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Osbert Lancaster: Osbert Lancaster scratching his head, 1961 |
How dandy Osbert blazed a cartoon trail
Gerald Isaaman tells the story of the man who brought the pocket cartoon to British newspapers
SOME of the best things in life – and the funniest – happen by chance. Such is the case of the pocket cartoon, unheard of in this country until Osbert Lancaster, then writing articles for the Daily Express, took features editor John Rayner to dinner.
Osbert mentioned his admiration for the “little column-width cartoons” then published in French newspapers but never adopted across the Channel. “Go ahead,” was Rayner’s instant reaction.
And so, just months before the outbreak of war in September 1939, the pocket cartoon, so named after pocket battleships, then very much in the news, was born, appearing initially on the William Hickey gossip page, edited by Osbert’s old Oxford friend, Tom Driberg.
Then it hit the front page, Osbert depicting the initial German-Soviet pact in pure cartoon form without words.
But what a big impact it had when he showed Hitler and Stalin shaking hands behind their national flags, swapping their different moustaches to match the outrageous hypocrisy of the deal that didn’t last.
So much for the history of the pocket cartoon in Britain, a land where Gillray and Rowlandson long ago showed the power of the pen and set the scene for the likes of Phil May, creator of the ’Appy ’Ampstead image, and Low, Vicky and Scarfe, all operating from NW3, to make their indelible mark.
Osbert Lancaster was from a unique school of his own, a wealthy family who sent him to Charterhouse and Lincoln College with the aim of him becoming a lawyer.
Fortunately, his artistic mother recognised his drawing talents and sent him to the Byam Shaw, Ruskin and Slade schools, where his interest in art, in particular architecture and stage design flourished, his first job being with the Architectural Review.
He became known as a dandy thanks to his fine style of pink shirts, buttonhole and cane. After working at home in the morning, often in a silk dressing gown, he would arrive on the dot of four o’clock at the Daily Express, take a quick look at the newspapers of the day, sit down and complete his pocket cartoon in just half an hour, without fail.
So was born the aristocratic Maudie Littlehampton and Osbert’s elegant parodies of snobbish society life, in wartime and beyond, which gave him his distinctive witty voice that so many admirers relished in terrible but terrific times.
Now you can now enjoy the view yourself at a major Wallace Collection exhibition, Cartoons and Coronets, and in an excellent book of the show, introduced with immaculate understanding and polite reverence by John Knox. Together, they pay due homage to doodling dandy on the centenary of his birth.
He was of course more than a prince of cartoonists and master of the bon mots – more a polymath, an acute observer of life he exposed, as critic and satirist, in prose and poetry alike. He was a travel writer too, a social observer who became an architectural historian, children’s author and also stage designer, ending up as a national treasure who duly enjoyed the knighthood awarded to him in 1975.
Indeed, it is equally important to record that while press attaché at the British Embassy in Athens in 1944 he saved the life of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, pushing him down some steps into the garden to avoid a sniper’s deadly bullet.
And there was a local link to Osbert’s gentle genius, namely the late Jock Murray, the Hampstead publisher, who gave his friend Osbert a new audience by producing his first book, and went on to publish all those that followed.
It was at Murray’s Albemarle Street offices that Osbert left for safe keeping some 11,000 drawings, a true treasure house that epitomises his talents. It was from these that Jock Murray’s son, John, and his wife Virginia have taken the best to display at the exhibition and in the book that richly accompanies it.
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