Abstract
In the second of three articles, a cartoon historian analyses the visual satire and humour of British magazines during the Great War
The year 1914 witnessed two noteworthy events in the history of humorous magazines: the death of Sir John Tenniel, one of Punch's greatest cartoonists, and the demise of the society caricature journal Vanity Fair, whose pages had contained portraits of George V and many eminent military figures and politicians who would feature in the First World War.
By the turn of the century, magazines were flourishing in Britain. They were the first of the mass media, with some titles claiming sales exceeding a million copies a week (Tit-Bits was selling 600,000 a week by 1900). They were also decades ahead of daily newspapers in carrying regular illustrations, let alone drawings in colour. Among those publications that included cartoons and caricature in their pages were old stalwarts such as Punch (founded in 1841) and the Sketch (1893), and more recent titles such as Tatler (1901), the Bystander (1903), London Opinion (1903) and John Bull (1906). These were joined by new wartime weekly journals such as The Passing Show (1915) and Blighty (1916).
Indeed, the market for humorous illustrations and cartoons in magazines became so great during the war that by 1916 Percy Bradshaw's Press Art School in Forest Hill, London (founded in 1905) was enrolling 3,000 new students a year for its correspondence courses. Among them was Kenneth Bird (1887–1965), better known as Fougasse, who would later become the only cartoonist to be editor of Punch (he also produced the famous Careless Talk Costs Lives series of posters in the Second World War). Bird served in the Royal Engineers but was invalided out after being shot in the spine at Gallipoli in 1915. While recovering in hospital he studied at Bradshaw's school and began contributing to Punch in 1916. He chose the pseudonym Fougasse as it was the French name for a small anti-personnel mine whose “effectiveness is not always reliable and its aim uncertain”.
Punch's main political cartoonist since 1910 was Bernard Partridge (1861–1945), who was knighted in 1925. His best known wartime cartoons included The Triumph of “Culture” (August 26, 1914) and Unconquerable (October 21, 1914), featuring the Kaiser and a defiant Albert I, King of the Belgians (Leslie Illingworth drew a parody of this for the Daily Mail during the Second World War which featured Adolf Hitler and was less flattering to Albert's son, King Leopold III, who had surrendered to the Nazis after only 18 days).
Partridge's deputy was Leonard Raven Hill (1867–1942), who produced a number of memorable war cartoons, notably The Return of the Raider ❶ (February 3, 1915), featuring the Kaiser and a battered Admiral Tirpitz, The Old Man of the Sea (July 21, 1915) with the Kaiser carrying Tirpitz (who has a paper labelled Lusitania in his pocket), and Held! ❷ (May 31, 1916), showing a German boar with its snout caught in a trap marked “Verdun”. The lot of the Tommy was also summed up in his famous cartoon of two soldiers at the Front: “Wot a life! No rest, no beer, no nuffin. It's only us keeping so cheerful as pulls us through!” ❸ (September 27, 1916)
In addition, Punch's first ever art editor, FH Townsend (1868–1920) produced some powerful images during the conflict. As well as Bravo, Belgium! mentioned earlier (BJR, Vol.25 2) he drew a spoof of the famous 1859 Richard Doyle cover of Punch but featuring the Kaiser and a dachshund in place of Mr Punch and Toby (Punch Almanack for 1916, ❹ December 1915), some striking colour almanac covers such as the one for 1915 (December 1914) with Mr Punch spearing the Kaiser dragon with a pen in the form of the Union Flag and trench humour cartoons such as The Theatre of War ❺ (March 7, 1917).
Townsend's successor as art editor in 1920 was his brother-in-law, Frank Reynolds (1876–1953), who drew the celebrated cartoon Study of a Prussian Household Having Its Morning Hate (February 24, 1915). Another of his drawings, The Triumph of Science and Civilisation (Sketch, September 2, 1914), showing a giant German soldier holding a flaming torch and walking over dead civilians as their village burns, was reproduced on the cover of the first ever issue of L'Europe Anti-Prussienne (October 5, 1914).
Yet another future art editor of Punch was George Morrow (1869–1955), who also published a book of his wartime drawings, An Alphabet of War (1915) and illustrated EV Lucas's Struwwelpeter pastiche, Swollenheaded William: Painful Stories and Funny Pictures After the German! (1914) and In Gentlest Germany (1915).
Numerous other Punch artists drew memorable war cartoons, such as GL Stampa, Wallis Mills, Fred Pegram, George Belcher and Charles Harrison (eg A Quick Change of Front, ❻ August 19, 1914).’ Many also served their country and saw action in the Great War and some achieved high rank or were decorated for valour. For example, Punch‘s main sporting cartoonist GD Armour became a lieutenant-colonel with the British Salonika Force and was awarded an OBE in 1919, EH Shepard (later to illustrate Winnie the Pooh) was a major in the Royal Artillery and received the Military Cross (1917) and Arthur Watts took part in the Zeebrugge Raid and was twice awarded the DSO.
The Bystander was another source of cartoon humour during the war years with contributors such as Edwin Morrow (brother of George) ❼ & ❽ and ET Reed (1860–1933) – son of Sir Edward James Reed, Chief Constructor of the Royal Navy – who drew The Head of the German Vam-pire (September 30, 1914) ❾ and other cartoons. Another Bystander artist was EGO Beuttler (1880–1964). A lieutenant in the Royal Navy in 1914, Beuttler began contributing to the Bystander from 1915 and Tatler from 1916, among other publications. He also produced a number of collections of his drawings, including the wartime anthologies Humour in the Navy (1916) and the Merry Mariners ❿ (1917).
The Bystander also published a number of drawings featuring one of the most famous cartoon characters of the First World War – the pipe-smoking, walrus-moustached Tommy, “Old Bill” Busby, created by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather (1887–1959), a machine-gun officer serving on the Western Front. The first of his celebrated Fragments from France series appeared in the Bystander in January 1915. However, Bairnsfather did not see it published until he was hospitalised in April 1915 after suffering shell-shock and damage to the hearing in his left ear during the second battle of Ypres. His best known cartoon, One of Our Minor Wars (November 24, 1915), shows two soldiers in a shell-hole during a bombardment with the caption: “Well, if you knows of a better 'ole, go to it!” Though popular with the troops (in 1916 alone, 250,000 copies were sold of Fragments from France, the first of eight collections of his drawings) the British military establishment objected strongly at first to “these vulgar caricatures of our heroes”. Nonetheless, his work so improved morale that he was promoted to officer-cartoonist and transferred to the intelligence department of the War Office to draw similar cartoons for the French, Italian and American forces.
Two other cartoonists whose work also appeared in overseas publications during the war were William Heath Robinson (1872–1944), whose drawings were reproduced in Fantasio and Le Pays de France and HM Bateman (1887–1970), whose work was published in La Baïennette and elsewhere.
Heath Robinson first gained international recognition during the war (the phrase “a Heath Robinson contraption” entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1917) and in 1918 he was invited to make drawings of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, some of which were published in the Sketch. He also published four anti-German cartoon collections, Some Frightful War Pictures (1915), Hunlikely! (1916), The Saintly Hun; A Book of German Virtues (1917) and Flypapers (1919).
Bateman, who was invalided out of the army with rheumatic fever in 1915, also contributed to the Sketch and (from 1916) Punch, and his famous series of social gaffes, The Man Who … (begun in Tatler in 1912), continued during the war. While on an official War Office visit to a bayonet training school at the front in France in 1918 he discovered that a number of his wartime drawings, including The Recruit Who Took to It Kindly (1917) – in which a timid soldier turns into a crazed bayonet-stabbing maniac – had been enlarged and stuck to the walls.
London Opinion, published by George Newnes (founder of Tit-Bits, Strand Magazine, Country Life and the Westminster Gazette) was another popular humorous magazine during the conflict and a collection of drawings by two of its artists, Bert Thomas and Wilton Williams (including The Inadequate Mop ⓫ September 28, 1918), was later published as a book, One Hundred War Cartoons from London Opinion (1919).
Another successful artist who worked for the magazine was Alfred Leete (who, like Bert Thomas, also served in the Artists Rifles). Not only did he draw the original version of the famous poster Britons – Kitchener Wants YOU (which first appeared on the front cover of London Opinion on September 5, 1914 with slightly different wording), but he also created the popular strip, Schmidt the Spy, for the magazine. Begun in 1914, a book of the drawings was later published (Schmidt the Spy and His Messages to Berlin, 1915) ⓬ and a film followed in 1916, with Lewis Sydney playing Schmidt. Leete, who served with the Artists Rifles in France, also illustrated two wartime books by Reginald Arkell: All the Rumours (1916) and The Bosch Book (1916).
Leete also drew the cover illustration for The Worries of Wilhelm: A Collection of Humorous and Satirical War Cartoons from the Pages of “The Passing Show” (1916). Published by Odhams, The Passing Show had begun in March 1915 and one of its main cartoonists was Leo Cheney (1878–1928) who had been Percy Bradshaw's first ever pupil at the Press Art School when it opened in 1905. A third of the drawings in The Worries of Wilhelm are by Cheney and he also drew for the Daily Chronicle and other publications including the Bystander (eg The Gnashing Room in a Berlin Hate Club, April 14, 1915). Other artists working for The Passing Show included Owen Aves, Edwin Morrow, Thomas Maybank and David Wilson (1873–1935) who notably drew German “Freedom of the Seas” ⓭ (May 20, 1916) and the cover for November 23, 1918 (At Last!), showing St George with the severed head of a dragon labelled German Militarism. Wilson also illustrated Adolphe A Braun's book Wilhelm the Ruthless, A Verbal and Pictorial Satire (1917).
Last, but by no means least, in this brief survey of wartime humour magazines, is John Bull. Founded and edited since 1906 (with backing from Odhams Press) by the then recently elected Liberal MP Horatio Bottomley (later jailed for fraud), this patriotic penny weekly was Britain's largest-selling magazine during the war, claiming a circulation of 1.35million on its front cover in 1916.
John Bull's main political cartoonist from around 1912 until 1919 was Frank Holland (fl.1895-after 1922), about whom little is known (though he may have been related to Bottomley's private secretary, WF Holland). In the 1890s, Holland had edited the comic paper The Gleam and contributed to many children's comics, and in the early 1900s had drawn for Fun, Black & White and the Daily Express (political cartoons). During the war he was also political cartoonist on the weekly Reynold's News.
For the issue of August 15, 1914, Bottomley asked Holland to redraw the cover of John Bull, transforming the traditional English farmer figure into a patriotic sailor with a cap-band, which read “HMS Victory” ⓮ The same issue contained Holland's cartoon A Place in the Sun, ⓯ showing the Kaiser sweating under a sun bristling with bayonets. Some of his John Bull drawings were even featured in “lightning sketch” versions for Pathé films. These included Climbing the Greasy Pole (1916) in which the Kaiser tries to climb the pole to “World Power” while the sun of “The Allies” shines down on him.
