March 8, 2015

Finest Hour 158, Spring 2013

Page 44

By Nicholas Hiley and Mark Bryant

“HIS FAULTLESS PEN-AND-INK TECHNIQUE WAS ESSENTIALLY NATURALISTIC YET MASTERLY IN ITS VARIETY OF TEXTURES, ARRANGEMENTS OF TONES, AND SUBTLE ATMOSPHERIC PERSPECTIVE —TIMOTHY S. BENSON, POLITICAL CARTOON GALLERY (http://xRL.us/bn3by8)

Leslie Illingworth was born in Barry, Glamorgan, South Wales on 2 September 1902, the son of a Yorkshire surveyor who worked in the Engineers’ Department of Barry Docks. After attending St. Anthan church school, he won the first of a series of scholarships from his county grammar school. He joined the lithographic department of the Western Mail in Cardiff, “because my father used to golf with Sir Robert J. Webber, chief of the newspaper.”

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Whilst working afternoons for the Western Mail, Illingworth attended the Cardiff School of Art, where he had won another scholarship. Attending with him was Ronald Niebour, another cartoonist who would be his colleague later on Daily Mail and Punch, but they lost touch when Niebour went into the Merchant Navy. He was publishing cartoons in the Football Express, and continued to draw sporting cartoons for the Western Mail, while attending Cardiff Art School, as well as deputising for the paper’s political cartoonist, the ailing J.M. Staniforth.

In 1920 Illingworth won another scholarship, this time to the Royal College of Art, where he received encouragement from the painter, draughtsman and art writer William Rothenstein. But when Staniforth died a few months later, the Western Mail offered Illingworth his job at £6 a week, and he left college to take up the post in 1921.

In 1924, continuing to work for the newspaper, Illingworth returned to London to study at the Slade School. A new opportunity for commissions was Owen Aves, editor of Passing Show, and in 1927, after Aves became an artist’s agent, he found enough work for Illingworth to go freelance. The same year he received his first commission from Punch: “I was a good artist,” Illingworth later recalled, “and I could make a lot of money.”

For part of 1927-28 Illingworth travelled to North America, returning to continue his art training in Berlin and Paris. He had a Paris flat and studied at the Académie Julian. His career blossomed, with freelance assignments for Nash’s Pall Mall, Passing Show, The Strand Magazine, Good Housekeeping, London Opinion, Red Magazine, Wills’ Magazine, Answers, Tit-Bits and, later, Life. He also produced commercial illustrations, such as “Beer is Best,” and advertising art for Winsor & Newton, Grey’s Cigarettes, Symington’s Soups, Eiffel Tower Lemonade and Wolsey underwear. In 1930 he again visited Canada and the United States, and in 1937 he drafted his first “big cut” for Punch, which he continued to supply with regular political cartoons.

When Percy Fearon (the famous “Poy”) retired from the Daily Mail in 1938, Illingworth applied for his job. A big London paper was a prime opportunity, but Illingworth bylined his sample drawings “MacGregor,” lest there be any prejudice over employing “Illingworth of Pu n c h .” There was good reason for caution: Percy Bradshaw of the Press Art School, asked to recommend cartoonists for the Daily Mail, said Illingworth was “not among those who, in my view, would be able to hold the job down.” It also seemed possible that Illingworth’s detailed style might not be adaptable to daily cartoons.

But the work he submitted was liked, and he joined the Mail staff in November 1939, his country already at war—which offered him a plethora of subject matter. He produced a cartoon a day, noting that “it was absolutely easy—there’s no doubt about it.” He also produced work for Ministries of Information and Health.

Illingworth’s busiest time in those years began on Thursday mornings, after his Punch cartoon had been commissioned the previous day. This was the toughest part of his week, when he had “a Punch cartoon and two Mail cartoons to produce before Saturday.” He often worked through the night and into the next day to finish his detailed drawings. His wartime cartoons were would go on working away at it indefinitely; sometimes it had to be snatched from him by cunning or brute force.”

The result of his intense labour was a highly-detailed, distinctive cartoon which took a day to produce and was designed to make a political point that would remain topical for a week. His and Muggeridge’s most controversial collaboration was a portrait of an aged and apparently ailing Churchill, which appeared in Punch on 3 February 1954. It was captioned: “Man Goeth Forth unto His Work and to His Labour until the Evening,” greeted with consternation at Downing Street, and especially by the Prime Minister himself. (See Tim Benson, “The Cartoon That Shocked the Prime Minister,” Finest Hour 113, Winter 2001-02.) Illingworth’s Churchill cartoons had been generally positive up until then, but Muggeridge was a critic, believing  WSC had remained in office far too long.

Bernard Hollowood, who succeeded Muggeridge and edited Punch through 1969, agreed that Illingworth lacked political passion and “produced very few of his own ideas.” Instead, “the chief political cartoons were produced communally, and the method suited Leslie.” The idea for the cartoon would be conceived during the Wednesday lunch, and, as one Punch writer explained in 1966: “Every aspect of the drawing is discussed, Illingworth makes a number of roughs in which the position of figures and objects is finalised, and then returns to his Barbican flat to start work on the actual finish.”

In 1962 Leslie Illingworth was voted Political and Social Cartoonist of the Year by the Cartoonist Club of Great Britain, and in 1966 he became one of the founder members of the British Cartoonists’ Association, serving as its first President. He was earning £1000 a year from Punch and £7000 a year from the Daily Mail, making regular trips to the Houses of Parliament to study his subjects in action: “I have a season ticket to the gallery—there’s usually a lovely show going on there.” He was fascinated by politicians’ concern for their appearance—“They know all the angles…and they’re always combing themselves”—and their need for cartoons of them: “To be left out…that’s death and destruction.” Yet he admitted he was unable to caricature women; he might quickly have had to learn had he worked in the age of Margaret Thatcher.

At sixty-six, Illingworth began to slow his hectic pace. He was succeeded by Wally Fawkes at Punch in 1968, but continued with the Mail for another year, working in close consultation with the editor. In the morning he would listen to the news and read the papers, working up a number of roughs which they talked over at lunchtime. After a final subject was chosen, he would return to his office and work up his final version. An interviewer said it might take Illingworth three hours to develop his cartoon from a final sketch approved by the editor.

Retiring from the Mail in 1969, the artist took up farming in Sussex. But he lived on in the M a i l as “Organ Morgan,” the Welsh farmer in Wally Fawkes’s cartoon strip, “Flook.” Four years later, short of cash to pay back taxes, he returned to the fray, standing in for Paul Rigby on the Sun, and producing a weekly cartoon for the News of the World in 1974.

His habitual work habits remained, but he no longer needed to submit a wide menu of ideas. Every Thursday in Sussex, he said, he would read the papers intently and produce a pencil sketch. The next day he would “drive up to…Bouverie Street to show it to the editor and ink it in….Very seldom do the editor and his executives suggest what should be drawn. Sometimes I take up to three or four samples. Only once did I have to follow their ideas.” In 1975 he received an Honorary D.Litt. from the University of Kent, the educational cachet he had long desired.

Illingworth used a Gillott 290 pen with Higgins ink on hot-pressed fashion board, roughing out a drawing first in pencil; he was one of the first cartoonists to employ scraperboard. He claimed to concentrate best surrounded by “lots of chatter,” and his Daily Mail office was often full of his colleagues. He disliked seeing his own work in print, claiming that he would “skip the pages I’m in.”

A great admirer of Carl Giles, famed cartoonist of the Daily Express—“no one, anywhere, can come up to Giles”— Illingworth thought of himself as “a red-nosed comic artist.” But his work was widely admired by his fellow cartoonists, and his classical style has been likened to the early work of the great Victorian cartoonist John Tenniel.

Asked how he managed to survive so long in Fleet Street, Illingworth said: “When the editor comes in looking for someone to sack, I hide behind the door and he doesn’t see me.”

Leslie Illingworth died on 20 December 1979. In 2009 a commemorative blue plaque was placed on his former home in Barry.

Dr. Hiley is curator of the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent at Canterbury. Mr. Bryant is an independent author. Their article is published by kind permission of the authors and the website of the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, Canterbury (www.cartoons.ac.uk).