For centuries political cartoons have provided a teasing record of our social history. And one of the finest archives is here in Putney. Simon Collins is drawn in...
There is something engagingly quaint about the Lower Richmond Road at Putney: a neat realm of mansion blocks and small, independent shops, each one a portal to its own unique world. Edwardian England, it seems, is alive and well beside the Thames.
One portal in particular – slotted in between a comic book dealer and a bespoke hairdressing salon – provides a beguiling path into an increasingly endangered place: the sharp, satirical, ingenious world of the British political cartoon.
Dr Tim Benson is your guide, modest but vigorous proprietor of the Political Cartoon Gallery and Café, and a man who surely knows as much about the subject as anyone else in the land.
Transience, he knows, is the cartoon’s natural state. Like the newspapers in which they appear, these witty, perceptive, but ultimately dated creations turn stale faster than yesterday’s sandwiches. Look at a topical cartoon from six months ago, let alone from yesteryear, and you’d be hard-pressed to recall the story to which it referred.
“Nothing dates like the topical,” reflects Tim philosophically.
And yet, while the stories that spawned them – the shredded heap of scandals, resignations and diplomatic feuds – find themselves consigned to the bin, many of the actual cartoons have an afterlife.
For here in Tim’s gallery, preserved for posterity, are the original artworks that once generated so much mockery and mirth. The emotions have long since subsided, but the images live on, extraordinary caricatures exuding glee undimmed by the passage of time.
Here you might encounter Theresa May – looking notably Thatcherite in her blue two-piece suit and possessed of a very long nose – suspended on a zip wire above the cathedral in Florence. One hand holds the British flag, the other the European.
And here is Jeremy Corbyn on Brighton beach during a Labour Party conference. His feet are as long as his thighs, and he needs both hands to hold a giant phallic stick of rock with the letter M, for Momentum, at its tip. The picture is in the saucy 1950s postcard style of Donald McGill. Neither image has a caption, nor needed any when published.
“The wonderful thing about cartoons is their immediacy,” says Tim, who preserves these phantasmagoric images, charged with the mood of the day, for their historical significance.
What they offer is a social and political record: a series of rapid glimpses into the public realm as from a train window; vignettes of the felt experience of history. In May 2018 a safety report on the Grenfell Tower fire was regarded by many as a whitewash. In the Guardian, Steve Bell depicted the charred husk of the tower block beneath a huge pot of white paint poured over the surface.
It was while seeking a subject for his PhD that historian Tim found himself at the University of Kent, home of the British Cartoon Archive, which keeps the artwork of some 200,000 editorial and socio-political cartoons.
His research became a book, while subsequent volumes included the weighty The Cartoon Century: Modern Britain Through the Eyes of Its Cartoonists, plus studies of such notables as Illingworth of the Daily Mail, Giles, Low and Strube – “the world’s most popular cartoonist” – who was at the Daily Express for nearly 40 years.
Every autumn Tim selects the best political cartoons of the year for an annual exhibition. To each one he attaches an explanation – on that Mrs May image, for example, what she said in her Florence speech and how it contradicted Boris Johnson, who had famously been suspended on a zip wire.
Yet the event horizon of the political cartoon may be looming. Newspaper sales have been plummeting for 20 years while social media platforms have come to dominate public discourse. Cartoonists are shunted aside or not employed at all.
In the 1980s there were about 300 notable newspaper cartoonists in America – today there are only a handful. As for the UK, Steve Bell sums it up. His four adult children, he says, have never bought a paper in their lives.
Further, digital composition on computerised tablet is replacing pen and ink, while editorial insistence on colour provides a further threat. Quite apart from the tension it creates between vibrancy and clarity, it also speaks of a shift away from the moral perspective inherent in satire towards pure entertainment.
For the political cartoon extinction beckons, just as once it did for the music hall and the market square juggler. Evolution is required. But at least there will remain thousands of these amazing images as reminders of what people used to feel.
original-political-cartoon.com; Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2019 from late Oct; David Low’s unpublished cartoons, titled David Low Censored, until Oct 25
