ONE of Liverpool’s best-known schoolteachers of the post-war years has died, aged 95.

Ken Cripps, who lived in Hoylake, had an educational career that stretched from the late 1930s to the 1970s as a classroom teacher, headteacher and schools inspector.

He had been a pupil of the Liverpool Institute in the 1920s, and trained as a teacher at St Paul’s College in Cheltenham.

No sooner had he qualified and started his first full-time post, at Broad Square Primary, in Liverpool, than war broke out.

He served as an intelligence officer in the RAF before returning to Broad Square, where his pupils included the writer and broadcaster Gillian Reynolds.

“He was a quite exceptional teacher,” she recalled yesterday.

“He could teach you to absorb facts in a way that allowed you to blossom later, and not to be afraid to ask questions.”

He went on to become head of St Paul’s C of E Primary, in Toxteth, and eventually, in the late 1950s, head of Dovedale Primary, in Mossley Hill.

His time at Dovedale saw the future film director and horror writer Clive Barker pass through the school as a pupil, and also a reunion with Gillian Reynolds, whose son was at the school from the late 1960s.

She said: “As a head, he was just as exceptional as he had been as a class teacher. He always had a huge sense of humour and a knack for picking out something that his pupils could appreciate.”

He was an active member of the National Union of Teachers, helping push through equal pay for women teachers, and eventually went on to become a schools inspector in Liverpool in 1974, before retiring in 1977.

He leaves a widow, three sons and several grandchildren. His funeral will be at Landican cemetery, Birkenhead, at 1.30pm, on Friday, July 2.