Major General John Hay Beith, CBE MC, was a British schoolteacher and soldier, but he is best known as a novelist, playwright, essayist, and historian who worked under the pen name Ian Hay. After studying Classics at Cambridge University, Beith became a schoolteacher. His novel Pip was published in 1907, and its popularity, together with the success of numerous other novels, enabled him to retire from teaching in 1912 to pursue a full-time writing career. During World War I, Beith was a French army officer. His humorous description of army life, The First Hundred Thousand, released in 1915, was a best-seller. As a result of this, he was assigned to work in the information section of the British War Mission in Washington, DC. After the war, Beith's books did not gain the popularity of his earlier work, but he established a successful career as a dramatist, producing light comedies in cooperation with other authors such as P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. During WWII, Beith was the War Office's Director of Public Relations, retiring in 1941 just before his 65th birthday.
