Long before Harry Potter, Jill Murphy's Worst Witch cast a magic spell over young readers

“I was a misfit” said Jill Murphy two years ago in an interview with this paper. “My shoelaces flapping behind me, my hat on back to front. My aunt once told me I was a difficult child to like. That hurt.” Still, Murphy, who has died from cancer aged 72, had the last laugh: she turned that childhood experience of feeling as though she never quite fitted in into one of the best loved characters in children's fiction, Mildred Hubble, the hapless Worst Witch at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches. Try as she might, Mildred can't help but mix up laughing potions with invisibility spells, turn fellow pupils into pigs, run up against the school bully, Ethel Hallow, with frequently disastrous results and appear unable at all times to control her broomstick.

Mildred burst onto the scene at a point when boarding school stories, with their tales of jolly hockey matches and midnight feasts, had become unfashionable, as the militancy of the Seventies desired a gritter sort of narrative for children. If the Enid Blyton boarding school stories taught young girls how to become young women, Murphy's loveable, calamity-prone creation taught them there was no right or wrong way in which to be a girl in the first place.

Murphy's antic tales – there were eight in total, each delightfully illustrated by Murphy herself – featured a school for magic long before JK Rowling came up with a similar idea: the first of her books, The Worst Witch, was published in 1974. That Rowling never acknowledged Murphy as a possible inspiration for her mega selling global franchise must have grated; indeed Murphy once told the Telegraph that “it would be nice if people said thank you”. But she mostly maintained a dignified silence – although the acclaimed stage production of the first Mildred Hubble book The Worst Witch which transferred to the West End in 2019 couldn't resist a sneaky reference. “We wouldn't have an Evil House here” said Miss Cackle as she welcomes new pupils at the start of term. “That would be silly.”

Yet Murphy scarcely needed Rowling's gratitude. Thanks to an Eighties TV film starring Diana Rigg and Fairuza Balk, the Nineties ITV series starring Felicity Jones and the more recent CBBC Netflix collaboration starring Game of Thrones' Bella Ramsey, successive generations of children have grown up on the effortlessly entertaining stories of Mildred Hubble, whose school experiences Murphy based closely on her own. She resisted calls from her publisher to make Miss Cackle's Academy co-ed, modelling it instead on the Ursuline High School, her Catholic grammar school in Wimbledon “where the nuns would appear in the corridors a bit like witches” and whose strict, conformist regime offered scant space for a precocious individualist like herself. Her books, with their all female environment and quiet admiration for breaking the rules were subtly feminist long before girl power became 'a thing'; Murphy even once said “being taught by nuns is a form of feminism without realising it”. She never preached to her readers, never rammed positive messages down their throats, and never once condescended to them. No wonder the Worst Witch series has sold more than five million copies to date.

There were other books, of course Including the hugely successful Peace at Last). Murphy turned to writing for children full time after the second Mildred Hubble book followed its predecessor onto the best seller lists, joining the long list of smash hit books that took an age to find a publisher: Murphy received many rejection letters before Allison and Busby accepted The Worst Witch in 1970, with many publishers declaring that children would find a school for witches too scary. How wrong they were. Just as the young Murphy was probably a bit frightened of her aunt, not to mention those nuns, her young readers find a perverse form of comfort in the fear young Mildred feels towards her icy-tongued form teacher Miss Hardbroom. And in the scruffy, clumsy, misunderstood Mildred a girl just like themselves.