A COUPLE who managed pubs in Gwent for more than 25 years have died within a day of each other.

Paul and Kathleen Hayward, (pictured) former publicans of The Rising Sun, in Malpas Road, and the Cambrian Arms, Com-mercial Street, Newport, both died of cancer last week. The couple will be buried in the same grave tomorrow.

Mr Hayward, who was 77, died on the Monday and his widow died the following day. Mrs Hayward, 74, was being treated at a nursing home for renal cancer and a chest infection when her husband went to see doctors on January 7, complaining of back ache. Doctors suspected he had a secondary form of liver cancer and Mr Hayward died within a week.

His wife, Pill-born Kathleen, died the next day without ever knowing about her husband's death.

The couple's son, Michael Hayward, 54, who was born in Newport, was on holiday in the USA when he heard about his father's death.

By the time he returned home on the first available flight his mother had also died. He said: "We had no idea dad was so ill - it is really a terrible blow for the family. "My mother was too ill to be told about my father and so we made the decision not to upset her.

"Their family were everything to them." Paul Hayward arrived in Newport at the end of the Second World War in 1946. He met his future wife, Kathleen, who was working at a munitions factory in Rogerstone, at a dance, and the pair married a year later, in 1947.

Michael added: "I was told they used to go courting at the top of the Transporter Bridge." After working at the Rising Sun, Cambrian Arms, The Bridge Bar, near Kingsway Shopping Centre, Newport, the White Hart, Caldicot, and the Red Lion, Caerleon, the couple retired in 1989 and moved to Derbyshire to be closer to their daughter, Pauline. Tragedy struck three years after when another daughter, Lesley Kinnear, died of cancer. Mr and Mrs Hayward will be buried in Derby.

Michael Hayward said their deaths had left their seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren devastated: "We were all very close and I used to telephone them every day.

"No matter how far apart we lived, if we ever needed a babysitter they'd always want to be first in the queue."