Churchill: A Life In Cartoons
by Tim Benson, Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99

HERE’s a dinner party ice breaker: Greatest Ever Briton? Discuss!
Apart from a couple of smart arse dinner guests, (“Mister Blobby!”, “Basil Brush!”) it would be mere seconds before “Winston Churchill’ was adamantly offered up.

Churchill, like Wellington, was a brand before advertisers even came up with the concept. Already in his mid 60s when he became prime minister, his energy and phlegmatic character came to define how Britons saw themselves – resolute, implacable, resilient in the face of adversity.

Even Churchill’s physical appearance lent itself to the advertiser’s Bulldog Breed brief — short, stocky, round-shouldered, pugnacious, with a jutting-jawed countenance.

Ideal for caricature. Many caricaturists captured that distinctive figure in a few deft lines, surely none better than Sir David Low, the Kiwi who made his way to England in 1919 after cutting his teeth in Sydney.

Tim Benson’s Churchill: A Life In Cartoons is a fascinating compendium of Churchill’s mercurial political life, mostly surrounding his own “finest hour,” captured by cartoonists and caricaturists from around the world, their work as snapshots, as milestones, marking not only Tempora but Mores.

There are few alive today who lived through the boarding of the German tanker Altmark during the so-called “phoney war” in the early part of WWII, but Arthur Potts’s 1940 cartoon in the Bristol Evening World gives a flavour of the incendiary mood within Britain at the time.

The Altmark had steamed into neutral waters carrying 299 British prisoners, certain that by hiding in non-combatant territory, they would deal two blows — pain and humiliation. Potts’s cartoon shows a pugnacious Churchill in his cavalry riding boots kicking Hitler’s backside. Hitler, in a brilliant cartooning flourish, is drawn as a pirate, ignominiously hoofed six feet into the air — an image straight out of a DC Thomson comic. With a few strokes of a pen, Hitler the bogeyman was reduced to an absurdity.

It was revealed that Churchill, not the appeaser Neville Chamberlain had written the order to board the tanker and free the prisoners, a mission that was achieved with the release of all prisoners and the deaths of seven Germans.

There is no doubt that Potts’s cartoon, and the many like it, bolstered Churchill’s reputation and put him in the frame as Britain’s preferred leader when the shooting war started, and how many patently inadequate, failing politicians have we been subjected to in the decades since, who’ve attempted to cloak themselves in that cigar-chomping, indomitable aura by riding in a tank or sitting in the cockpit of an Air Force jet?

None have succeeded. It’s not enough to have Hercules’s sword. You must have Hercules’s arm.

Not unexpectedly, in those days of empire, the cartoonists featured are not all British.

New Zealand-born Low, Egyptian-born political cartoonist Kem (Kimon Evan Marengo) and South African Bob Connolly are featured, as well as those numerous British cartoonists whose work is excellent, but whose names have sadly faded into the mists of time, including Glaswegian Jimmy Friell “Gabriel” whose arresting and simple pen/brushwork took him from the slums of Glasgow to London’s Fleet Street to cartoon for the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star!) and put him within touching distance of Low.

Instantly evocative marquee names like Heath Robinson also make an appearance in Benson’s homage not only to Churchill but those cartoonists who patently enjoyed portraying him.

Churchill: A Life In Cartoons also covers Churchill’s post-war years, beginning barely a couple of months after VE day with an ignominious, and (for some) unbelievable general election defeat for the Conservative Party — a landslide win for Labour.

Despite Churchill’s personal popularity, Britain, battered, starving, and shell shocked after the second colossal conflagration in 30 years, chose change.

The editorial cartoonist’s art is necessarily to encapsulate sometimes disparate and conflicting aspects of a situation or episode (or era, even) in a single drawing, especially in such a way that (a) the person in the street can comprehend the message, and (b) offer a unique, less aligned “take” on the issue.

Churchill’s so-called “Missouri” (or “Iron Curtain”) speech, given at President Truman’s invitation in 1946, was aimed almost exclusively at a US audience, it warned of a Soviet expansion and exhorted the US to guard its nuclear secrets.

The speech, widely regarded as a verbal starting gun for the Cold War was popular in the US, but caused great consternation in Europe, in the extant Soviet territories and those later to be invaded.

WH Woodburn (Hengest) cartooning in the Manchester Evening News (MEN) summarised the Missouri Speech as a black cat being tossed by Churchill among a flock of startled pigeons. If the average MEN reader, literate or not, couldn’t access the nuance or subtext of Churchill’s speech, he was nevertheless now aware that Churchill the statesman had upset the applecart. “Hengest” had done his job admirably.

Churchill of course ascended to the prime ministership again in 1951, to resign in 1955, even though the Conservatives won the general election that year. Now, a new generation of cartoonists would take to portraying the 80-year-old’s rounded, avuncular features first as a backbencher, then in retirement, and their styles basically conformed to those greats on whose shoulders they stood.

However, a pendulum of change had swung its way through cartooning. Even anti-Churchill cartoons drawn by his foreign enemies of the past had formal style, an element of grudging respect. Now, a new generation of enfants terrible, inspired less by Gillray than by Picasso or Francis Bacon, had arrived.
 
Some, like Gerald Scarfe, commissioned by The Times, encountered Churchill physically and mentally frail. Scarfe, being Scarfe, did not hold back in the savagery of his caricature. The Times chose not to publish, but a newly founded satirical publication snapped up the work. Private Eye had opened for business. The world of editorial cartooning had changed forever.

On October 15 1964, in the first general election since 1895 without Churchill as a candidate, the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson was victorious, albeit with a small majority.

Here’s my final statement, and I stress this is a personal view: whether you are a Churchill devotee or a critic: the man had to wait until 1953, eight years after WWII, to be offered a knighthood. If nothing else serves as a comment on the levels to which the honours system has since been debased, surely that does?