The Scottish writer, broadcaster and polymath Bob Crampsey was remarkable for the range of his interests and the variety of the subjects that he covered in his books and columns, television and radio programmes.

A much loved Scottish cultural institution, Crampsey was at heart a scholar and an intellectual but he had the knack of endowing his material with an Everyman appeal which took his words and ideas into almost every Scottish household at some stage.

A teacher by profession — and teaching remained his lifelong occupation — he still found time to be a TV football commentator, a radio pundit, an author and a newspaper columnist, as well as a BBC Radio 4 Brain of Britain. That particular feat he achieved in 1965, and while it was much admired by others, Crampsey always played it down.

Amid his myriad pursuits his most high-profile role was as a commentator and opinion-maker on Scotsport, the much watched football highlights programme on STV which, until its demise this year, had been the longest-running sports programme in Britain — it beat the BBC’s Grandstand on to the air by a matter of months in 1957. Along with the presenter Arthur Montford, Crampsey, who possessed a distinctive voice, was one of the show’s mainstays, bringing an insightful and faintly erudite air to the working man’s game of football.

Among his many loves, ranging from Puccini’s operas and American musicals to English county cricket, football was arguably Crampsey’s main passion. He attended the famous 1960 European Cup Final between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden Park — which Real won 7-3 — and said that the match only confirmed in his mind that football was one of the greatest pastimes known to man.

Alongside his genial and inspiring teaching of schoolchildren, Crampsey also wrote two biographies. One, The King’s Grocer, was a history of Sir Thomas Lipton; the other, Mr Stein, was a life of Jock Stein, the great manager of Celtic. He also wrote The Game For The Game’s Sake, a history of his beloved Queen’s Park FC, as well the official history of Scottish league football. All the while he edited a famed sports column called “Now You Know” in Glasgow’s Evening Times, in which Crampsey would reply to inquiries from readers, supplying them with long-lost and often arcane tidbits of sporting knowledge.

Such roles as his “Now You Know” column and his football broadcasting captured perfectly Crampsey’s universal appeal. He was a man of intellectual weight who nonetheless had a deep respect for humanity at every level, acknowledging no distinctions or boundaries.

Born in 1930 in Glasgow, Robert Crampsey had words and ideas in his genes, and was soon taking perceptive stock of the wartime state of Britain, and in particular of the West of Scotland. These were experiences he would later chronicle in The Young Civilian, his personal memoir of the time.

Having flourished at school and then graduated from the University of Glasgow, Crampsey then served in the RAF from 1952 until 1955 before settling into teaching. He became the head of St Ambrose High in Coatbridge on the outskirts of Glasgow. But education, however great his devotion to it, could form only one aspect of his prodigious output. He had a PhD in sports journalism from the University of Stirling.

On TV and radio Crampsey became beloved of generations of Scots, despite an odd interlude in the 1980s when a new wave of brash, loudmouth pundits came on the scene, and he temporarily fell out of favour. In the 1990s, though, when a new crop of college and university-educated football fans came on the scene, Crampsey was hastily called back into the fray, bringing his measured insights and pithy comments to BBC Radio Scotland’s football coverage.

He was found to have Parkinson’s disease some years ago, but even well into his seventies he was still broadcasting and writing. Four years ago his book on the Empire Exhibition of 1938 was published — at the time he was lecturing on the American Civil War as a part of the University of Glasgow’s Life-Long Learning syllabus.

Crampsey is survived by his wife and four daughters.

Bob Crampsey, teacher, writer and broadcaster, was born on July 8, 1930. He died after a long illness on July 27, 2008, aged 78