Press
Beachcomber
Robert Ashley
I am well aware that the Times, in the shape of Mr Bernard Levin, and the Sunday Times, in the shape of Mr Ian Jack, have done him proud, but I don't see that as a reason for not adding my tribute. I refer, of, course, to the greatest genius journalism has produced in this or any other country, John Cameron Andrieu Bingham Michael Morton, who for fifty-one years has been wandering along the beaches that fringe Our lives, picking up the odder things he noticed as he wandered along. Beachcomber, in other words, has decided to call it a day, and the world will be a duller place as a result.
first came across Beachcomber during the war, when the attempts of the Royal Navy's
training officers to make a sailor out of me Were resulting in somewhat frayed tempers on both sides of the struggle. Wandering disconsolatelY, into the Naafi one day for a wad and a cup 0' char I noticed a pile of books on the counter.' picked one up, mainly for want of something better to do, opened it, read one astonishing paragraph, laughed out loud, and have been hooked ever since. The date, if it matters to yoll — it does to me — was July 14, St Swithin's DAY' 1942, so for thirty-three years I've been the most devoted of disciples. For all that time I have known — and I mean really known — Mr Justice Cocklecarrot and the Seven Red-bearded Dwarfs, along with the fairy who used to drop out of the large canvas cake they would occasionally bring into the • body of the court. I have many times sat in at committee meetings with Charlie Suet at the Ministry of Bubble-blowing. I have pondered long over the mystery of the 50,000 missing midwives. I have read copy after copy of that spendid Scandinavian newspaper, the Svenska Bassondraft. I sympathised with the campaign for wearing shirts outside waistcoats. 1 was.8 member of the same club as Captain Foulenough — indeed, on one occasion 1 ViaS incidental in stopping him being asked resign. I applauded madly the dancing 01 Tumbelova and the singing of Rustiguzzt. stayed at that finest of boarding houses, Rissole Mio, and, proudest boast of all, I once helped Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht, a piece of especially recondite research. Atl" whenever I was not engaged in any of te above activities, I would sit down and dip 10 that most dip-into-able of books, the List o' Huntingdonshire Cabmen. The point of the whole of that paragraph is that I feel that I have done all thclse,. things and known all those people. Really. Fc/rj' Beachcomber, like all the great humorists, all, there aren't all that many at this level, made hi own world, and usually it was much more re,8 than the one you and I spend our generahY humdrum lives in from day to dreary daY. When Chaplin turned a pair of bread rolls °rid forks into dancing clogs, when Tati p1aYe table tennis in Monsieur Hulot's HolidalY1 without a ball and without an opponent, Wile,‘ the Marx Brothers did wonderful things mirrors in Duck Soup, when Laurel and Hall"'‘er were transporting a piano across a rope britig„ over a gorge, only to find their way blocked bya gorilla (well, what else?), we all knew that, some heightened way, theirs was the real rear world. So it was with Beachcomber. Everything he wrote about was sharper in outline than ins the life you and I have to put up with. Mro McGurgle is a more real landlady than anY 11 ever charged you for use of the cruet. 1.‘, Filthistan Trio are more real acrobats thanOf, you and I ever saw in a circus. Dr Smart-Allic', is more real than anybody on the Headmasters List. This was Beachcomber's achievement. Eveslir day for forty years, and then once a week 1°f, the next eleven years, he invented his world and invited us to test which was the re't one, his or ours; I know which one alwaYs my vote. The ironic thing is that he is retir: now, at the age of eighty-two, because the world we live in has become madder than one he created: "I couldn't possibly invent tin damn silly real things I read about „n. newspapers these days". So he has packed "or, and is going to pack up in another sense, t°_.e for he is leaving his beloved Sussex to go to in Ireland and write French history. TcIt His is an astonishing achievement. Ian va A in the Sunday Times, tells us something Ilia' forgotten, or perhaps never known: that Evelyn Waugh once said he had "the greatest comic fertditY of any Englishman". I presume Waugh meant "any Englishman ever". And if Waugh didn't go as far as that, by God I do. His great friend, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, who was Beachcomber before him and went on to become Timothy Sly in the News Chronicle, ran hIrri close, but not too close. Morton was a great f,riellO, too, of Hilaire Belloc and shared with rum an enthusiasm for most things French. And he wasn't in the least afraid of putting a Perfectly straight piece in his column about the delights of the Dordogne or the ravishments of the Auvergne. Indeed, before I came to understand him fully if ever anyone can understand fully a man with a mind so much his
I used to read such paragraphs over and over again, wondering where I missed the Point. I know better now.
But I won't have the chance to miss the point ariY more Last Saturday's column in the Daily Express was his last. Did he fall, or was he Pushed? A little of both, I suppose, And, as he remarked to Ian Jack, the Express "have been generous". But so has Beachcomber. Generous With the greatest humorous imagination I have ever come across, or ever will. We shall not look Vol) his like again. And I still don't know Whether those 50,000 missing midwives really do exist (or perhaps don't exist would be .hetter), or whether he just made them up. I Uofie his retirement is long, happy, and fruitful.
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