As a Winchester student, Herbert sent verses to the offices of Punch and received notes of encouragement and suggestions from the editor, Owen Seaman.

In early October, news reached him that his brother, Owen Herbert, had been posted "missing, believed killed" in the retreat from Mons.

[11][12] In summer 1916, when he was passed fit for duty, Herbert returned to Hawke Battalion at their base camp in Abbeville, where he was made assistant adjutant.

[12][13] On medical leave back in England after the injury, Herbert began writing his first book, The Secret Battle, which he finished "in a few weeks".

He was elected a member of the Savage Club and raised by Punch to the "exclusive group of its contributors who were allowed to attach their initials to their work.

He arrived in Madrid on 22 November and dined with the Embassy's naval attaché, Captain John Harvey, as well as Filson Young and others, before making the return journey to Gibraltar.

Montgomery saw it as "the best story of front line war" and Herbert himself believed that court-martial arrangements were subsequently "altered in some way" as a result of the book.

However, the book had no great commercial success, which his biographer Reginald Pound puts down to the fact that "Readers, it seems, were tired of war as a dramatic theme.

"[18] Unable to sustain himself on Punch's "eccentric rates of payment", Herbert wrote his second book, The House by the River, in two months.

He handed his literary business to A. P. Watt, who sold the American rights to The House by the River and published a collection of his prose submissions to Punch under the title Light Articles Only.

In 1925, Herbert attended the Third Imperial Press Conference on behalf of Punch, where he made his first speech in front of a large audience in Melbourne, where it was described as "delectably witty" by Sir Harry Brittain.

Since the decision was never challenged in a higher court, it led to a unique situation of uncertainty as to "the extent to which statute law applies to either House of Parliament.

Herbert first had the idea of standing for Parliament a few weeks before the 1935 general election, when he ran into Frederick Lindemann, who had just been rejected as Conservative candidate for Oxford University.

[23] Defying the advice of more experienced members, including Austen Chamberlain, he made his maiden speech on 4 December 1935, the second day of the opening session of the new Parliament.

Malavika Rajkotia writes that "This novel sparked off the first divorce law reform movement in England, which led to the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937".

[26] In 1936, Herbert failed to be drawn in the private members' ballot but managed to get the Conservative Rupert De la Bère to sponsor the bill.

[31] On 3 November 1938, Herbert enrolled himself and his boat, the Water Gipsy, in the River Emergency Service, which was under the control of the Port of London Authority.

Herbert's own crew consisted of Darcy Braddell, vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Victor Pasmore, Magnus Pyke and John Pudney.

A number of MPs left the Commons following the sirens and cheered the Water Gipsy as the only naval vessel in sight before they saluted it.

"[34] Herbert was sent to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1943 with Derrick Gunston and Charles Ammon as members of a parliamentary commission to investigate the future of the dominion.

He prepared a number of private member's bills, including ones covering betting reform, legal aid for the poor, a fairer voting system, and the abolition of decree nisi.

[35] In autumn 1945, George Orwell had the essay Notes on Nationalism published in the magazine Polemic and named Herbert as one of the followers of "neo-Toryism", who were marked by a "desire not to recognise that British power and influence have declined.

[41] Herbert sat on the Supreme Court Committee on Practice and Procedures, chaired by Raymond Evershed, investigating the cost of litigation.

Herbert commented: "Had it included graphs and tables and been written in a heavy style it would have been accepted as a major contribution to the practice of sound administration.

In August 1971, he wrote his last letter to The Times, an appeal for parliamentary good manners in refraining from "witty derision of the literary exertions of Mr Harold Wilson" and of the "marine activities" of Edward Heath.

On 7 December, the Congressional Record of the US House of Representatives appeared with four pages of tributes to Herbert by congressmen from Ohio, Missouri, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

"[50] In a 1957 article entitled "Over Seventy", lamenting the decline of the humorist, P. G. Wodehouse wrote: "I want to see an A. P. Herbert on every street corner, an Alex Atkinson in every local."

One of the "cases", supposedly establishing a novel crime of "doing what you like", was sharply criticised by an American law review article, whose author failed to note its entire absurdity.

The BBC successfully adapted these for television, as three series of A P Herbert's Misleading Cases (1967, 1968 and 1971), with Roy Dotrice as Haddock and Alastair Sim as the judge, Mr Justice Swallow.

In the book, he describes all manner of sundials, and recounts many of his experiments in designing and building different models, including a few that could be used to tell your position on the earth as well as the local time.