Like the late George Melly, Humphrey Lyttelton was a committed jazzman whose convivial personality and dry sense of humour won over listeners who might not have been able to begin to tell the difference between Dixieland or bebop.

Once regarded as an upper-class interloper, he established himself as one of the country’s most admired players-cum-critics. In a realm bedevilled by petty doctrinal disputes, he was a model of open-mindedness.

Millions who never heard his band play came to admire him as the deadpan chairman of the long-running radio show, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. Lyttelton’s droll stage persona allowed him to negotiate the most outrageous doubles entendres — many of them directed at the voluptuous but imaginary hostess, Samantha — while he also demonstrated his mastery of the show’s impossibly arcane parlour game, Mornington Crescent.

Lyttelton also won acclaim as a cartoonist and journalist. Philip Larkin, the poet and jazz lover, offered perhaps the most astute appraisal in a review of the “autobiographical scrapbook”, Take it from the Top: “One musn’t be misled by the amiable, bumbling persona . . . He is a toughly intelligent man moving confidently in any kind of surroundings from Windsor Castle to Birdland.”

Born in Eton College in 1921, Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton was the second son of the Hon George Lyttelton, a popular master later described by one newspaper as “a great oak tree of a man who had delightfully little in common with most people’s idea of a schoolmaster”. His son considered following in his footsteps, but doubts about his academic qualifications — not to mention his passion for music — put paid to the notion.

Lyttelton acquired his first trumpet in 1936 while visiting London to watch the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match at Lord’s. After leaving the ground with his mother he went to a shop in the Charing Cross Road, bought an instrument for around five pounds, and set about modelling his playing on Louis Armstrong. The drummer in his first band at Eton was Ludovic Kennedy, who was to be guest of honour at Lyttelton’s 80th birthday concert in Edinburgh in 2001.

Lyttelton’s trumpet was a constant companion during his war service in the Grenadier Guards, even during the landing at Salerno — going ashore at the beachhead as a battalion signals officer, he carried a pistol in one hand and the horn in another. On VE-Day he serenaded West End crowds from a hand cart as they pushed him towards Buckingham Palace.

In the early 1940s Lyttelton had spent 18 months working in the steel works at Port Talbot, a stint arranged by an uncle who was president of the Iron and Steel Federation. The experience left the young man with the convictions of a “romantic socialist”. After leaving the Army, he spent two years at Camberwell Art College. A music career beckoned, however. By 1947 he had gravitated towards the New Orleans-style revivalists, the Dixielanders, led by the pianist George Webb.

Snapshots taken at the band’s regular sessions at the Red Barn public house in Barneshurst, Kent, show Lytellton in dyed battledress, negotiating solos with eyes closed, as always. Another member of the Dixielanders — the clarinettist and cartoonist Wally Fawkes — was to become a particularly close friend. Lyttelton, who began drawing for the Daily Mail in 1949, was eventually to provide story lines and dialogue for Fawkes’s immensely popular satirical strip, Flook.

Within a year of joining Webb, Lyttelton formed his own group, firmly based on traditional New Orleans principles. Appearances with the US master Sidney Bechet helped confirm his reputation as the leader of the British revival, and his sets at what is now the 100 Club in Oxford Street turned the venue into one of the most fashionable nightspots in the capital. “Hooray Henries” and Lyttelton’s Eton contemporaries were not always welcome visitors, however.

From 1949 Lyttelton’s group began recording for the Parlophone label, and were eventually taken under the wing of George Martin, the inventive producer who was later to be dubbed “the fifth Beatle”.

Another renowned studio Svengali, Joe Meek, was to have a hand in one of Lyttelton’s most acclaimed recordings, Bad Penny Blues (1956), the first British jazz record to reach the Top 20. The bustling piano riffs were said to have inspired the piano part on the Beatles’ hit Lady Madonna.