his delivery bag after more than half a century of early morning starts.

Most paperboys and girls get up before they go to school and do their rounds for a year or two to earn some pocket money.

While their classmates are snoozing away, they are up by 7am in all weathers and on dark winter mornings to make sure the news gets through.

Mr Coles, who lives in Priorsfield, has been delivering papers since he was six or seven and now at the age of 62 he has decided it's time for a lie-in.

He has been getting up at 4am virtually since he was 13 when he started doing a daily delivery at his family's news and sweet shop called Tanners in the High Street.

The family sold the business many years ago and until recently it traded as the Newshop but it closed two weeks ago.

Mr Coles lived with his grandmother as a boy and she delivered the Gazette and other papers around her home in West Overton.

As a six or seven-year-old Mr Coles used to accompany his grandmother and help her with the deliveries, not dreaming that his pocket money job would one day become his career.

After leaving school it was his destiny to join the family's newsagents business and as a teenager Mr Coles used to cycle around Marlborough delivering every morning.

His uncle had built up a daily and Sunday papers round in the Kennet Valley villages to the west of Marlborough including Lockeridge, West Overton, the Kennetts, Avebury and Berwick Bassett. Mr Coles took over this round and it became a full time business for him.

But for the last 45 years or more it has meant getting out of bed every day at 4am to sort the papers and then start the daily round, seven days a week.

He said: "Work for me has meant getting up at 4am seven days a week."

Asked how he managed to take holidays, Mr Coles said: "Holidays, what are they?

"We only get the odd two or three days usually and we have only had a week away now and again."

His wife Wendy, who manages a stationer's business in the town, has had to put up with his early mornings for all their married life.

To start with, said Mrs Coles, her husband used to wake her with a cup of tea at four every morning.

In recent years, however, he has crept downstairs leaving her to wake at a more civilised hour.

Mr Coles said that, having reached the age of 62, the rigour of getting up before dawn every day had become too much and he had decided to sell the business.

It has been taken over by Swindon-based AGR News, which will carry on delivering the papers to Mr Coles' old customers.

The couple have two grown up children: Richard, who in the past helped out and allowed his dad to have occasional days off, and Cate.