The world’s oldest newspaper columnist is 100 years old today
Happy birthday to the Daily Express’s Beachcomber, who has offered a sideways look at the world for generations
READERS of our Beachcomber column every weekday can hardly fail to have noticed that he is now 100 years old. In fact, while this is indeed his centenary year, his actual birthday falls on August 2.
And so today we celebrate a life well lived during which Beachcomber has lampooned dictators, inspired a comic revolution and of course entertained millions of readers with a cast of characters ranging from Mr Justice Cocklecarrot to the Apostropher Royal Sir D’Anville O’M’Darlin’.
The origins of Beachcomber can be traced back to the First World War when, starting in May 1917, the Daily Express carried a column entitled Gossip Of The Day. On July 27 this title was changed to By The Way and on August 2, 1917 the byline Beachcomber appeared beneath it for the first time.
The column appears to have been written originally by John Bernard Arbuthnot – not a man with the CV of an anarchic humourist. A veteran of the Scots Guards he fought in the Second Boer War before serving a stint in Hong Kong as aide-de-camp to the governor.
By the time Arbuthnot joined the Daily Express as social correspondent and began writing Beachcomber he had served another stint in the Army, risen to major and been mentioned in dispatches for his service in the First World War. Perhaps understandably, given the author’s background, the column was a fairly straight cocktail of news and comment.
Two years later, at the age of 44, Arbuthnot was promoted to deputy editor of the paper and handed on the column to D B Wyndham Lewis. He lasted five years before passing the baton to his friend and colleague JB Morton, who continued writing it for the next 50 years.
Morton turned the column into a unique daily dose of surreal inconsequentiality. From around 1930 until the 1950s an annual collection of Beachcomber’s columns was published, bringing renewed joy to his followers, with its collected stories of Mr Justice Cocklecarrot and his misadventures with Twelve Red-Bearded Dwarfs, Dr SmartAlick (the ludicrous headmaster of Narkover), Lady Cabstanleigh, Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht and other regulars in the column’s parallel universe.
DR Strabismus, incidentally, came up with the supposedly ridiculous idea of the electric toothbrush long before it was invented in all seriousness. Morton himself seemed to embody the humour and cantankerousness of his writings. One account of meeting him captures his essence perfectly: “The door was burst open and a thick-set, furious, bucolic figure all over straw and clay, strode in and banged passionately on the floor with a thick gnarled stick uttering a roar soon known and feared in every pub in Fleet Street, ‘Flaming eggs! Will no one rid me of this stinking town!’”
It was a measure of Morton’s influence that Beachcomber was one of the few features that appeared continuously throughout the Second World War despite the fact that paper rationing often seriously reduced pagination.
Morton’s lampooning of Hitler, including the invention of something called bracerot that made the Nazi’s trousers fall down, was regarded as valuable for morale.
And in the post-war years Beachcomber laid the foundations on which a generation or more of British comedy grew. It influenced everything from The Goon Show to Monty Python and Spike Milligan himself eagerly took on the role of Beachcomber when the BBC decided to turn the column into a SURREAL: Spike Milligan was thrilled to play Beachcomber in a BBC series surreal TV comedy series entitled World Of Beachcomber.
The column was discontinued in 1975 and Morton died in 1979 but it was brought back to life in 1990 and has to my personal knowledge been written by the same fellow since at least 1998.
Unsurprisingly Mr Justice Cocklecarrot and his companions from the old Beachcombers have been replaced by a host of equally surreal characters. Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) has given way to Prof Norvus Breakdown, incumbent of and usually recumbent in the Ikea Chair in Contemporary Lifestyle at the University of Brent; Lady Cabstanleigh turned into the cheeky but aristocratic Lady Clamydia Featherlight-Plume; and we have seen the introduction of the Apostropher Royal, Sir D’Anville O’M’Darlin’, in whose hands the fate of the British apostrophe lies.
The current Beachcomber has also spent much of the past 15 years as the head of K-Slott, the campaign to Keep Sea Lions Off The Tubes, which has been outstandingly successful at preventing sea lions and other pinnipedia from wreaking havoc on London’s transport system.
In the opinion of many of the cognoscenti, the Beachcomber column is indeed as ridiculous as it has ever been as is Beachcomber himself.
Quite apart from JB Morton’s rancorous disposition and stickbanging habit he was apparently frequently seen in the office reading his own columns and laughing uproariously. When criticised for this behaviour he is said to have replied: “Well if I don’t find it funny, who will?”
“A man who doesn’t laugh at his own jokes,” Morton once wrote, “is timid, self-conscious and altogether half-strangled with beastliness. It is argued that this is a sign of conceit. Bosch.
“It is a sign of being able to enjoy oneself without consulting the
beachcomber’s wisdom at its very best
One disadvantage of being a hog is that at any moment some blundering fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife’s ear. Erratum: In my article on the Price Of Milk, “horses” should have read “cows” throughout. Out of my mind. Back in five minutes. Sixty horses wedged in a chimney. The story to fit this sensational headline has not turned up yet. A politician on the fence Should always sit astride. This makes it easier to climb down On one or other side. Not many of our old families can boast that a Savile Row tailor calls four times a year at their country estates to measure the scarecrows in the fields for new suits. So long as a man can put his trousers on without sitting down, he is not old. “My backscratcher is ectopic,” said the Eskimo, “and I fear the irritation to my acnestis will bring on a bout of pibloqtoq.” Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes and laugh in a cold and calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, favour beards, affect curious hats, cough deceitfully, go about in mittens during the winter, dare not boast, hate fighting, knit too much, talk about bicycling, wheeze, squeak, drawl and maunder. There are no standard sizes for horses’ hats so that very often the holes for the ears are either too close together or too far apart. conventions of the half-men.” [“Hear, hear!” comes the voice of the current Beachcomber, interrupting his frequent guffaws and cries of “Brilliant!” as he reads his own columns in a corner of the office.]
Indeed you could say that the main difference between Beachcombers ancient and modern is that for some reason his columns are no longer collected into annual anthologies.
[“Lily-livered, unimaginative, fopdoodles and cumberworlds!” comes the cry from across the room, with the characteristic bang of a gnarled stick. “Typical lubberwort publishers!”]