My father, Gordon Firth, who has died aged 82, was a headteacher in Cheshire and also a cartoonist who, after retirement from teaching, took part in the making of two successful children’s television programmes in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Gordon’s involvement in TV stemmed from a sideline in the mid-70s, when he had contributed cartoons to the Warrington Guardian’s children’s page. The distinctive style and characters he developed in that newspaper became the basis of puppets he later designed for ITV’s Roger and the Rottentrolls, which starred Martin Clunes, John Thomson and Holliday Grainger.
Using storylines he had devised himself, the show ran for four years from 1996 to 2000, and won a Bafta, after which Gordon featured in a spin-off children’s show in 2002-03, Ripley and Scuff, appearing as the artist Grandad Gordon, who encouraged children to get involved in art. It was an appropriate role, for Gordon had specialised in art as a teacher, having risen to become head of junior schools in Warrington and then Runcorn.
He was born in Doncaster to Ernest and Phyllis (nee Downing), who ran a guesthouse, and from Thorne grammar school in Doncaster went to Leeds teacher training college, where he met his future wife Kathy (nee Wilkinson). Moving to her native Cheshire they both taught at Grange junior school in Runcorn, getting married in 1960 and having two children, me and Simon.
By 1964 Gordon had completed a master’s degree in children’s art at Liverpool University and had been appointed head of Bradshaw Lane primary school in Warrington, a job he held until 1974, when he returned to Grange juniors as headteacher.
The youngest head in Cheshire’s history, “Mister Firth”, as generations of schoolchildren will tell you, was no ordinary teacher. In an age before risk assessments he sweet-talked mayors in his beloved Yorkshire into letting him tip up with a coachload of schoolchildren to sleep in the town hall on PE crash mats. He would then turf everyone out of bed at six in the morning to paint the dawn rising on the River Wharfe.
As far as Gordon was concerned, no time or place was off limits for painting. At the height of the cold war he led what was in retrospect a forward-thinking trip to Moscow and, while watching the Bolshoi Ballet got out a canvas and brushes. It took less than 10 minutes for him to be hauled out backwards by state security. Playing the foreign innocent, he managed to talk his way out of arrest, but not into retrieving his painting; it was presented to the prima ballerina after the show.
He retired as a head in 1987, which was when he began his television work. It was also then that he began to reconnect with his talents as a watercolourist, exhibiting widely in galleries across the north west of England.
He is survived by Kathy, his two sons and three grandchildren.
