IF I HAD been an undertaker,” Anthony Buckeridge once wrote, “I would write funny stories about funerals.” The words point not only to his inherently cheerful disposition but also to his need to ground his writing in things that he knew about. So, as schoolmaster rather than undertaker, he turned naturally to the foibles of boys for his source material and, in the creation of Linbury Court School and its inhabitants, he shared with several generations of young readers his delight in the ridiculous.

But he took some time to discover his metier. Born in 1912, Anthony Malcolm Buckeridge had rather a fraught childhood, since his father, a bank clerk, was killed on the Western Front in 1917 after just half an hour on active service, and his mother (unusually for the period, a university graduate) determined to take his place as breadwinner.

The young Anthony was thus looked after by various relations until, through the Bank Clerks’ Orphanage charity, he was dispatched to Seaford College, where he gained a pupil’s-eye view of boarding-school life over ten not-unenjoyable years. A couple of forms ahead of him in the school was a “mildly eccentric” boy by the name of Diarmaid Jennings, whose japes were to be of notable significance for his younger contemporary in years to come.

After Seaford, Buckeridge, as seems to have been expected of him, went to work in a bank. But he did not relish being cooped up all day and, having harboured thoughts of becoming a teacher, he took advantage of a £500 legacy and worked for a place at University College London.

Here too though, he could not settle, and he left during his final year, “defeated by Latin”, and in 1936 took up a post at a prep school in Suffolk. For the next 15 years, with a break during the war, when he served in the Auxiliary Fire Service, he continued schoolmastering, and although he was a lifelong socialist who favoured state schooling, he ending up as head of English in the junior school of St Lawrence College, Ramsgate. (He sent his son to Lancing on a music scholarship.)

A constant element in this unexceptional progress had been in the opportunities it afforded Buckeridge to enjoy his love of theatre. As a boy he had been to see the Casson-Thorndike Merchant of Venice, and from that time on playgoing, playwriting and acting were a vital part of his life. (A first full length-play, Industrial Front, had been written for a drama group in the Fire Service, but its production was scuppered by D-Day and the departure of his cast to action elsewhere.)

After the war, at Ramsgate, he managed to fit some repertory acting into his timetable, along with the composition of several plays for the BBC. Among these was the one that drew upon recollections of the exploits of Diarmaid Jennings, and Jennings Learns the Ropes so impressed David Davis, the producer of Children’s Hour, that he commissioned five more scripts to go with it. Thus was Linbury Court established, to be fixed in time through 62 episodes over 16 years. Such was the popularity of the scripts that Buckeridge soon found himself kitting them out to join the ranks of the English school story, with the first book, Jennings Goes to School, appearing in 1950.

Twenty-four volumes were to follow, with the author having to tinker with 1930 details within Linbury’s 1950s time-warp to keep pace with the world’s changing mores (“chaps” become “blokes”; pocket money increases from a pound to a fiver; events both gay and queer require new descriptions). Buckeridge was therefore decidedly miffed when some “flighty girls” at his publishers decided in 2000 that his hero “doesn’t quite translate for today’s children” — a rather inept verb since the series is to be found in at least 12 languages, including Indonesian, with the Norwegians having a particular affection for “Stompa”.

Such widespread popularity bears witness to a truth found in other instances: that the circumstances of an unfamiliar setting are incidental to the comedy of the plot. Buckeridge saw his success in the Jennings books — and to a lesser extent in those about Rex Milligan, pupil at a day school — as stemming from the way he allowed “the normal routine of school” to develop one stage further than it might do in real life. (In the first play, Jennings and Darbishire, as new boys, try to finance an escape home with sixpence each.) But thespian experience also played a part, the ravelling-up of misunderstandings and the mistimed efforts to solve them owing much to the techniques of stage farce.

As may be guessed from his books, Anthony Buckeridge was a man of modest but winning temperament — some seeing Linbury Court’s Mr Carter, with his “shrewd knowledge of the youthful mind”, as something of a self-portrait. He took his craft seriously despite its small compass, and he was a keen member of the Society of Authors, helping to found its Children’s Writers Group in the 1960s.

He also persevered with his acting and was fortunate enough to be contracted to play small non-speaking, non-singing parts at Glyndebourne.

A staunch and unswerving socialist, Buckeridge had demonstrated against Franco in his youth, and later joined CND and supported the Sandinistas by donating a signed Jennings first edition. He saw no paradox in his support of state schooling. “I think children should be educated at day-schools,” he said, “except in special circumstances. If you’ve got a musical child, for example, at boarding school you’ve got all your music under one roof.” His own son went to Lancing on a music scholarship.

Despite the judgment of the flighty girls, his final years found him much fêted. Some of the early books, in fine collectors’ condition, change hands for as much as £500. The original scripts for his Jennings plays have been published, along with an autobiographical memoir, While I Remember (1999), and in a radio interview in 2001 he gave his blessing to Harry Potter — though he felt that appointing a children’s author OBE was “way over the top”. He was himself appointed OBE last year.

His marriage to his first wife, Sylvia, was dissolved. He is survived by their son and daughter, and by his second wife, Eileen, and their son Corin who has composed accompaniments to some of his father’s plays.

Anthony Buckeridge, OBE, schoolmaster, author and playwright, was born in London on June 20, 1912. He died on June 28, 2004, aged 92.