Tributes have been paid to a popular Whitehaven playwright who has died at the age of 72.

Alan Butler was best known for forming the Miners Lamp Theatre Company with his wife Eleanor, in which they performed a host of plays and sketches.

He died at home on February 10 following a battle against cancer.

Mrs Butler says her late husband was “someone who was open and friendly and was very proud of his Cumbrian roots”.

She spoke fondly of their time in the theatre company as Mr Butler wrote numerous coal mining plays and Cumbrian versions of well-known literary works.

“The Cumbrian dialect is dying out – we wanted to preserve it. We were a team,” she said. “He was always writing in his school days. He was good and he was imaginative. He got into the Cumbrian dialect after looking into Shakespeare’s Macbeth which refers to the Prince of Cumberland.”

Mr Butler had performed for many decades. As a youngster he took part in musicals, plays and pantomimes at school and college.

After he left school he trained in teaching both in this country and abroad. This included spending two years in Kenya as a volunteer teacher.

He was a supply teacher and also worked at Wyndham School, in Egremont, as a modern studies teacher.

Mr Butler married Eleanor in 1974 and the couple later moved to London. They returned to Whitehaven in 1999 and launched the theatre company two years later.

In addition to writing plays, Mr Butler was interested in current affairs and sport, especially Whitehaven Rugby League. The couple used to spend a lot of time together and enjoyed going for walks around Whitehaven.

“Alan used to spend a lot of time reading Norwegian papers online and looked for the connections between Cumbria and the Scandinavian languages,” said Mrs Butler.

The Whitehaven man was one of three children. His late brother Tony died in 2009 and he was close to his younger sister Mary.

Family and friends attended Mr Butler’s funeral at Distington crematorium followed by a gathering at the Chase Hotel.

Mrs Butler said one of her husband’s friends from Kenya travelled from Anglesey to pay his respects, in which he played a Celtic lament on a penny whistle.