35 Facts About Ben Travers

Ben Travers's output includes more than 20 plays, 30 screenplays, 5 novels, and 3 volumes of memoirs.

Ben Travers is most notable for his long-running series of farces first staged in the 1920s and 1930s at the Aldwych Theatre.

Ben Travers turned his 1921 novel, The Dippers, into a play that was first produced in the West End in 1922.

Ben Travers followed this success with eight more farces for Walls and his team; the last in the series closed in 1933.

Ben Travers was born in the London borough of Hendon, the elder son and the second of the three children of Walter Francis Ben Travers, a merchant, and his wife, Margaret Burges.

Ben Travers was educated at the Abbey School, Beckenham, and at Charterhouse.

Ben Travers did not greatly enjoy his schooldays and later declared that he had been "a complete failure at school".

Ben Travers left Charterhouse in 1904 and was sent by his parents to live in Dresden, for a few months, to learn German.

Ben Travers later told Pinero that he had learnt more from him than from all other playwrights put together.

In 1908, after the death of his mother, Ben Travers returned to London to keep his father company.

Ben Travers 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.

Ben Travers worked for Lane for three years, during which he accompanied his employer on business trips to the US and Canada.

Ben Travers crashed several times and narrowly failed to shoot down a Zeppelin.

Ben Travers 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.

Ben Travers served in south Russia during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, in 1919, and received the Air Force Cross in 1920.

Ben Travers's 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.

Ben Travers then turned the novel back into a farce and sent it to the actor-manager Sir Charles Hawtrey.

Ben Travers followed The Dippers with another farcical novel, A Cuckoo in the Nest, published in 1922.

Again reviewers praised its humour, and again Ben Travers turned it into a playscript.

Ben 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".

The Times dismissed it on those grounds; Ivor Brown in The Observer congratulated Ben Travers and deplored the snobbish suggestion that a writer of successful farces could have nothing of value to say on religious matters.

Ben Travers returned to farce with Banana Ridge in which Robertson Hare starred with Alfred Drayton.

Ben Travers himself played the part of Wun, a servant; his lines in colloquial Malay, remembered from his Malacca days, were improvised and sometimes took his colleagues by surprise.

Ben Travers was given the rank of Squadron leader and was later attached to the Ministry of Information as air adviser on censorship.

Ben Travers Follows Me About had Hare as a harried vicar coping with mischievous Waafs and a bogus bishop.

In Hyde's words, Ben Travers lost most of his old zest for writing and spent more and more time in travelling and staying with friends in Malaya.

Ben Travers Follows Me About was revived at the Aldwych in 1952, and a revised version of O Mistress Mine was staged in the provinces in 1953 as The Nun's Unveiling.

Ben Travers collaborated on the screenplay of Fast and Loose, based on A Cuckoo in the Nest.

In 1968 Ben Travers returned to playwriting with a new farce, Corker's End, which was produced at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford.

At the age of 83 Ben Travers rewrote the plays for the BBC to concentrate on plot twists and verbal misunderstandings, rather than the high-speed action and split-second timing that characterised the original stage versions.

Ben Travers should be regarded as an important figure post-Pinero and pre-Orton, and certainly one of the most skilled of British farceurs.

Ben Travers wrote two further plays, After You with the Milk and Malacca Linda, in which he revisited the colonial Malaya of his youth.

Ben Travers served as prime warden of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers and as vice-president of Somerset County Cricket Club.

Ben Travers received the CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours, 1976.

Ben Travers laid the foundation stone in 1980, and the first production in the completed theatre was Thark in January 1984.