Clive Murphy, who has died aged 85, was a colourful writer and historian best known for his Ordinary Lives series of books, for which he interviewed modest but eloquent individuals who had lived through the upheavals of the first three-quarters of the 20th century and edited their taped reminiscences into compelling memoirs.

Murphy, who also published several novels and volumes of what he called “ribald rhymes”, lived for more than 40 years in bachelor chaos above the Aladin curry house in Brick Lane, east London, in a tiny choc-a-bloc flat. It was shortly after he arrived in London from Ireland in the late 1950s, renting a bedsit in Pimlico, that Murphy got the idea for his series on “ordinary lives”.

“There was a retired lavatory attendant and his wife who lived down below, and they invited me down for supper,” he told the anonymous “Gentle Author” of the online magazine Spitalfields Life. “He had such a natural gift for language and a quaint way of expressing himself, so I said, ‘Let’s do a book!’ and that was Four Acres and a Donkey.”

Other “ordinary” people whose lives he recorded included a gamekeeper, a pigman, an East End Salvation Army hostel dweller, a river-keeper, a struggling poet, a failed tenor turned Jewish mantle-presser, and Marjorie Graham, who had been a flapper, actress and chorus girl of the Roaring Twenties before falling on hard times and becoming a lavatory attendant at the Metropole Cinema in Victoria.

The series of memoirs was praised by Ronald Blythe as “a marriage of art and artlessness”, but when Murphy first tried to interest publishers in his “brace” of lavatory attendants to “make a fortune for all concerned”, he received a pile of rejection slips.

Eventually Marjorie Graham and her male counterpart were taken on, along with other “lives”, by publisher Dennis Dobson and these acquired a select but enthusiastic following.

Marjorie’s memoir Love, Dears! (1980), republished in 2013 by Pan Macmillan as Up in Lights, was described by John Betjeman as “deeply moving and authentic and compulsive reading.” Spitalfields Life observed that Murphy chose his subjects “because he saw the poetry in them when no one else did”.

He abandoned the project as his subjects began to rise up the income scale, finding that members of the middle classes “had an image of themselves they wanted to project” and insisted on being able to “correct” what they had said before Murphy translated their words into published “memoir”.

Clive Murphy was born in Liverpool to Irish parents on November 28, 1935. The family returned to Ireland when he was a small child.

He qualified as a solicitor but in 1958 left Dublin for London bedsit-land and got a job as a liftman at a Lyons Corner House for £8 a week. Later he taught children while trying to make his name as a writer.

He had his first literary success with Summer Overtures, a novel featuring four young Irishmen making their way in London, which was joint winner in 1972 of the First Novel Award of ADAM International Review.

It was followed by two novellas, Freedom for Mr Mildew and Nigel Someone, published as one volume in 1975. As with Summer Overtures they drew on Murphy’s own experiences , and after that he concentrated on his oral history project.

His 10 collections of “ribald rhymes” were described as “not for the faint-hearted” although they would be ideal presents for an in-law. The last, To Hell with Thomas Bowdler, Mrs Grundy and Mary Whitehouse!, was published in 2015.

Though bedridden in his final years, Murphy retained his sense of humour. Mishearing an interviewer who asked him whether he minded being recorded with a Dictaphone, he replied: “I thought you said with your d---, and I thought, here is an eccentric young man.”

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]