Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton was born in 1921 at Eton College, where his father, the second son of Viscount Cobham, was a House Master. Initially playing the harmonica, Lyttelton formed a school jazz group, which included the future journalist Ludovic Kennedy on drums. Attending the 1936 Eton vs Harrow cricket match at Lords, Lyttelton and his mother slipped away, and she bought him his first trumpet. After leaving school, he worked for a while at the Port Talbot Steel Works where he became, in his own words, ‘a romantic socialist’. Called up for war service he was commissioned from Sandhurst in November 1941 into the Grenadier Guards. Seeing action in Italy he waded ashore during the Salerno landings carrying a pistol in one hand and a trumpet in the other.

Using his demob grant, he studied at Camberwell School of Art before securing a job as a cartoonist with the Daily Mail. While at art school, he joined the George Webb Dixielanders an important part of the post war British Jazz boom. Wearing his old army battledress, now dyed blue, and accompanied by a beard and sandals, his aristocratic family must have despaired of their wayward son. Managing parallel careers as both a cartoonist and a musician, Lyttelton favoured collaboration with New Orleans musicians in conflict with the Musicians Union which forbade working with US artists. In 1956 he had a hit with Bad Penny Blues which was the first British Jazz record to reach the top twenty in the charts. In 2000 he appeared alongside Radiohead in front of a crowd of 50,000, after collaborating with the band on their track 'Living in a Glass House'. From the 1950s to the early 2000s The Humphrey Lyttelton Band toured the UK, and such was his influence that Louis Armstrong referred to him as ‘that cat in England who swings his ass off.’

Lyttelton also managed a third career as a radio presenter, hosting The Best of Jazz on Radio 2 from 1967 until 2007 and I’m Sorry, I Haven’t Got a Clue on Radio 4 from 1972 to 2007. The show was a deliberate attempt by the BBC to move away from the staid middle-class game show format and Lyttelton’s deadpan delivery of ever-more-outrageous double entendres was a regular feature. Outside work he was a talented calligrapher and president of The Society for Italic Handwriting. His eccentricity extended to his obsession with privacy and he designed his house with blank walls on the outside and all the windows looking over an internal courtyard. When he was asked to collaborate on his obituary being compiled by the writer Steve Voce he commented wistfully, ‘I wish I could be there to read it when it’s published.’ A lifelong socialist, Humphrey Lyttelton turned down the offer of an OBE in 1974 and a knighthood in 1996.