Former Sheffield journalism lecturer Frank Littlewood has died in hospital at Hexham, Northumberland, a few days after having a heart attack, one of several, at his Wylam home. He was 90.

Though he retired from the journalism training centre in Sheffield 25 years ago, thousands of journalists now working in all parts of the world still remember Frank with great affection – not only for his insistence that they should master the fundamentals of grammar and syntax but also because of his daily habit of losing his spectacles.

Frank was tempted into full-time journalism training from his subbing job on The Yorkshire Post and helped to establish the National Council for the Training of Journalists centre at Richmond College in Sheffield after it moved from the old polytechnic in the city centre.

For years before then, he had worked voluntarily on weekend training programmes for reporters and sub-editors at places like Grantley Hall in Yorkshire and had often dipped in to his own pocket to fund them.

Why Frank chose to leave mainstream journalism for the world of education is one of life’s major mysteries to the people with whom he worked. Frank would often argue that journalism was all about the “big bad world and the big bad bloody people in it” …and you don’t see many of them sitting behind a college desk.

After moving from Leeds to live in Sheffield with his wife, Bessie, Frank joined the Attercliffe Conservative Party because of his belief that the country was going to the dogs and needed a dose of discipline. He used to boast that they were the only two members.

Dogs featured frequently in Frank’s life. He hated them… and when not writing letters to the editors of all the local newspapers arguing that Leeds was a much better place to live than Sheffield, would pen equally derogatory epistles about local dog-owners. He became famous throughout the district as “Dog hater, Sheffield13″.

People would stop him in the streets of Handsworth and tell him how much they liked his latest rant.

After retirement, Frank moved to the North East where, years after Bessie’s death, he took to writing sonnets in praise of a local woman friend which were subsequently published in two slim volumes and attracted a fair amount of favourable comment.

Frank will be cremated in Newcastle on Thursday. There will be no flowers but donations can be made to the Parkinson Disease Society.

At Frank’s own request, it will not be a religious ceremony. His son, John, and daughter, Jenny, will each deliver a short address.

Those who knew him could have predicted that in death, as in life, Frank would insist that his farewell should be like his intros – short, sharp, simple and without unnecessary comment.