B. Morton (7 June 1893 – 10 May 1979), was an English humorous writer noted for authoring a column called "By the Way" under the pen name 'Beachcomber' in the Daily Express from 1924 to 1975.
G. K. Chesterton described Morton as "a huge thunderous wind of elemental and essential laughter"; according to Evelyn Waugh, he had "the greatest comic fertility of any Englishman".
Morton was admitted to Worcester College, Oxford, but failed to win a scholarship, and had to leave after a year to support his father after a stroke.
Quickly realising that he could not make a living from poetry, Morton found a job writing for a musical revue, until he was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914.
Like Morton, Wyndham Lewis had also served in the ranks in the War, and the two shared a bizarre sense of humour, as well as being fellow Francophiles.
Wyndham Lewis set the surreal, comic style that was to become the column's identifying feature, and published the first collection of Beachcomber material in 1922, entitled A London Farrago.
With so much in common, when Morton moved into his cubicle they quickly became friends, and their continual banter could be heard across the top floor of the building.
Morton viewed the Beachcomber sobriquet as a protective blanket of anonymity, and continued to enjoy this until his identity was revealed in the thirties.
Behind this cover, Morton often indulged himself in opinionated rants about new inventions, motorists, Socialists, pretentious art, public schools, and whatever else aroused his wrath.
Under Morton's pen, By the Way continued for many years, surviving the Second World War paper shortages and consequent shrinkage of the Express to four pages.
His mockery of both Nazi propaganda and British red tape was recognised as a huge contribution to morale, and Morton became a CBE in 1952.
The format reflected the column in being a series of unrelated sketches with (largely) scripted inks provided by Spike Milligan.
[1] Morton also wrote a few pieces on French history, in the style of his good friend Hilaire Belloc, but these were not widely read and are now forgotten.
Events like this were quite frequent: on another occasion he littered Virginia Woolf's front doorstep with dozens of empty, quart-sized brown ale bottles.
Wyndham-Lewis recalls that on their first meeting, the door 'burst open' and 'a thick-set, 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 on Fleet Street: "Flaming eggs!
This moving around didn't interfere with the column, which Morton hand-wrote (never having learned to type) on sheets of blue Basildon Bond and posted to the Express.