House of Trumpton author and creator Alison Prince up for sale on Arran - complete with typewriter

And now the island home of the woman who wrote down the iconic list of names has gone up for sale, and her family are hoping it will be taken over by another writer seeking inspiration or even that it might inspire another writer.

Alison Prince was the brains behind the beloved children's programmes Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley, which began life in the 1960s on BBC TV and aired repeatedly until the early 1980s.

The author, who died last month at the age of 88, also produced more than 50 children's books and worked on other TV series, including Watch with Mother and Jackanory, which will also be fondly remembered by both parents and now grown-up children.

But it is little known that for many years she penned her vast body of work from a small office in her house on Arran, an island she fell in love with as a child and where her family said she had a "second blossoming".

As an extra incentive, the typewriter on which she wrote her children's shows is included in the sale.

Ms Prince threw herself into island life and became a member of the local jazz band, wrote for the Arran newspaper, worked with the community council to establish better recycling and formed a poetry group among and other activities – using her home as the base.

Her daughter, Samantha David, said: "My mother was brought to Scotland on holiday as a child by her grandmother and she absolutely fell in love with Arran. She always remembered it, and it was her life-long dream to go and live there.

"Her house perfectly reflected her personality. She would write beside this huge window which looked out over the Firth of Clyde, and she really drew inspiration from that. Arran was heaven-on-Earth for her and she absolutely loved living there. It was a dream come true and she never wanted to leave.

"She played a huge part of in the community and moving there was definitely a second blossoming for my mother. She drew a lot of comfort from the island and her time there was among the happiest in her life."

Born in England and a trained artist, Alison Prince turned to writing in the 1960s after her children were born and she had to give up her teaching career.

Her first creation was the character Joe, a little boy who lives in a motel, whose stories were covered on Watch With Mother and who later appeared in his own books and comics for little children, Joe Moves House and Joe and a Horse.

The success of these led to her being offered the chance to write scripts for Trumpton, which she did while caring for her three children as a single mother after the collapse of her marriage.

Paid £15 a script, Ms Prince had to familiarise herself with the intricacies of the series signature stop-motion animation. In a later interview, she said: "I didn’t have a TV, but I had three kids to feed, so I said yes.”

Trumpton, which was preceded in the series by Camberwick Green and followed by Chigley, told quirky tales from fictional English villages stocked by memorable characters such as the carpenter "Chippy" Minton, the farmer "Windy" Miller and Toni Antonio, the ice-cream seller.

Narrated by the Play School presenter Brian Cant, each series ran for around a dozen episodes and had several cross-overs with characters from one show turning up in the other.

All started with the same sequence of the town clock, complete with two golden statuettes, ringing out the out the time while the narrator said: "Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock. Telling the time, steadily, sensibly; never too quickly, never too slowly. Telling the time for Trumpton."

Alison was given free rein to name the characters, but was posed a challenge when it came to the fire crew, who were all nearly identical. Her deliberations would lead to her coming up the with famous sing-song roll-call.

She later said: "I looked at the sequence over and over again and thought: ‘Well, there’s one who looks a bit lanky. I’ll call him Dibble. 'Grub' was the silly one who came tumbling in late, having obviously been interrupted halfway through a ham sandwich. Two were absolutely identical, so I felt they must be twins: Pugh and Pugh. Another one, who had a certain largeness of gesture, I imagined to be Irish. He became Barney McGrew.”

The fire crew featured in each of Trumpton's episodes, but never went to an actual blaze, although they would often deploy their fire hose, much to fire chief Captain Flack's annoyance.

The author revealed there were practical reasons behind this, saying: "It dawned on me how quaint the remit was. You can’t depict flames using stop-motion, nor can you do smoke and water. So I realised I would have to write 13 stories about a fire brigade that never went anywhere near a fire.”

The series was a huge success, and would be repeated many times by the BBC before being ushered off the airwaves as more modern cartoons replaced its quaint tales of mayors, bakers, village shops and window cleaners.

Alison Prince would go on to become a successful children's author, achieving critical success for The Sherwood Hero, a contemporary remake of the Robin Hood legend set in 1990s Glasgow, for which she was a joint winner, with Philip Pullman, of the 1996 Guardian children’s fiction prize. Later, her thriller Oranges and Murder was the Scottish Arts Council’s children’s book of the year in 2002.

Her books continued to be successful in the UK and were also translated into other languages, including Danish, German, Japanese and Welsh. Her notable contribution to children’s books from the 1970s onwards was recognised in 2005 when she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Leicester for services to children’s literature, her obituary in The Guardian reports.

But Trumpton remained one of the main things she was remembered for, and she kept the original scripts until her death.

Her daughter said: "Because Trumpton was on TV it received a very high profile and she received a lot of attention for it. She remained fond of it, but sometimes she would sigh a little and say 'I have done so many things, when you have been as prolific as I have there is always going to be one thing which sticks out and that's what you get remembered for'.

"But it was part of a huge canon of work in children's literature which she produced and she was proud of it all. She did keep all the scripts she wrote for Trumpton, and she loved all her writing."

The second half of her career was spent on Arran, living in her dream home Burnfoot House, in Whiting Bay, where she was a pillar of village life.

Samantha David remembers the two-storey semi-detached cottage as being full of life and creativity, with her mother encouraging others to express their artistic side through writing, music, poetry and painting.

She also indulged her green-fingered side, managing the impressive achievement of growing grapes in Scotland in her large garden greenhouse.

The house was also a magnet for the local creative community, who regarded Alison Prince as their patron and mentor.

Samantha David said: "There was always something going on – you would have my mother and her writing partner Joan Hickson in a corner people doing crafts at the table, grandchildren running around. There was always something going on.

"Many people she worked with went on to create other children's programmes and she was great at encouraging them.

"The house was made for families and gatherings. There would be poetry readings, and the jazz band would practice there. She made it a wonderful place, and she would always be doing something because that's the sort of woman she was."

Take our quiz to check how much you remember the classic cartoon: 

Answers to the quiz below.

1 Cuthbert

2 Camberwick Green

3 A red and blue music box

4 Mrs Cobbit

5 Hatmaker

6 Commander Snort