Ben Travers

Ben Travers (12 November 1886 – 18 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. 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 unsu... ()