BILL Naughton was born William John Francis Naughton in the Irish town of Ballyhaunis in 1910.

His family moved to Bolton when young Bill was aged just four, and he attended St Peter and Paul’s School before going on to work as a weaver, coal-bagger and lorry-driver.

A keen writer, he submitted a number of short stories to magazines, and gradually his reputation started to grow. Naughton left Bolton in 1939 at the start of the Second World War to be a civil defence driver in London, but his ambition to become a writer continued.

The BBC soon picked up on Naughton’s talent, and he became well known as a writer of plays and short stories which were broadcast both on television and radio. Although he was now based in London, the impoverished Northern background of his youth was a strong theme through his work.

One of his earliest plays, June Evening, was the sort of “kitchen sink” drama which is commonplace today, and Naughton maintained that ITV had stolen his idea for a Northern drama set on a street and centreing around the local corner shop. They called it Coronation Street.

By the early 1960s Naughton was hailed as one of the best new playwrights around. The trio of All In Good Time, Alfie and Spring and Port Wine went first to the West End and were then turned into films. All In Good Time became The Family Way, starring John and Hayley Mills, James Mason took on the lead role in Spring and Port Wine and, of course, Michael Caine was the loveable titular Cockney in Alfie.

Although best known for his plays and screenwriting, Naughton was an incredibly prolific author, producing a stream of radio plays, adaptations, children’s books and autobiographies, writing secret diaries and producing The Dream Mind, an investigation into the meaning of dreams which indulged one of his personal obsessions.

Now thought to be as important as writers such as Beckett, Pinter and Osborne, Naughton died in 1992, but his widow Erna has worked tirelessly to publish work prepared before his death.