Edward John Sewell Lamburn, a Classics master at Bury Grammar School[1] and his wife Clara (née Crompton).

Richmal Crompton attended St Elphin's Boarding School for the daughters of the clergy, originally based in Warrington, Lancashire.

In order to further her chosen career as a schoolteacher, she won a scholarship to Royal Holloway College, part of the University of London in Englefield Green, Surrey.

[2] In 1914, she returned to St Elphin's as a Classics mistress and later, at age 27, moved to Bromley High School in southeast London where she began her writing in earnest.

Her William stories and her other literature were extremely successful and, three years after she retired from teaching, Crompton was able to afford to have a house (The Glebe) built in Bromley Common for herself and her mother, Clara.

Crompton left the copyright of all her books to her niece, Mrs Richmal C. L. Ashbee of Chelsfield, Kent; along with £57,623.

Though these novels have the same inventiveness and lack of sentimentality as the 'William' books, after the Second World War such literature had an increasingly limited appeal.

Owing to her restricted movements she took her setting from her immediate surroundings which contained many of the features described, such as unspoilt woods and wide streams and Biggin Hill Aerodrome, very active in the Twenties.Crompton's fiction centres around family and social life, dwelling on the constraints that they place on individuals while also nurturing them.

Richmal Crompton's archives are held at Roehampton University, London and at Wat Tyler Country Park, Pitsea, where some members of her family lived.

A public house in Bromley is named in her honour and contains framed prints and texts from the William series.