Smythe was born Reginald Smyth in Hartlepool on July 10 1917. His father worked in the Teesside shipyards. Reg attended Galleys Field School in Hartlepool, leaving at 14 to become a butcher's boy. In 1936 he joined the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, and served throughout the Second World War as a machine-gunner.

On demobilisation, Smyth became a civil servant, working as a junior clerk at the General Post Office. In his spare time he began first to draw posters for Jack The Barman, the Post Office amateur dramatic group, and then to send pocket cartoons to such specialist journals as the Fishtrader's Gazette and the Drapers Record. Soon he was turning out several dozen drawings a week, using an alarm clock to limit the time he spent on each to half an hour. He also began to use Smythe as his professional name.

Andy Capp was first commissioned by the Daily Mirror in August 1957 as a strip just for its northern readers, but within six months it was in included in every edition. The strip probably went some way in strengthening the southern stereotype of Northerners being nothing more than unemployed layabouts with nothing to do all day but go down the pub and drink beer and smoke fags.

Smythe modelled the layabout, male chauvinist Andy Capp and his long-suffering wife Flo on his own Floparents and based many story lines on life in his native Hartlepool. Smythe's development of the work shy, beer swilling, rent dodging pigeon fancier was condemned by feminists but acclaimed in equal measure as a breath of fresh air by the critics.

Smythe, who turned to comic strips after a stint as a postal worker in London, continued to produce 60 drawings a week and refused to modernise Andy Capp, who he said represented "the bloke in the local".

He died in Hartlepool were he had spent most of life at the age of 81. Andy Capp has been sold to just about every corner of the world. Exactly what foreign readers may think of it, who knows, but one thing is for sure, I'll bet they don't realise that this fictional character is based on a male stereotype which is alive and well, and living in Hartlepool the cultural centre of the NE of England.