George Wilfred Proudfoot (19 December 1921 – 19 July 2013) was a British Conservative Party politician and former Member of Parliament (MP).

It was a British pioneer of the self-service model whereby customers took goods from open shelves and paid for them at a check-out desk rather than being served at a counter.

He was awarded the Military Cross on 27th September 1918 during fighting near Ribécourt during the assault on Cambrai while serving in the York and Lancaster Regiment of the British army during the First World War.

Frank Proudfoot had political ambitions but these were restrained by Broughs who refused to allow him to stand as a Conservative candidate in local council elections.

In his early years, Proudfoot helped his father in the shop by performing tasks such as filling blue bags with sugar.

[2] Proudfoot married Margaret "Peg" Mary Jackson (1922-2019) in 1950 and the couple had three children (two sons Mark and Ian, and a daughter Lyn).

He developed the business using the self-service and high volume/low price model that he had observed at Broughs in the 1930s and on an extended working trip to the USA in the mid-to-late 1950s.

By 2008 some shops in the chain had been sold off strategically leaving the four at Seamer, Eastfield, Manham Hill and Scalby still in Proudfoot ownership.

The company remains under the control of the Proudfoot family, its core supplier is Nisa, the Co-operative Group owned distributor.

[7] At the 1970 general election, he stood in the marginal West Yorkshire constituency of Brighouse and Spenborough, where he ousted the sitting Labour MP Colin Jackson by a majority of only 59 votes.

Proudfoot never held ministerial office although he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Sir Keith Joseph (minister of housing and local government) between 1961 and 1963.

[1] In 1965 a group of local businessmen formed a consortium to promote a new pirate radio station to serve the North East coast from a ship to be anchored off Scarborough.

[10] He established the business as a limited company (Ellambar Investments Ltd) and attracted a large number of investors after addressing a public meeting at a Scarborough hotel.

Proudfoot's immediate influence on programming was to drop a plan to broadcast a mixture of light music and lifestyle material in favour of a simple Top 40 format.

He also gave airtime to political causes, such as support for the white minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa being voiced by Conservative MP Patrick Wall.

Although the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act 1967 brought about an early end to Radio 270, its brief life served to raise Proudfoot's public profile considerably and this may have contributed to his return to Parliament in 1970.

He established the Proudfoot School of Clinical Hypnosis and Psychotherapy based in Scarborough where training courses in various aspects of hypnotism were delivered.