Ben Travers (12 November 188618 December 1980) was an English writer. His output includes more than 20 plays, 30 screenplays, 5 novels, and 3 volumes of memoirs. He is most notable for his long-running series of farces first staged in the 1920s and 1930s at the Aldwych Theatre. Many of these were made into films and later television productions.
After working for some years in his family's wholesale grocery business, which he detested, Travers was given a job by the publisher John Lane in 1911. After service as a pilot in the First World War, he began to write novels and plays. He turned his 1921 novel, The Dippers, into a play that was first produced in the West End in 1922. His big break came in 1925, when the actor-manager Tom Walls bought the performing rights to his play A Cuckoo in the Nest, which ran for more than a year at the Aldwych. He followed this success with eight more farces for Walls and his team; the last in the series closed in 1933. Most of the farces were adapted for film in the 1930s and 1940s, with Travers writing the screenplays for eight of them.
After the Aldwych series came to a close, in 1935 Travers wrote a serious play with a religious theme. It was unsuccessful, and he returned to comedy. Of his later farces only one, Banana Ridge (1938), rivalled the runs of his 1920s hits; it was filmed in 1942. During the Second World War Travers served in the Royal Air Force, working in intelligence, and later served at the Ministry of Information, while producing two well-received plays.
Due to the war and the death of his wife, Travers had a fallow period, although he collaborated on a few revivals and adaptations of his earlier work. He returned to playwriting in 1968. He was inspired to write a new comedy in the early 1970s after the abolition of theatre censorship in Britain permitted him to write without evasion about sexual activities, one of his favourite topics. The resulting play, The Bed Before Yesterday (1975), presented when he was 89, was the longest-running of all his stage works, easily outplaying any of his Aldwych farces.
Life and career
Early years Ben Travers was born in the London borough of Hendon, the elder son and the second of the three children of Walter Francis Travers, a merchant, and his wife, Margaret Burges.Hyde, H Montgomery, rev Clare L Taylor. "Travers, Benjamin (1886–1980)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, October 2006, accessed 4 March 2013 He was educated at the Abbey School, Beckenham, and at Charterhouse. He did not greatly enjoy his schooldays and later declared that he had been "a complete failure at school". The only thing he enjoyed there was cricket, for which he had a lifelong enthusiasm, later writing a memoir focusing on his passion for the game, Ninety-four Declared: Cricket Reminiscences. When he was nine, his father took him to the Ashes match at the Oval. Eighty years later he recalled watching W. G. Grace and F. S. Jackson opening the batting for England with Ranjitsinhji coming in first wicket down: "I remember when Ranji came in to bat the crowd started singing; I think he only made 7; it was a very low scoring match.""Brian Johnston interviews Ben Travers, 1980", BBC Test Match Special, 1980
Travers left Charterhouse in 1904 and was sent by his parents to live in Dresden, for a few months, to learn German. While he was there he saw performances by the leading French actors Sarah Bernhardt in La Tosca, and Lucien Guitry in Les affaires sont les affaires, which inspired him with a passion for the theatre.Travers (1978), p. 17 His parents were unimpressed by his ambition to become an actor; he was sent into the family business, the long-established wholesale grocery firm Joseph Travers & Sons Ltd, of which his father was a director."Mr Ben Travers", The Times, 19 December 1980, p. 15 He found commercial life tedious and incomprehensible: "I had no more idea what it was all about then than I have now and vice versa."Travers (1957), p. 31 He served first at the firm's head office in Cannon Street in the City of London, which was dominated by dauntingly-bearded Victorian patriarchs.Travers (1978), p. 25 From there, to his and the patriarchs' relief, he was soon transferred to the company's offices in Singapore and then Malacca.Travers (1978), p. 26; and Travers (1957), p. 25
While at the Malacca outpost Travers had little work and much leisure; in the local library he found a complete set of the plays of Pinero. He later said he fell on them with rapturous excitement and found each volume "a guidebook to the technique of stagecraft."Travers (1957), p. 35 They rekindled his interest in the theatre, his earlier wish to be an actor now overtaken by his determination to be a dramatist. He later told Pinero that he had learnt more from him than from all other playwrights put together.Travers (1957), p. 36 His greatest lesson from Pinero was that "however absurd the incidents of a play they had to arise from a basis of reality. The people should never be mere grotesques. Ideally they should be as matter-of-fact – or apparently so – as the people across the road."
In 1908, after the death of his mother, Travers returned to London to keep his father company. He endured his work at the family firm for three more years until, in 1911, he met the publisher John Lane of the Bodley Head, who offered him a job as a publisher's reader. Lane's firm had been in existence for a little over twenty years and had an avant garde reputation; among Lane's first publications were The Yellow Book and Wilde's Salome.Travers (1957), p. 53 Travers worked for Lane for three years, during which he accompanied his employer on business trips to the US and Canada.Travers (1957), p. 60
On the outbreak of the First World War, Travers joined the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). His service was eventful. He crashed several times and narrowly failed to shoot down a Zeppelin.Walker, Martin. "Travers, the king of farce, dies", The Guardian, 19 December 1980, p. 1 He became a squadron commander, and when the RNAS merged with the Royal Flying Corps he transferred to the new Royal Air Force with the rank of major in 1918. He served in south Russia during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, in 1919,Travers (1978), pp. 57–58 and received the Air Force Cross in 1920."Travers, Ben", Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2008; online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2007, accessed 4 March 2013
In April 1916 Travers married Violet Mouncey (d. 1951), the only child of Captain D. W B. Mouncey, of the Leicestershire Regiment, and granddaughter of Sir James Longden."Marriages", The Times, 2 May 1916, p. 1 They went on to have three children - Josephine, Benjamin and Daniel ('Burtie').
Novelist and playwright
With the security of his wife's income, Travers determined to earn his living as a writer when he was demobilised from the RAF. He and his wife settled in Somerset, and he started to write. His first attempt was a farce about a lawyer who finds himself mistaken at a country house full of strangers for half of a husband-and-wife jazz dance act. While writing it he decided to turn it into a novel, The Dippers, which was accepted by John Lane and published in 1921. The reviews were good. The Daily Chronicle noted "an amount of clever writing and character study that the humorous novel rarely gets … as clever a piece of comedy as we have read for some time"."Bodley Head", The Times, 22 April 1921, p. 9 Travers then turned the novel back into a farce and sent it to the actor-manager Sir Charles Hawtrey. After a tour that included eight large towns and cities, Hawtrey brought the play into the West End in 1922."The Theatres", The Times, 30 March 1922, p. 10 The reviews were mixed: The Manchester Guardian praised the piece, and its star Cyril Maude;"Prince's Theatre – The Dippers", The Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1922, p. 16 The Observer was scathing about both."The Dippers", The Observer, 27 August 1922, p. 7 The Times considered the play "neatly contrived and often brilliantly phrased" and praised the cast and the author – "such good company and in a play so amusing"."The Dippers", The Times, 23 August 1922, p. 10 The play had a moderately successful London run of 173 performances. Travers's next stage work was less successful: he wrote an English adaptation of Franz Lehár's 1923 operetta Der Libellentanz. The music received mild praise, but the libretto did not."The Three Graces", The Times, 28 January 1924, p. 8 The piece ran for just over three months."The Theatres", The Times, 12 May 1924, p. 12
Travers followed The Dippers with another farcical novel, A Cuckoo in the Nest, published in 1922."The Bodley Head List", The Manchester Guardian, 27 April 1922, p. 5 Again reviewers praised its humour, and again Travers turned it into a playscript. The actor Lawrence Grossmith spotted the dramatic possibilities of this story, and he acquired the performing rights to the play.Travers (1957), p. 127 Before Grossmith had time to produce the piece, he had an offer from the actor-manager Tom Walls to buy the rights. Walls was in need of a replacement for his current hit farce, It Pays to Advertise, which was nearing the end of a long run at the Aldwych Theatre.Travers (1957), pp. 123, 125–126
Aldwych farces
With Travers's agreement, Grossmith sold the rights to A Cuckoo in the Nest to Walls, and the play opened at the Aldwych in July 1925."Aldwych Theatre", The Times, 23 July 1925, p. 12 The leading lady was Yvonne Arnaud, and the two leading men were Walls and Ralph Lynn. They were supported by a team of players who became part of a regular company at the Aldwych for the rest of the 1920s and into the 1930s: Robertson Hare, Mary Brough and Gordon James, joined in subsequent productions by Winifred Shotter (in place of Arnaud) and Ethel Coleridge."Mr. Ralph Lynn", The Times, 10 August 1962, p. 11 The play was an immediate success and ran for 376 performances.
During the next seven years there were ten more Aldwych farces; Travers wrote eight of them: Rookery Nook (1926), Thark (1927), Plunder (1928), A Cup of Kindness (1929), A Night Like This (1930), Turkey Time (1931), Dirty Work (1932), and A Bit of a Test (1933). It took Travers some time to establish a satisfactory working relationship with Walls, whom he found difficult as a manager and distressingly unprepared as an actor. In the early days he also had reservations about the other star of the company, Ralph Lynn, who initially ad-libbed too much for the author's taste. Travers noted that the ad-libbing diminished as he came to anticipate and include in his scripts "the sort of thing Ralph himself would have said in the circumstances".Travers, p. 91 Though the main parts in the Aldwych plays were written to fit the members of the regular company, Travers varied their roles to avoid monotony. He also varied the themes of his plots. Thark was a spoof of haunted house melodramas;Travers (1978), p. 103 Plunder featured burglary and violent death (in a way that pre-echoed Joe Orton), A Cup of Kindness was what he called "a Romeo and Juliet story of the suburbs";Travers, 1957, p. 161 and A Bit of a Test had a cricketing theme at the time of the controversial "Bodyline" series."An Aldwych Farce in White Flannels – A Bit of a Test", The Manchester Guardian, 31 January 1933, p. 8
Travers's biographer H Montgomery Hyde records that between 1926 and 1932 the Aldwych box office grossed £1,500,000 in receipts, and the aggregate number of performances of the nine Travers farces totalled nearly 2,700. During the 1930s, film versions of ten of the twelve Aldwych farces were made, mostly directed by Walls. Travers wrote the screenplays for eight of them."Ben Travers", Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003, accessed 4 March 2013
Later 1930s