War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.

He was unable to contest the seat as there was no general election until 1918 when the Unionists did not oppose the sitting member a coalition Liberal. In the same year he had one of his greatest successes with Off the Record (co-written with Stephen King-Hall) which ran for 702 performances. Between 1908 and 1914 he followed Pip with five more novels characterised by The Times as "of the right stuff and happy-go-lucky their good feeling saved from insipidity by its seasoning of piquant humour".

In 1907 he publiJohn Hay Beithd a novel Pip; its success and that of several more novels enabled him to give up teaching in 1912 to be a full-time author. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. After reading Classics at Cambridge Beith became a schoolmaster.