Beachcomber: Thirty Years of Uproar

IF TRUTH and humor kept company more often, life would be jollier and newspapers better reading. Here and there it does happen, even in our own un-jolly and sheep-like era. One of the most truthful humorists in journalism today is unknown in America; he speaks out in a daily column published in the slickest popular newspaper in Britain, the London Express. The column is called By the Way, and is written by a man who signs himself “Beachcomber.”

“I don’t care what you write about me,” said Beachcomber, “as long as you say that I’m a young, tall, good-looking, red-haired Cornishman, thirty years of age.” In fact, he is small, sixty-five, and looks by turns startled and helplessly, overpoweringly amused; the little hair he has left is gray and close-cropped, and he was born in London. His manners are kindly and gentle, and his voice deprecating, but he is a man of the most violent enthusiasms and violent antipathies. He regards the late Hilaire Belloc as “the best writer in my time” and says “I hate everything that’s been invented since I was born.” His earliest recollection is of lying on the grass, when he was a year and a half old, with a dog named Ibsen. He and his Irish wife, Mary, who was a practicing doctor before their marriage thirty-one years ago, are a heartening example of how to be happy though married; they shine with merriment and are the best company imaginable. They laugh when they feel like it, which is often, and sing at the lunch table if memory moves them.

Beachcomber must be one of the most durable columnists in the history of journalism, for he has been writing By the Way since 1924 and has outlasted every rival in the British press. Though the Express prides itself on smartly sensational layouts, Beachcomber’s column is not an eye catcher. It is tucked away in small type in the middle of the editorial page, a chunky box of three or four paragraphs, with modest headlines that are swamped by the waves of big type roaring through the rest of the paper. But the Express shouts are often less arresting than Beachcomber’s murmurs: Nothing to do with me; It is impossible to concentrate; Oh, I say, look here!; I only want to help; Trumpeter, what on earth are you sounding there?

And what are these paragraphs about? To an unaccustomed reader they may seem a bewildering farrago of cleanly written nonsense — like an unfamiliar comic strip in which you don’t know the cast of characters or the plot. The clue to Beachcomber is simple: his column is a satirical commentary on everything that is happening. Unlike most of us Americans, Beachcomber believes neither in progress nor in reform — except as a return to older and better ways; he thinks the world is mad and has been going to hell for some time. And he would much rather go to hell in a hack than in a motorcar.

He never has to look far afield for his material: he gets most of it from reading one London newspaper which he considers “absolutely idiotic.” One of his favorite gambits is to take (or invent) an almost bald news item, pat it a bit, then suddenly clap a Harpo Marx wig over it:

Nature is wonderful

If a day-old gosling sees a human being it may go through life thinking it is a human being, or that human beings are geese.

(National Geographic Society of New York.)

The reason for this little known fact is said, by the society, to be that young birds identify themselves with the first thing they see. “It has resulted in ducks thinking they were motor-boats.” Yes, yes. And I knew a tiny ostrich, brought up in a zoo, which thought itself a hippopotamus. This got on the head keeper’s nerves, and he ended by thinking he was an ostrich. He ate nails, old boots and braces, and slept with his head in sand. They cured him by telling him he was a hippopotamus.

He loves the advice columns in newspapers: Dr. Rhubarb’s corner

N. T. writes: A gentleman friend took me to a restaurant last month, and drank his soup through a straw. I felt very uncomfortable, as everyone stared. What should I have done?

Dr. Rhubarb says: You should have ordered spaghetti and eaten it with a buttonhook. Then he would have been the one to feel uncomfortable.

N.L. writes: We found a strange man asleep in our dustbin the other morning. We woke him, but he wouldn’t get out, so we gave him a cup of tea, and he went to sleep again. What should we do?

Dr. Rhubarb says: If he is not claimed within 48 hours, he belongs to you.

BEACHCOMBER has invented a small army of characters, most of whom represent a trade, profession, class, or popular fad; he keeps thirty or forty always on call. These are a few of them: Prodnose (the British public, who sometimes interrupts Beachcomber’s wilder flights by asking calm, flat, heavy questions); Rustiguzzi (a formidable female opera star, built like a battleship); Dr. Smart-Allick (headmaster of Narkover, a school that caters to juvenile delinquents); Captain Foulenough (a rascal who lives by his wits and pursues Vita Brevis, a beautiful rich girl who is too smart for him); Dr. Strabismus of Utrecht (omniscient and omni-inventive scientist, whose name is always reverently attended by the parenthetical phrase, “Whom God Preserve”); Mr. Justice Cocklecarrot, with his attendant barristers, Gooseboote and Snapdriver; Sol Hogwasch (Hollywood magnate); Dawn Kedgaree and Trivia Tansy (film stars); the Khur of Kashdoun and Getaweh (a Middle Eastern potentate, rich in oil); Lit-tle Bo-Pest (a child who asks embarrassing questions about “deterrents” and H-bombs).

This is how Prodnose, after long and patient silence, feels compelled to observe that things are getting out of hand:

Was the “round white thing” seen in mid-air over Mexico a whitewashed football or an albino hedgehog?

A leading scientist has said, with admirable impartiality, “there is no cogent reason to suppose that it was either. Moreover, the claim that the baby rhinoceros born at Whipsnade is Indian, not English, is sound sense. If a cow calves in an enormous dustbin, it isn’t refuse, and the council cannot claim it.” “I see what he means,” commented a spokesman, “but he has got things mixed up a bit. It would have been more accurate to say that if a sow has a litter in an ironmonger’s shop, the little pigs are not saucepans.” “They are not even mowing machines,” added a passer-by, raising his hat and smiling through his tears.

Interlude

Prodnose: What you have written above seems to me to be completely confused.

Myself: That’s because you are not taking the long view and facing the facts.

Prodnose: The long view of what? And what facts?

Myself: I have no space to argue with you. Put aside your prejudices and read it all over again.

Prodnose: But why did the passer-by smile through his tears?

Myself: He was an unhappy man, and was trying to put a brave face on it.

The solemn cavortings of the law delight Beachcomber. I have put these paragraphs together, like the ones on Dr. Rhubarb, so that the reader can get the drift, but in Beachcomber’s column they might appear days or even weeks apart:

Odd occurrence

A man who went to bed in his boots in an hotel was accused of leaving muddy marks on the pillow. He said he had to be up early in the morning, to which the management replied that he appeared to have slept with his head at the foot of the bed and his feet on the pillow. The man said that this unusual position was bound to wake him in time for his early start. They refused to accept this explanation, and the man said: “Very well. I will tell you the truth. I am a contortionist, and my legs were round my neck several times during the night. Hence the marks on the pillow.” They said: “Why can’t contortionists take their boots off at night?” There was a long silence, and then the man burst into tears.

Sensational disclosures

Cross-examining Mr. Colehouse [the contortionist], Mr. Humphrey Gooseboote, for the defence, as opposed to the prosecution, asked whether the defendant had mentioned at the reception desk that he was a contortionist.

Colehouse: The reception desk did not ask me.

Cocklecarrot intervenes

Cocklecarrot: We seem to be losing sight of the main issue. These irrelevances about men with their elbows in their mouths and their heads in flower-pots are wasting the time of the court.

Snapdriver: M’lud, I am trying to establish the frontier or borderline between voluntary and involuntary contortionism.

Cocklecarrot: Nobody has suggested that the defendant twisted his body out of its normal shape involuntarily. He admits to having slept in his boots with the object of facilitating the arrangement of his legs around his neck. The action was premeditated, and what we have to decide is whether it was, as the plaintiff claims, malice aforethought, or simply habitual foolishness.

Since Beachcomber’s imagination, like the mad world about him, boggles at nothing, why not imagine a “List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen" published in seven volumes — and why not a further ‘"anthology” from this great work, translated into French and Italian?

Twelfth edition exhausted

A storm of praise has greeted the publication of the anthology compiled from the “List Of Huntingdonshire Cabmen.”Here are some opinions:

Packed with integrity, awareness, and a sense of vaues. (Daphne Mound.)

. . . Not one superfluous name. . . . (Daily Howl.)

A realistic presentation of incontrovertible facts. (Abbott and Costello.)

Admirably true to life. (Braceplug-Setters’ Gazette.)

Vital statistics raised to a fine art. (Rocky Marciano.)

A mine of information for the student of cabmen’s names. (Yehudi Menuhin.)

Impartial, unembittered, uninhibited. (New Zealand Times.)

Here is no cheap sensationalism. (Hardware Argus and Messenger.)

Can be safely left about a house where there are children. (Singapore Sentinel.)

Dr. Strabismus of Utrecht has apparently settled in an English village, for he is sometimes referred to as “the sage of Waggling Parva”:

To end it all

Dr. Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht has invented a typewriting machine which, while boiling an egg, plays classical records, grows mushrooms in a dark corner, releases a steel hand to blow your nose, tells your fortune, registers your weight, puts on your hat, washes plates, scrapes cobwebs from the ceiling, paints a watercolour, opens your umbrella, sifts charcoal, mends your shirt, draws a weather chart, ejects hot steam, shouts the times of trains, piles up cardboard, neighs like a horse, lifts a wheelbarrow, sponges meat, makes the bed, shreds beetroot, works an electric lift, traps ferrets, stirs tea, feeds the cat, pulls things away, discards mince, yodels, polishes jade, and keeps the wind away.

Beachcomber shows a complete lack of sympathy with statesmen and their delicate problems:

A subtle policy

“Since countries can only negotiate from strength, it is obvious that there can be no attempt to discuss the present situation until we have overtaken and passed the Russians in the arms race. When that happens, and the Russians are in the position we are in at present, they will refuse to negotiate until they have overtaken and passed us again. It will then be our duty to overtake and pass them again.”

(From a statesmanlike speech.)

If I were choosing an anthology to suit myself, for the peculiar Beachcomber quality that most appeals to me, these are some I would pick:

Here is the best news for aesthetes since the invention of the Gothic, stained-glass shaving-mirror with a lapis lazuli border.

Ink which smells of fresh fruit is on the market in America. The advantages of such a commodity are so many that it would be ludicrous to mention them. The real fun will begin when grocers sell fresh fruit which smells of ink. Those who care deeply about all this are invited to a fork-lunch at the Wroxton Hall Annexe, to launch a new brand of charcoal which reeks of stale fish. Mrs. Kande will be in the chair, and her dog Bapchild under it.

Windfall (By Private Wire)

The treasury has received a tiny little shrivelled apple from a Mr. Gowfe

Missed by Reuter

A ten-year-old Yugoslav boy has 831 teeth. They are all very small, and do not inconvenience him. His mouth is the normal size, but when he whistles through his teeth he can be heard a mile away, and can blow out a candle at 40 paces distance. His name is Gustika.

Nose-bags for women

Dear Sir,
How could a woman look her best in a nose-bag, however artfully designed? Moreover, conversation would be impossible, unless she kept on taking her head out of the bag every time she wanted to talk. Only the most poised and sophisticated women can do this without appearing ridiculous. A noted psychiatrist who has conducted experiments with mangers fixed to restaurant walls, has found that the women tend to paw the ground impatiently if kept waiting. This enhances neither the charm of social intercourse nor the ease of gracious living.
Isobel Frant.

BEACHCOMBER is a happy man. He actually likes to write. “Oh, I wouldn’t write if I didn’t enjoy it. I love to write,” and he lives a more contented life than most men. His friends, who call him “Johnny,” know that his real name is J. B. Morton (though perhaps they don’t all know the full extent of his name: John Cameron Andrieu Bingham Michael Morton) and that his daily column is only a small part of his writing life. His first novel, The Barber of Putney, was published nearly thirty years ago, and since then he has written forty-three other books: novels, essays, verse, fairy tales, history, and biography.

He and his wife live in a handsome Georgian house, with a Tudor back, set in two acres of garden on the edge of Tenterden, a town in Kent. The garden, a characteristically English, unspectacular, and charming labor of love, contains a flourishing bay tree and a pond and is sometimes visited by a shy hedgehog. Flowers bloom there all the year round. There is no railway station in Tenterden, and the Mortons have no car. London is sixty miles away, and usually stays there.

Though he has been a journalist, on the side, for thirty-five years, J. B. Morton has never learned to use a typewriter (“a fountain pen is the nearest I can get to managing anything mechanical”), nor drive a car, nor even ride a bicycle. After breakfast every morning he goes to his second-floor study, a big, square, high-ceilinged room lined with bookshelves and prints of scenes and characters of the French Revolution, and writes his column in a small, barely legible hand. This takes him usually not much more than an hour. He then posts his copy, always five or six days ahead, to the Express office, and that’s that. No changes are ever made in what he writes, though the newspaper’s lawyer always reads it for libel, and sometimes a paragraph may be dropped for lack of space.

With the column out of the way, the rest of the day is his, and he works on the book he is writing — sometimes he has two or three going at the same time. He has just finished a life of Marshal Ney, the latest of half a dozen books on the Napoleonic era in French history, his favorite study, to which he brings a lifelong knowledge of France, its language, countryside, and wines. As a young soldier he saw it from the trenches: he enlisted in 1914 and won a commission two years later. For the quality and quantity of his writing he was recently honored by the Queen, who made him a C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire). But he would still like to write a successful novel. No good writer really wants to be a best seller, he just wants to be read by a great many more people. Beachcomber’s only other unfulfilled desire is to turn the clock back to the Edwardian times in which he was a small boy.

The Mortons live a quiet life — an occasional evening of bridge with village neighbors, a daytime trip to London, an annual holiday on the Continent. Every weekend Mrs. Morton makes a packet of sandwiches for her husband, and he goes off on a ten-to-twenty-mile walk by himself. As he walks he sings, composing the music as he goes; sometimes songs, sometimes “more serious stuff.” When he comes home again, he whistles the tunes over and writes words to fit the music.

Getting fun out of life must have become a settled habit of J. B. Morton’s at an early age. After Harrow he went up to Worcester College, Oxford, where he dipped into various courses of study, failing in all of them, and thoroughly enjoyed himself for a year.

As a young man in London he lived with some other “wild men” in a flat on Elizabeth Street. “If we made the kind of row in which everything got broken and the neighbors were muttering, one of us just leaned out the window and said firmly, in a loud voice: ‘If this row doesn’t cease I’ll send for the police!'" On one of these evenings someone threw a fish through the window. An open car was parked directly below, with a man and a girl sitting in it, and the fish hit the man in the face. Instead of apologizing, one of the wild men leaned out the window and said to the girl, “In that case, please come up and cook some bacon and eggs for us.” She came without a murmur, simply asking as she entered the door where the frying pan was. When the man, still showing no signs of resentment, sheepishly followed her, they were very fierce with him, asking him if he had never been hit in the face with a fish before, and why he made such a fuss about being hit with one fish.

J. B. Morton knows what’s funny when he sees it, and spends a lot of his time laughing, but if you ask him whether he can define, or describe, a sense of humor, he says: “O Lord, no. Well, if I had to: a sense of proportion.”Measured against his own sense of proportion, the whole modern world is ludicrously, uproariously — sometimes damnably — out of whack. He thinks modern democracy a ridiculous sham, and would like to see the return of an absolute monarchy in England (he doesn’t like the words “Britain” or “British”). He wants the scientists “put in their place and trying to make us happy instead of trying to destroy us.” He has no idea how many people read his column. “The hell with the public. I don’t care a damn about that.” One of his favorite dreams is that all oil supplies should be dried tip.

And what about the United States, a country he has never visited? “I don’t like the idea of it at all.” (At this point Mrs. Morton interjects: “Johnny has always talked against America and adored every American he’s met.”) He has a feeling that Americans “are bad for civilization. And they’re leading the modern business altogether.” But surely, even though humor may not travel any better than wine, satire is tougher. Doesn’t he ever read the New Yorker? “I glance at it occasionally, but I can’t understand a single joke.“ (Italics mine.)

I sometimes despair of Anglo-American relations. but I have a serious proposal to make on that subject: abolish the English-Speaking Union, and get Beachcomber to lunch with E. B. White.