Journalist, author and scriptwriter, known as "Beachcomber." John Cameron Andrieu Bingham Michael Morton was born in Tooting, South London, the only child of Edward Arthur Morton and his wife, Rosamond (nee Bingham). He was educated at Harrow School and Worcester College, Oxford. During the First World War, he joined the Royal Fusiliers, transferring to the Suffolk Regiment, and was wounded during the Battle of the Somme. Following the Armistice, he joined the Daily Express and, in 1924, took over the humorous "Beachcomber" column from D.B. Wyndham-Lewis. He was to continue writing this for six days a week until 1975. Evelyn Waugh wrote of "Beachcomber"; "I think that he displays the greatest comic fertility of any Englishman." The columns have been gathered into eighteen anthologies, and have been adapted twice by the B.B.C.: in 1968, for the television, with Spike Milligan, Michael Redgrave, Frank Thornton and Hattie Jacques; and, in 1989, for the wireless, with Richard Ingrams, John Wells, Patricia Routledge and John Sessions. In addition, Morton wrote twenty-nine other books and two screenplays: "Two's Company" and "Boys Will Be Boys" the latter of which starred Will Hay. In 1922, he converted to Roman Catholicism and, on the 24th. September 1927, in Kensington, he married Mary O'Leary; they had no children. After her death in 1974, he stopped writing the column (a year earlier, it had been reduced from appearing daily to once a week on Saturday), ate little but bread and jam (he had never learned how to cook, nor how to type, drive a car or ride a bicycle), and wandered around the house looking for his wife, not understanding that she had died. Eventually, he had to be taken to a nursing home in Worthing in Sussex, where he died.