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 best remembered for his long-running
series of farces first staged in the 1920s and 1930s at the
Aldwych Theatre
The Aldwych Theatre is a West End theatre, located in Aldwych in the City of Westminster, central London. It was listed Grade II on 20 July 1971. Its seating capacity is 1,200 on three levels.
History
Origins
The theatre was constructed in th ...
. 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
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, he began to write novels and plays. He turned his 1921 novel, ''
The Dippers
''The Dippers'' is a comedy play by the British writer Ben Travers first performed in 1922 and based on his own 1920 novel of the same title. It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool before transferring to the Criterion Theatre in Lond ...
'', into a play that was first produced in the
West End in 1922. His big break came in 1925, when the
actor-manager
An actor-manager is a leading actor who sets up their own permanent theatrical company and manages the business, sometimes taking over a theatre to perform select plays in which they usually star. It is a method of theatrical production used co ...
Tom Walls
Thomas Kirby Walls (18 February 1883 – 27 November 1949) was an English stage and film actor, producer and director, best known for presenting and co-starring in the Aldwych farces in the 1920s and for starring in and directing the film adapt ...
bought the performing rights to his play ''
A Cuckoo in the Nest
''A Cuckoo in the Nest'' is a farce by the English playwright Ben Travers. It was first given at the Aldwych Theatre, London, the second in the series of twelve Aldwych farces presented by the actor-manager Tom Walls at the theatre between 1923 ...
'', 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
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
Travers served in the
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and ...
, 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, Ben 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
Travers was born in the London borough of
Hendon
Hendon is an urban area in the Borough of Barnet, North-West London northwest of Charing Cross. Hendon was an ancient manor and parish in the county of Middlesex and a former borough, the Municipal Borough of Hendon; it has been part of Great ...
, 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
Beckenham () is a town in Greater London, England, within the London Borough of Bromley, in Greater London. Until 1965 it was part of the historic county of Kent. It is located south-east of Charing Cross, situated north of Elmers End and E ...
, and at
Charterhouse
Charterhouse may refer to:
* Charterhouse (monastery), of the Carthusian religious order
Charterhouse may also refer to:
Places
* The Charterhouse, Coventry, a former monastery
* Charterhouse School, an English public school in Surrey
London ...
. 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
The Oval, currently known for sponsorship reasons as the Kia Oval, is an international cricket ground in Kennington, located in the borough of Lambeth, in south London. The Oval has been the home ground of Surrey County Cricket Club since ...
. Eighty years later he recalled watching W G Grace
William Gilbert Grace (18 July 1848 – 23 October 1915) was an English amateur cricketer who was important in the development of the sport and is widely considered one of its greatest players. He played first-class cricket for a record-equa ...
and F S Jackson opening the batting for England with Ranjitsinhji
Colonel H. H. Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji II, Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, (10 September 1872 – 2 April 1933), often known as Ranji or K. S. Ranjitsinhji, was the ruler of the Indian princely state of Nawanagar from 1907 to 1933, as Ma ...
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."
Travers left Charterhouse in 1904 and was sent by his parents to live in Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label=Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth larg ...
, for a few months, to learn German. While he was there he saw performances by the leading French actors, Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt (; born Henriette-Rosine Bernard; 22 or 23 October 1844 – 26 March 1923) was a French stage actress who starred in some of the most popular French plays of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including '' La Dame Aux Camel ...
in ''La Tosca
''La Tosca'' is a five- act drama by the 19th-century French playwright Victorien Sardou. It was first performed on 24 November 1887 at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris, with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. Despite negative ...
'', and Lucien Guitry
Lucien Germain Guitry (13 December 1860 – 1 June 1925) was a French actor.
Life
In 1885, while living in Saint Petersburg, Guitry appeared at the French (or Mikhaylovsky) Theatre.
His son, the future actor, writer and director Sacha Gui ...
in '' Les affaires sont les affaires'', which inspired him with a passion for the theatre. 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." He served first at the firm's head office in Cannon Street
Cannon Street is a road in the City of London, the historic nucleus of London and its modern financial centre. It runs roughly parallel with the River Thames, about north of it, in the south of the City.
It is the site of the ancient London ...
in the City of London
The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London fr ...
, which was dominated by dauntingly-bearded Victorian patriarchs. From there, to his and the patriarchs' relief, he was soon transferred to the company's offices in Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
and then Malacca
Malacca ( ms, Melaka) is a state in Malaysia located in the southern region of the Malay Peninsula, next to the Strait of Malacca. Its capital is Malacca City, dubbed the Historic City, which has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site si ...
.
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. 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
The Bodley Head is an English publishing house, founded in 1887 and existing as an independent entity until the 1970s. The name was used as an imprint of Random House Children's Books from 1987 to 2008. In April 2008, it was revived as an adul ...
, 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
''The Yellow Book'' was a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897. It was published at The Bodley Head Publishing House by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and later by John Lane alone, and edited by th ...
'' and Wilde
Wilde is a surname. Notable people with the name include:
In arts and entertainment In film, television, and theatre
* '' Wilde'' a 1997 biographical film about Oscar Wilde
* Andrew Wilde (actor), English actor
* Barbie Wilde (born 1960), Canad ...
's '' Salome''. Travers worked for Lane for three years, during which he accompanied his employer on business trips to the US and Canada.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Travers joined the Royal Naval Air Service
The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was the air arm of the Royal Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty's Air Department, and existed formally from 1 July 1914 to 1 April 1918, when it was merged with the British Army's Royal Flying Corps t ...
(RNAS). His service was eventful. He crashed several times and narrowly failed to shoot down a Zeppelin
A Zeppelin is a type of rigid airship named after the German inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin () who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century. Zeppelin's notions were first formulated in 1874Eckener 1938, pp ...
. He became a squadron commander, and when the RNAS merged with the Royal Flying Corps
"Through Adversity to the Stars"
, colors =
, colours_label =
, march =
, mascot =
, anniversaries =
, decorations ...
he transferred to the new Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and ...
with the rank of Major in 1918. He served in south Russia during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War or Allied Powers intervention in the Russian Civil War consisted of a series of multi-national military expeditions which began in 1918. The Allies first had the goal of helping the Czechoslovak Leg ...
, in 1919, 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
The Leicestershire Regiment (Royal Leicestershire Regiment after 1946) was a line infantry regiment of the British Army, with a history going back to 1688. The regiment saw service for three centuries, in numerous wars and conflicts such as both W ...
, and granddaughter of Sir James Longden.
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
''Daily Chronicle'' may refer to:
* ''Daily Chronicle'' (United Kingdom), a British newspaper which merged into the ''News Chronicle''
* ''Daily Chronicle'' (Illinois), a newspaper in DeKalb County, Illinois
* ''Daily Chronicle'' (New Zealand), ...
'' 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". Travers then turned the novel back into a farce and sent it to the actor-manager
An actor-manager is a leading actor who sets up their own permanent theatrical company and manages the business, sometimes taking over a theatre to perform select plays in which they usually star. It is a method of theatrical production used co ...
Sir Charles Hawtrey
Sir Charles Henry Hawtrey (21 September 1858 – 30 July 1923) was an English actor, director, producer and manager. He pursued a successful career as an actor-manager, specialising in debonair, often disreputable, parts in popular comedie ...
. After a tour that included eight large towns and cities, Hawtrey brought the play into the West End in 1922. The reviews were mixed: ''The Manchester Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' praised the piece, and its star Cyril Maude
Cyril Francis Maude (24 April 1862 — 20 February 1951) was an English actor-manager.
Biography
Maude was born in London and educated at Wixenford and Charterhouse School. In 1881, he was sent to Adelaide, South Australia, on the clipper ship ...
; ''The Observer
''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...
'' was scathing about both. ''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 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
Franz Lehár ( ; hu, Lehár Ferenc ; 30 April 1870 – 24 October 1948) was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas, of which the most successful and best known is ''The Merry Widow'' (''Die lustige Witwe'').
Life ...
's 1923 operetta ''Der Libellentanz''. The music received mild praise, but the libretto did not. The piece ran for just over three months.
Travers followed ''The Dippers'' with another farcical novel, ''A Cuckoo in the Nest'', published in 1922. Again reviewers praised its humour, and again Travers turned it into a playscript. The actor Lawrence Grossmith
Lawrence Randall Grossmith (29 March 1877 – 21 February 1944) was an English actor, the son of the Gilbert and Sullivan performer George Grossmith and the brother of the actor-manager George Grossmith Jr.
After establishing his career in Edw ...
spotted the dramatic possibilities of this story, and he acquired the performing rights to the play. Before Grossmith had time to produce the piece, he had an offer from the actor-manager Tom Walls
Thomas Kirby Walls (18 February 1883 – 27 November 1949) was an English stage and film actor, producer and director, best known for presenting and co-starring in the Aldwych farces in the 1920s and for starring in and directing the film adapt ...
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
The Aldwych Theatre is a West End theatre, located in Aldwych in the City of Westminster, central London. It was listed Grade II on 20 July 1971. Its seating capacity is 1,200 on three levels.
History
Origins
The theatre was constructed in th ...
.
Aldwych farces
With Travers's agreement, Grossmith sold the rights to ''A Cuckoo in the Nest
''A Cuckoo in the Nest'' is a farce by the English playwright Ben Travers. It was first given at the Aldwych Theatre, London, the second in the series of twelve Aldwych farces presented by the actor-manager Tom Walls at the theatre between 1923 ...
'' 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
Germaine Yvonne Arnaud (20 December 1890 – 20 September 1958) was a French-born pianist, singer and actress, who was well known for her career in Britain, as well as her native land. After beginning a career as a concert pianist as a child, Ar ...
, and the two leading men were Walls and Ralph Lynn
Ralph Clifford Lynn (8 March 1882 – 8 August 1962) was an English actor who had a 60-year career, and is best remembered for playing comedy parts in the Aldwych farces first on stage and then in film.
Lynn became an actor at the age of 18 ...
. 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
John Robertson Hare, OBE (17 December 1891 – 25 January 1979) was an English actor, who came to fame in the Aldwych farces. He is remembered by more recent audiences for his performances as the Archdeacon in the popular BBC sitcom, ''All Gas ...
, Mary Brough
Mary may refer to:
People
* Mary (name), a feminine given name (includes a list of people with the name)
Religious contexts
* New Testament people named Mary, overview article linking to many of those below
* Mary, mother of Jesus, also calle ...
and Gordon James, joined in subsequent productions by Winifred Shotter
Winifred Florence Shotter (5 November 1904 – 4 April 1996) was an English actress best known for her appearances in the Aldwych farces of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Initially a singer and dancer in the ensembles of musical comedies, Shotte ...
(in place of Arnaud) and Ethel Coleridge
Ethel Coleridge (14 January 1883 – 15 August 1976) was an English actress, best known for her roles in the original Aldwych farces in the 1920s and 1930s.
Life and career
Coleridge was born Ethel Coleridge Tucker in South Molton, Devonshire, ...
.["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 farce
The Aldwych farces were a series of twelve stage farces presented at the Aldwych Theatre, London, nearly continuously from 1923 to 1933. All but three of them were written by Ben Travers. They incorporate and develop British low comedy styles, ...
s; 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
''A Bit of a Test'' is a farce by Ben Travers. It was the last, and least successful, of the series of twelve Aldwych farces that ran in uninterrupted succession at the Aldwych Theatre in London from 1923 to 1933. The play depicts the efforts ...
'' (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
Ralph Clifford Lynn (8 March 1882 – 8 August 1962) was an English actor who had a 60-year career, and is best remembered for playing comedy parts in the Aldwych farces first on stage and then in film.
Lynn became an actor at the age of 18 ...
, 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". 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; ''Plunder'' featured burglary and violent death (in a way that pre-echoed Joe Orton
John Kingsley Orton (1 January 1933 – 9 August 1967), known by the pen name of Joe Orton, was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his death in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brie ...
),[ ''A Cup of Kindness'' was what he called "a Romeo and Juliet story of the suburbs"; and ''A Bit of a Test'' had a cricketing theme at the time of the controversial "]Bodyline
Bodyline, also known as fast leg theory bowling, was a cricketing tactic devised by the English cricket team for their 1932–33 Ashes tour of Australia. It was designed to combat the extraordinary batting skill of Australia's leading batsman ...
" series.
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
After the Aldwych series finished Travers wrote his first serious play, ''Chastity, my Brother'' (1936), based on the life of St Paul
Paul; grc, Παῦλος, translit=Paulos; cop, ⲡⲁⲩⲗⲟⲥ; hbo, פאולוס השליח (previously called Saul of Tarsus;; ar, بولس الطرسوسي; grc, Σαῦλος Ταρσεύς, Saũlos Tarseús; tr, Tarsuslu Pavlus; ...
. To his sadness, it ran for only two weeks. No author was named for the piece, but it was an open secret that Travers was the author. ''The Times'' dismissed it on those grounds; Ivor Brown
Ivor John Carnegie Brown CBE (25 April 1891 – 22 April 1974) was a British journalist and man of letters.
Biography
Born in Penang, Malaya, Brown was the younger of two sons of Dr. William Carnegie Brown, a specialist in tropical diseases, ...
in ''The Observer'' congratulated Travers and deplored the snobbish suggestion that a writer of successful farces could have nothing of value to say on religious matters. All his life Travers held strong religious views and was a regular communicant of the Church of England
The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
; his views on chastity, however, were unorthodox: "sex is nature's act – God's will", and he admitted to wholesale promiscuity.
After the failure of ''Chastity, my Brother'', Travers returned to comedy, though not immediately to farce. Later in 1936 his ''O Mistress Mine'' was a light Ruritania
Ruritania is a fictional country, originally located in central Europe as a setting for novels by Anthony Hope, such as ''The Prisoner of Zenda'' (1894). Nowadays the term connotes a quaint minor European country, or is used as a placeholder name f ...
n vehicle for Yvonne Printemps
Yvonne Printemps (; born Yvonne Wigniolle; 25 July 1894 – 19 January 1977) was a French singer and actress who achieved stardom on stage and screen in France and internationally.
Printemps went on the stage in Paris at the age of 12, and ...
. He returned to farce with '' Banana Ridge'' (1938) in which Robertson Hare starred with Alfred Drayton
Alfred Drayton (1 November 1881 – 26 April 1949) was a British stage and film actor.
Drayton worked in a brewery when he was 18 but having a good deal of amateur dramatics experience decided to go on stage. His first appearance on stage was ''T ...
.[Gaye, p. 1253] It was set in Malaya, and turned on which of two middle-aged pillars of Empire was the father of the young hero. 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. The play ran for 291 performances, bettering the runs of the last six Aldwych farces.
Second World War and postwar
During the Second World War Travers rejoined the RAF, working in intelligence. He was given the rank of Squadron leader
Squadron leader (Sqn Ldr in the RAF ; SQNLDR in the RAAF and RNZAF; formerly sometimes S/L in all services) is a commissioned rank in the Royal Air Force and the air forces of many countries which have historical British influence. It is also ...
and was later attached to the Ministry of Information as air adviser on censorship.[ He had two plays staged during the war. ''Spotted Dick'' (1939), again starring Hare and Drayton, was a farce about insurance fraud. ''She Follows Me About'' (1943) had Hare as a harried vicar coping with mischievous Waafs and a bogus bishop. '']The Observer
''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...
'' commented, "the third act is a tumultuous affair, with all four doors and a staircase in action at once."["She Follows Me About", ''The Observer'', 17 October 1943, p. 2]
In the postwar years Travers wrote a new farce for Lynn and Hare. ''Outrageous Fortune'' was described by ''The Manchester Guardian'' as "an elaborate tangle about stolen ration cards and a Hertfordshire manor house and country police ... very laughable in its own way." In 1951 Travers wrote another farce for Lynn and Hare, '' Wild Horses'', about the ownership of a valuable picture. It was his last new play for more than a decade. In 1951 Violet Travers died of cancer. Travers felt the bereavement deeply. In Hyde's words, Travers lost most of his old zest for writing and spent more and more time in travelling and staying with friends in Malaya.[ ''She 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''.][ Travers collaborated on the screenplay of '' Fast and Loose'' (1954), based on '']A Cuckoo in the Nest
''A Cuckoo in the Nest'' is a farce by the English playwright Ben Travers. It was first given at the Aldwych Theatre, London, the second in the series of twelve Aldwych farces presented by the actor-manager Tom Walls at the theatre between 1923 ...
''.[
]
Last years
In 1968 Travers returned to playwriting with a new farce, ''Corker's End'', which was produced at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre is a theatre located in Guildford, Surrey, England. Named after the actress Yvonne Arnaud, it presents a series of locally produced and national touring productions, including opera, ballet and pantomime. The theatre ...
, Guildford
Guildford ()
is a town in west Surrey, around southwest of central London. As of the 2011 census, the town has a population of about 77,000 and is the seat of the wider Borough of Guildford, which had around inhabitants in . The name "Guildf ...
.[ '']The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'' commented, "Some of his jokes, which always tended to be outrageous, are perhaps a little more outspoken than they used to be, but nothing essential has changed. Those who care for farce will enjoy themselves for exactly that reason." In 1970 BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
television broadcast seven Travers plays: ''Rookery Nook'', ''A Cuckoo in the Nest'', ''Turkey Time'', ''A Cup of Kindness'', ''Plunder'', ''Dirty Work'' and ''She Follows Me About''. At the age of 83 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.
After the abolition in 1968 of theatre censorship in Britain, Travers was for the first time able to write about sexual matters without discreet allusion or innuendo.