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.

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.

Due to the war and the death of his wife, Ben had a fallow period, although he collaborated on a few revivals and adaptations of his earlier work.

[4] His parents were unimpressed by his ambition to become an actor; he was sent into the family business, the long-established wholesale grocery firm Joseph Travers & Sons Ltd, of which his father was a director.

[8] While at the Malacca outpost Travers had little work and much leisure; in the local library he found a complete set of the plays of Pinero.

His first attempt was a farce about a lawyer who finds himself mistaken at a country house full of strangers for half of a husband-and-wife jazz dance act.

[1] Travers's next stage work was less successful: he wrote an English adaptation of Franz Lehár's 1923 operetta Der Libellentanz.

Walls was in need of a replacement for his current hit farce, It Pays to Advertise, which was nearing the end of a long run at the Aldwych Theatre.

[27] With Travers's agreement, Grossmith sold the rights to A Cuckoo in the Nest to Walls, and the play opened at the Aldwych in July 1925.

They were supported by a team of players who became part of a regular company at the Aldwych for the rest of the 1920s and into the 1930s: Robertson Hare, Mary Brough and Gordon James, joined in subsequent productions by Winifred Shotter (in place of Arnaud) and Ethel Coleridge.

[29] Walls, splendidly right when he chose to act – which was not always – could be a testing director; Travers knew how to humour him, and there was no trouble whatever with the buoyant, knuckle-gnawing, monocle-dropping Ralph Lynn, an unexampled farceur.

During the next seven years there were ten more Aldwych farces; Travers wrote eight of them: Rookery Nook (1926), Thark (1927), Plunder (1928), A Cup of Kindness (1929), A Night Like This (1930), Turkey Time (1931), Dirty Work (1932), and A Bit of a Test (1933).

It took Travers some time to establish a satisfactory working relationship with Walls, whom he found difficult as a manager and distressingly unprepared as an actor.

[30] Though the main parts in the Aldwych plays were written to fit the members of the regular company, Travers varied their roles to avoid monotony.

Thark was a spoof of haunted house melodramas;[31] Plunder featured burglary and violent death (in a way that pre-echoed Joe Orton),[1] A Cup of Kindness was what he called "a Romeo and Juliet story of the suburbs";[32] and A Bit of a Test had a cricketing theme at the time of the controversial "Bodyline" series.

[34] After the Aldwych series finished Travers wrote his first serious play, Chastity, my Brother (1936), based on the life of St Paul.

The Times dismissed it on those grounds;[35] Ivor Brown in The Observer congratulated Travers and deplored the snobbish suggestion that a writer of successful farces could have nothing of value to say on religious matters.

Travers himself played the part of Wun, a servant; his lines in colloquial Malay, remembered from his Malacca days, were improvised and sometimes took his colleagues by surprise.

Outrageous Fortune was described by The Manchester Guardian as "an elaborate tangle about stolen ration cards and a Hertfordshire manor house and country police ... very laughable in its own way.

In Hyde's words, Travers lost most of his old zest for writing and spent more and more time in travelling and staying with friends in Malaya.

"[45] In 1970 BBC television broadcast seven Travers plays: Rookery Nook, A Cuckoo in the Nest, Turkey Time, A Cup of Kindness, Plunder, Dirty Work and She Follows Me About.

At the age of 83 Travers rewrote the plays for the BBC to concentrate on plot twists and verbal misunderstandings, rather than the high-speed action and split-second timing that characterised the original stage versions.

Joan Plowright played the central character with John Moffatt, Helen Mirren and Royce Mills in the main supporting roles.

[48] In his ninetieth year Travers had the uncommon distinction of having three of his plays running simultaneously in London; as well as The Bed Before Yesterday at the Lyric, there were revivals of Plunder at the National with Frank Finlay and Dinsdale Landen, and Banana Ridge at the Savoy with Robert Morley and George Cole.

[5] Travers served as prime warden of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers (1946) and as vice-president of Somerset County Cricket Club.