NEW YORK — E.R. Braithwaite, the Guyanese author, educator and diplomat whose years teaching in the slums of London inspired the international best-seller “To Sir, With Love” and the Sidney Poitier movie of the same name, has died at age 104.

Braithwaite’s companion, Ginette Ast, said he became ill Monday and died at the Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville, Maryland.

Schooled in Guyana, the U.S. and Britain, Braithwaite wrote several fiction and nonfiction books, focusing on racism and class and the contrast between first world and colonial cultures.

SOME HONORS CAME LATE

He was regarded as an early and overlooked chronicler of Britain from a non-white’s perspective, his admirers including the authors Hanif Kureishi and Caryl Phillips.

He also served in the 1960s as the newly independent Guyana’s first representative at the United Nations and later was ambassador to Venezuela. Upon his 100th birthday, he received an honorary medal from his native country for lifetime achievement.

Guyana President David Granger on Tuesday remembered Braithwaite as “an eminent Guyanese and distinguished diplomat.”

To Sir, With Love,” his first and most famous book, was published in 1959. The autobiographical tale about how a West Indian of patrician manner scolded, encouraged and befriended a rowdy, mostly white class of East End teens, who in turn softened him, was an immediate success and a natural for film. Poitier played Braithwaite (renamed Thackeray) in the 1967 release and the pop star Lulu was featured as one of the students. The title song, performed by Lulu, became a No. 1 hit.

Braithwaite criticized director-screenwriter James Clavell for downplaying the author’s interracial romance with a fellow teacher and said Poitier’s performance was too light-hearted.

“The movie made it look like fun and games,” he observed.

HIS HEROISM WENT UNAPPRECIATED

Edward Ricardo Braithwaite was born in what was then British Guiana in 1912, the son of Oxford graduates who grew up in relatively affluent surroundings and by the late 1930s was attending graduate school at Cambridge University. A pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II, he graduated from Cambridge in 1949 with a degree in physics and confidence that he was well suited for his chosen field.

But, like so many black veterans, he was repeatedly turned down for jobs and housing, a disillusioning experience.

“The majority of Britons at home have very little appreciation of what that intangible yet amazingly real and invaluable export – the British Way of Life – means to colonial people,” he wrote in “To Sir, With Love.”

“Yes, it is wonderful to be British. Until one comes to Britain.”

Braithwaite was finally hired as a teacher at a secondary school in a bombed-out East End neighborhood, “hating it at first, treating it as a temporary exercise in survival until something better came along.”

He taught for nine years, long enough to be addressed as “Sir” by his students. While employed at the London welfare department, he began thinking about his classroom experiences. A London couple which had taken him in as a surrogate son urged him to write a book. For the title, he remembered a package of monogrammed cigarettes his students had given him.

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