Albert Gubay: Founder of Kwik Save and Total Fitness who became one of Britain's most generous philanthropists

Albert Gubay was the multimillionaire founder of the Kwik Save supermarket chain and the Total Fitness gym network, who later became one of the leading philanthropists in this country, through his Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation.

Gubay was born in Rhyl, north Wales in 1928, the son of an Iraqi Jewish father and an Irish Roman Catholic mother. Brought up in a caravan for the early part of his life, Gubay recalled, “I had a very hard father. I had two sisters. He was soft on them and hard on me.” For Gubay junior, this meant having to help with his father's market stall. “I was always made to work at a very early age,” he recalled. “I finished school at 4pm and by 5pm I was working. It was seven days a week.”

As a young man struggling to support himself and his family by selling non-sugar sweets during rationing after the war, he recalled that he made a pact with God, saying in a prayer: “Make me a millionaire and I'll give you half of my money”.

After working as a carpenter and a brief spell in the Navy, Gubay started his business, Value Foods, as a single shop in Prestatyn in 1959. During the mid-1960s he visited the US and the discount stores of Aldi in Germany, seeking inspiration for his supermarket chain, by now called Kwik Save. The trips reinforced his belief that his business model – buying cheaply in quantity, keeping the number of product lines low and selling directly from their cardboard delivery boxes – was the right one. That same model endures with low-cost retailers to this day.

By 1970 the business was ripe for stock-market floatation and Kwik Save shares went on sale. While the new-found liquidity for Kwik Save was welcome, Gubay found that the external control of his company and the limits that this placed on his freedom did not suit him. Three years later he sold his shares, making £14m, quit the company and moved to New Zealand. The company saw continued success without Gubay at the helm, reaching a peak turnover of £974m by 1988 and selling to the Somerfield chain a decade later.

Gubay was not ready to stop there. He went on to establish discount stores in New Zealand and the US, as well as Ireland, where his stores were sold to become the core of a new Tesco Ireland chain.

Two decades after the Kwik Save sale, and while recovering from a back injury, Gubay sought a new challenge. Anticipating a nascent demand for personal fitness memberships, he founded the Total Fitness gym chain. The company was sold to the private equity arm of Legal & General in 2004 for £80m. By 2006 Forbes magazine estimated Gubay's net worth at £500m – and three years later he was ranked 107th on the Sunday Times Rich List.

Gubay was already redistributing his wealth, having paid for the building of a church on the Isle of Man and for an extension to a church in Leixlip, County Kildare, in memory of his mother. In 2010 he created the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation, based on the Isle of Man, by donating £470m of his personal fortune. The foundation, which receives around £20m annually from Gubay's businesses, reinvests half that income into the Roman Catholic Church to fulfil Gubay's pact with God.

In February the following year he was presented with a Papal knighthood by the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, in recognition of his charity work, becoming a Knight Commander with Star of the Order of St Gregory the Great.

The Archbishop told Gubay and the gathered congregation during the bestowal ceremony, “Albert, your generosity – thoughtful, intelligent, measured yet seemingly boundless – is a great sign of the generosity of God. This is so because you make it clear that you expect no public acclaim, no list of honours, no fanfare of trumpets. You are generous because God is first generous to you. And that is your great lesson to us all today.”

Gubay had lived on the Isle of Man, at Santon, since 1971. In addition to his numerous business interests on the mainland, he owned the Mount Murray Hotel and Country Club on the island. “Mount Murray gives me as much to do as the whole of England does,” he said in a 2014 interview. “What I get out of it, compared to the UK, I shouldn't really be doing it. But I've tried to create something for the island and I think that I've done that...”

Could he envisage himself retiring at some point? “No,” he said, “because I believe people who have worked hard who stop, with nothing to get up for, don't get up.”

Asked elsewhere about the greatest achievement in his life, Gubay said, “That I have been able to keep the promise I made to God, I think that keeps me going. No matter how much the money had been, I would have always fulfilled my promise, as that's the way I am.”

Albert Gubay, entrepreneur and philanthropist: born Rhyl, North Wales 9 April 1928; married twice (two children); died Wilmslow, Cheshire 5 January 2016.