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The sole dread of folly
Since the days of Horace and Juvenal, satirists have lampooned those in power when they dared to err.Gerald Isaaman here reviews a new book that pays homage to more recent wielders of the sacred weapon in Happy Hampstead
The Cartoon Century: Modern Britain
Through the Eyes of its Cartoonists.
By Timothy S Benson.
Random House £20
THEY used to meet on a quiet afternoon in a coffee shop in Flask Walk, Hampstead, run by a retired Spanish matador, and sit around drawing competing cartoons on a single subject. Someone would shout “Dustbins” and away they would go.
Gerald Scarfe, still going strong in the Sunday Times, was one of them. Frank Dickens, whose moon-faced office man named Bristow is now sadly retired from the Evening Standard, was another.
Ralph Steadman used to drop by at The Aragon, together with a handsome Greek called Fotis, whose cartoons were purely visual, without words, and so hilarious that the Daily Sketch published a page of them at a time. And they mixed there with a few yet to make a cartoon impact.
Hampstead has always been a mecca for talent. And for some unknown reason cartoonists have climbed the hill to find inspiration and solace there, from Phil May, who created the image of the ’appy ’ampstead fair on Hampstead Heath, to the great David Low, who hid away in a second floor office at No 13 Heath Street, the entrance door deliberately without a bell, so that nobody could disturb him.
Sidney Strube, who owned the Wells Hotel at one time and was paid a colossal £4,500 a year in 1927, was another cartoon giant. Then, in more recent years, there was the incomparable Vicky, the Hungarian Victor Weiss, creator of Supermac, who sadly committed suicide at his home in Steeles Road.
Nick Garland was living in Heath Hurst Road when he made his name, and Wally Fawkes, alias Trog, a defining draftsman of genius, as well as a jazz clarinettist of note, now 83. Having started out in Flask Walk, he remains a long-standing resident of Kentish Town. Sadly, failing eyesight means that he is unable to delight us any more, in particular with his coloured caricatures.
Now most of this incongruous crew, who hold their own special niche place in social history, are abundantly on brilliant display in Timothy Benson’s compelling graphic cartoon century of modern Britain, as seen though the eyes of its eminent cartoonists.
Benson suspects, and is probably right, that cartoonists today do not have the same savage impact on politics as the like of Low, whom the Nazis wanted stifled as part of the Munich agreement. Chamberlain, too was fed up with Low’s lampooning, depicting the PM’s umbrella as a symbol of appeasement.
His pen was undoubtedly the most powerful of the 20th century and Gordon Brown may consider himself fortunate that he is still not around following Labour’s recent debacles.
“A cartoonist’s purpose is not just to be funny,” Benson points out. “It is a sad fact, but oppression, deceit and injustice are the mothers of satire, the cartoonist’s best weapon. A satirist without a cause is a frustrated person.”
The humorist Alan Coren, in his days editing Punch, declared: “The political cartoon never stopped, never changed anything – it doesn’t now.”
Nevertheless, it is part of an accumulative effect that creates the spreading surge of poison that usually heralds political disaster. It can, of course, go wrong.
Vicky’s depiction of Harold Macmillan as Supermac had the opposite effect to what he intended, which must have amused Lord Beaverbrook, Tory proprietor of the Evening Standard, who gave the likes of Vicky and Low total freedom to exploit their own left-wing beliefs and to mock anyone they wished, friend or foe.
Readers objected to the way the Conservatives were portrayed. One even wrote to say that the cartoonist was so “Low” that he would go to hell in a balloon.
Those maligned often hated the way they were depicted.
Lord Birkenhead sent Low a photograph of himself because he disliked his distorted image, and protested: “Your cartoonist over a long period of time published filthy and disgusting cartoons of me which were intended and calculated to do me great injury,” and he howled over the space being given to “a filthy little Socialist” who presented him “daily as a crapulous and corpulent buffoon.”
Stanley Baldwin once described Low as “evil and malicious” and other prime ministers, from Anthony Eden to John Major, were equally upset by the vicious slant put on cartoons.
Major was especially hurt by Steve Bell’s portrayal of him in the Guardian sporting Y-fronts outside his trousers.
Cartoons can also be misinterpreted in a serious way. Philip Zec almost got the Daily Mirror closed down in 1942 with his cartoon of a torpedoed sailor hanging on to a life-raft, above a caption that declared: The Price of Petrol has been increased by One Penny.”
Yet other occupants of No 10 have enjoyed the wit and fun-making of cartoonists, whose daily output probably put as much pressure on them as did the political conundrums of the day in Parliament.
Baldwin told Strube: “I love your work, both its draughtsmanship and its spirit,” and Lloyd George went further, insisting: “The first thing I did, even before I got out of bed, was to take up the Daily Express, a paper with whose policy I often profoundly disagreed, and looked at Strube’s cartoon. “That put me in a good humour for the rest of the day.”
And Labour’s doyen Manny Shinwell summed it all up by telling Michael Cummings: “My boy, however angry politicians may get by the way you draw them in your cartoons, they’ll be more angry if you leave them out!”
Cartoonists have also broken down barriers, no longer treating royalty with deference as they did – with Prince Charles and Diana among the targets – and even taking on the once taboo subject of the disabled, with blind cabinet minister David Blunkett becoming a visual victim.
Any public figure has become fair and unfair game for their subtle and seriously venomous fervour.
Indeed, despite the laws of libel, Steve Bell miraculously escaped unharmed after depicting President George Bush in a compromising position with a camel.
Yet cartoons, as we know from those allegedly insulting Mohammed, have created riots and even deaths.
Benson’s collection shows the enormous scope of the cartoonist’s innate skills as social commentators and the enormous variety of subjects they have fired upon in the name of freedom of expression, enough to provide more than one good laugh a page.
It’s only inherent fault is that, in order to produce so many cartoons, too many of them are too small to do them the sublime justice they so richly deserve.
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