A “bright and beautiful” dad who bravely battled cancer will be remembered on a family holiday next month when his wife and children take his flip-flops with them to Menorca.

Anthony Martin was just 38 when he lost his fight against bowel cancer last weekend and died at his Horton Bank Top home with his wife Faye by his side.

Despite being so ill, the father-of-two had insisted on booking the holiday and that his family should go ahead with the sunshine break with other relatives – even without him.

“We’ve had wonderful holidays together and he wanted us to go on this one – we’ll be taking his flip-flops, a little bit of him, with us,” said Mrs Martin, who met him as a teenager at a funfair in Bowling Park.

Family and friends will say their farewells at St Joseph’s Church, Pakington Street, Bradford, on Wednesday, at 11am. The celebration of his life will start with All Things Bright And Beautiful – “Because that’s what he was to us,” said Mrs Martin.

Mr Martin, a former Yorkshire Martyrs pupil, had trained as a lift engineer but worked wherever there was money to be made – for a time he also worked as a sewer baiter.

“He’d work wherever the money was and did it all for us,” said Mrs Martin, who was able to care for her husband at home with the help of Macmillan Nurses.

Bradford City supporter Mr Martin’s “mischievous football moments” as a member of the Bradford Ointment gang earned him a mention in a book about hooliganism in Bradford called Getting A Nasty Shock.

He twice cheated death, once when he had to be airlifted to hospital after sneezing nine times at the wheel and crashing on a motorway, and another time when his appendix burst and he ended up in intensive care and on the high-dependency unit for weeks.

It was later discovered it had been a tumour that had put pressure on his appendix and ruptured it.

He went through two gruelling rounds of chemotherapy and had surgery, but doctors told him in July last year that he was terminally ill.

“It was a massive shock. We thought they’d blasted everything and he was going to be okay, but it wasn’t,” said Mrs Martin, 35.

The day he died he had seen all his friends and has spent time with his children Jacob, 16, and Fearne, seven.

“The children told him how much they loved him and that they would make him proud. It’s hard without him but in a way we’d already started grieving before he went.

“Eventually we had to talk about what was going to happen but he didn’t want to leave us.

“We’re only young, we’d never had to talk about funerals before, but we had to get on with it – he just wanted a big celebration of his life and that’s what we’ll have.”