Punch first accepted a submission in 1931, and he left to become a staff writer on the magazine in 1933, the same year he married Barbara Hasseldine.
Punch continued to publish Ellis's work, but from 1954 he found a more lucrative market in The New Yorker, where the Wentworth stories proved very popular.
Ellis was a rugby football blue at university, and subsequently played for the town of Richmond and for Kent.
A. J. Wentworth, B.A., a gauche, diffident and rather ineffectual mathematics teacher, works at Burgrove Preparatory School in the fictional village of Wilminster.
His diaries recount the trials of teaching Pythagoras to unruly schoolboys, as well as Wentworth's experiences as an officer in the Second World War, and later his life in retirement.