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Humphry Francis Ellis was born in 1907 in Lincolnshire, and educated at Tonbridge and Magdalen College, Oxford. Following a year as assistant master at Marlborough school he began to write for Punch magazine. In 1949 Ellis became Punch's Literary and Deputy Editor, a post which he held until 1953. It was during this period that he developed the character of A. J. Wentworth, inspired by his experience as a schoolmaster. Punch continued to publish Ellis's work, though from 1954 he found a more lucrative market in The New Yorker, where the Wentworth stories proved very popular.
Praise for the Wentworth Papers: ‘A splendid comic hero … cannot fail to engage the sympathy of everyone who has ever sat in a classroom either as master or pupil … Few books have made me laugh out loud quite so often’ Evening Standard ‘I was often helpless with laughter. Not a book to be read in public’ The Oldie ‘A truly comic invention’ The Guardian ‘Masterly caricature’ Times Literary Supplement ‘Wentworth turns out to be the hero of a work certain to be pigeon-holed as a minor classic by which people usually mean a classic more readable than the major kind … a man Mr Pooter would regard with awe but nevertheless recognise as a brother’ Spectator ‘A book of such hilarious nature that I had to give up reading it in public’ New Statesman ‘One of the funniest books ever’ Sunday Express
