Its getting to that time of year again when
the sun becomes but a fleeting acquaintance and a chill draws itself upon us
during the stark days, making home a snug and contended place to spend ones
time.
Around this time of year I enjoy a Sunday
evening with old books, be they novels or periodicals – or even Victorian
newspapers – to bask in the warmth of their pages as our ancestors did in the
days before electricity, when home entertainment on a dark autumn evening came
in the form of a few hours spent with the a Tennyson or Dickens, or, for a bit
of fun-poking and scathing wit, Punch.
I’m lucky enough, as I’ve boasted upon
these pages in the past, to own a few Punch’s myself, and I never tire of
thumbing the pages of them and marvelling not only at the incredible sketches
and cartoons, but the marvellously clever humour that simply isn’t available in
today’s society.
Just over eighteen months ago I was lucky
enough to have Andre Gailani write a superb history of Punch (which you can
read here), and I’m delighted to say that he has furnished me with a second installment, this time exploring the magazine’s development and evolution coming
out of the Victorian era and into the twentieth century, where it continued to
mock and satirize the establishment.
A Victorian Institution in the Twentieth
Century.
Part 1: A Brave New Century
It wasn't All Change in 1900 for PUNCH magazine,
but steady-as-she-goes. For one, the editorial staff, writers and cartoonists
were all Victorians: Editor Francis Burnand had contributed since 1863, Linley
Sambourne since 1867, and its greatest asset Sir John Tenniel who would retire
a year later, drew his first Punch illustration in 1850. A few of them
continued into the mid Twentieth Century: Lewis Baumer, George Stampa, Leonard
Raven-Hill and Bernard Partridge worked into the Thirties, Forties and Fifties
while a new generation of writers and artists such as PG Wodehouse, AP Herbert,
EV Lucas, George Morrow and EH Shepard began their long associations with the
magazine at the start of the century. The weekly issues from 1900 saw a wide
range of content and cartoon styles that celebrated the new century and
exported English-British culture on the back of its Responsibilities of
Empire while Mr Punch’s Extra Pages had guest authors such as Arthur Conan
Doyle and Somerset Maugham contributing one-off stories. But as change and
progress at home and abroad were being pushed through by powerful undercurrents
of organised labour, voting equality and rising nationalist independence, PUNCH
was firmly anchored in its own Victorian imperial glory. That year the PUNCH
offices moved from 85 Fleet Street a few hundred yards south to 10 Bouverie
Street where their printer-owners Bradbury and Agnew had already published (as
Bradbury and Evans) the Daily News, Thackeray and Dickens.Responsibilities of Empire |
PUNCH didn't just have its finger on the
pulse of English culture, it was the pulse. Its cartoonists illustrated for the
top authors, adverts and information posters. Its writers were respected
authors and librettists, playwrights and poets, journalists and critics witnessing
first-hand the politics, arts and social developments recorded in Sketches of
Parliament, At the Play and the many ‘social cut’ cartoons. A handful were
knighted: John Tenniel, Francis Burnand, Bernard Partridge, AP Herbert; Owen
Seaman's 1914 knighthood was upgraded to a Baronet upon retiring as PUNCH
editor. William Haselden was offered a knighthood, and long standing
contributors PG Wodehouse and John Betjeman given the honour late in life. Many
regular contributors and staff were trained barristers, journalists, teachers,
designers, university dons (Owen Seaman), MPs (AP Herbert, Christopher Hollis,
Clement Freud, Giles Brandreth, Roy Hattersley), a publisher (EV Lucas,
chairman of Methuen) an architect (Acanthus designed Gatwick Airport’s Beehive
lounge), jazz musicians (Trog, Humph, Benny Green, Miles Kington, George
Melly), actors (Bernard Partridge, Joyce Grenfell), artists (Jack Butler Yeats)
an inventor (Rowland Emett), sportsmen (RC Lehmann, Bernard Hollowood),
engineers (Fougasse, Sambourne), novelists (George du Maurier: Trilby; Anthony
Powell: Dance to the Music of Time; Patrick Ryan: How I Won The War; Ernest
Bramah: Kai Lung; Keith Waterhouse: Billy Liar; Alan Hackney: Private's
Progress; Margaret Drabble, Elspeth Huxley, Peter Dickinson, C.S. Lewis) poets
(John Betjeman, Virginia Graham), military intelligence (AA Milne, Malcolm
Muggeridge), War Propaganda Bureau (Thomas Derrick was its Art Editor)
broadcasters (Michael Parkinson, Frank Muir, Joan Bakewell, Ann Leslie) and several
served in either of the World Wars including in WW2 Ronald Searle, David
Langdon, Alfred Bestall (WW1 and WW2), and Basil Boothroyd.
"Fougasse", Kenneth Bird's
nom-de-plume (French for an unreliable WW1 landmine), was a product of the
frontline: his first contribution sent into PUNCH was from a war hospital bed
in 1916 where he was critically injured. The series of articles Our Man in
America in the 1950's were written by the iconic PG Wodehouse who had been a
regular contributor to PUNCH from 1902-1914. In the 1970's the staff tried to
get his signature on the Punch Table but couldn't overcome the problem of him
being in America .
Jan Struther (who's PUNCH work was noticed by The Times and went on to write
Mrs Miniver) wrote several stories and poems illustrated by Anne Harriet Fish
and EH Shepard. And PUNCH theatre critic Eric Keown's short story Sir Tristram
Goes West was turned into the successful Hollywood
film The Ghost Goes West (1936) starring Robert Donat.
Various high profile regulars and guest writers,
historians and thinkers crop up such as John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, JB
Priestley, Margaret Drabble, Alan Bullock, and TV personalities David Frost,
Clive James, Michael Parkinson, Frank Muir and Harry Secombe. The cartoonists Partridge,
Illingworth, Fougasse and Langdon all produced public information posters for
government ministries, the most celebrated of which were the Careless Talk
Costs Lives campaign for the Ministry of Information by Fougasse in 1940.
Fougasse was awarded a CBE in 1946 in recognition of this contribution.
PUNCH is a record of massive cultural
change in Britain
during a century and a half. It also charts the continuity and struggle of
British identity, or more accurately, Englishness as produced for and consumed
by the middle classes at home and abroad in the imperial/colonial Empire.
Our modern preoccupations with celebrity,
crime, fashion, science and technology, the arts, film and leisure are
delivered in Victorian and Edwardian cartoons with the freshness of a new diary
entry often lacking in posed and lifeless contemporary photos. It was at the
forefront of describing and re-imagining a new world of exciting discoveries,
scientific breakthroughs, New Art and New Politics and shows how these layers
enhance or challenge the normal man or woman on the street. When a new form of self-defence
called Jujitsu becomes popularised in Western media, we see it applied to
politics with The Suffragette that knew Jiu-jitsu. The Arrest: one woman,
sleeves rolled up, and police casualties impaled on the railings.
When a new dance called the Tango arrives we see a policeman arresting a Suffragette using his latest dance move. The Spread of Tango:
Politicians naturally, were fair game.
Gladstone, Disraeli and Lloyd George were praised and pilloried, but respected
in equal measure. Members of Parliament, Prime Ministers and Totalitarian
leaders all went through the mill of satire, from Asquith to Eden, Atlee to
Wilson, Macmillan to Thatcher, Louis Napoleon, Tsar Nicholas I, Kaiser Wilhelm
II, Stalin and Hitler. The young Churchill grew up reading PUNCH seeing his
father Randolph mercilessly ridiculed, and learnt about history and the world
through its full page political cartoons. These often depicted Britannia, the
British Lion, John Bull, the German Eagle, Russian Bear, French Poodle or
Cockerel, Indian Tiger or Afghan Cat. Early on, PUNCH's staunch
anti-Irish/Nationalist/Catholic stance depicted Irish Monkeys, Frankensteins
and sub-human Fenians.
A recurring Imperialist tone of saving
various peoples (and by extension, taking control) such as the Irish damsel
Eire from a separatist dragon, Africans in the Congo from the snake-like Belgian
rubber coils, or Indians from Famine, all echoed Britain's burden of
responsibility to tame nature and Civilise the world. America was
'Little Jonathan', a rowdy upstart that a paternal John Bull had trouble
guiding. By the time the Great War ended, that relationship had turned upside
down along with the old orders: Europe, the British Empire ,
Class, Gender, Culture itself. The once successful pattern of Britannia or the
British Lion meting out vengeance on rebel Sepoys in India
or arguing the moral case against Belgium
in Africa was over. But just as the sun began
setting on Empire, the shoots of a 'brighter' London and the Bright Young
Things appeared in the 1920s, the term ignited by reports of scientific
discoveries such as Einstein's Relativity theory in 1919 and the requirement
for a new way of looking at the world and living in it. Readers were consumers:
gadgets, inventions and popular science fed this need for a new society that
was at once broken and breaking away from the devastation of WW1.
The age of the consumer coincided with the Golden
Ages of illustration, mass journalism, advertising, radio and cinema, and PUNCH
through its anti-hero Mr Punch rode these horses simultaneously like a circus entertainer.
But at its inception the magazine was not a commercial venture: it was a labour
of love started by a few talented humourists, became a magazine, later a Club,
and, adopted by an eager public, a “National Institution”. Early on in December
1842 editor Mark Lemon agreed to be bought-out by printer-proprietors Bradbury
& Evans (from 1872 Bradbury and Agnew) essentially saving a struggling but
popular publication in what was at the time in publishing a highly vulnerable
venture. They used a new, fast, accurate press to distribute the magazine
efficiently and give it the edge over rivals; less than a hundred years later
PUNCH had to increase its editorial pages because its advertising pages had
grown significantly and it made more money through advertising revenue than
circulation. In 1918 PUNCH had 16 pages of editorial content. By 1925 it had to
increase them to 28 pages in order not to be swamped by the adverts.
While new forms of expression such as
Modernism and Art Deco took off and Futurism and Dada were appropriated by
Fascism and Soviet neo-realism, the New Woman too was constantly evolving and
pushing the limits of what was permissible in dress, vocation and behaviour. Fashions
changed with the practicalities of physical movement in leisure and employment
such as cycling, dancing, ice-skating or factory work. If mid-Nineteenth
century daring would be to visit the criminal courts un-chaperoned with a male
friend or cycling in the fin-de-siècle, then in the first half of the Twentieth
century it was Votes for Women and female aviators. PUNCH was at hand to take
note of these structural and cultural shifts in society. The Victorian New
Woman from the 1860s onwards: usually a university graduate or doctor, had, by
the turn of the century become a cycling, smoking, card-playing and altogether
more confident, physical, intrepid, politicised and sexualized creature. Women
started to match men's leisure activities and professions, and it was a natural
progression to demand the right to vote.
The New Woman was reinvented every decade
from Actress in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, munitions worker in WW1,
the Flapper/Bright Young Thing in the Twenties, female aviator and business
owner in the Thirties, Land Girl and WAAF transport pilots in the Forties, sophisticated
Mary Poppins type in the Fifties with the New Look; sexually liberated and
objectified in the Sixties, Feminist in the Seventies; social climber, power
dresser, politician and Prime Minister in the Eighties. The expedient gender
equality of WW1 and WW2 which included work at operations desks, as Bletchley
code breakers, Make Do and Mend, and Dig for Victory developed further in the
post-war austerity period with rising aspiration, travel, mass consumerism,
Rock & Roll, the Pill and Feminism.
Fast-forward to 1967 and future PUNCH editor William Davis wrote a congratulatory open letter to Minister for Transport Barbara Castle in the series Letters to Our Masters. A few years later he invited her to be PUNCH editor for one issue replacing the editorial staff with women and sub-titling it Judy.
Sexism and chauvinism however hadn’t changed; female suffrage and greater control of women’s lives (choosing whether or not to have sex/babies/careers) in an increasingly sexualized culture only increased these tensions, and the cartoons reflected this. The corporate world was still male dominated. PUNCH’s largely male middle class readers would have simply acknowledged the message in the cartoons confirming a misogynistic status quo rather than being made to ask questions or prompt social change. Gone was the moral guidance of Mr Punch (some might say thankfully) regularly popping-up to tell off Strikers and Socialists, or venting off about Suffragette vandalism, while balancing it with cartoons such as The Dignity of the Franchise. By the 1960s Mr Punch's job was redundant: the cartoon preaching more to the dyed-in-the-wool type than to the New Man. The joke cartoon, social cut, political full page (Big or Large Cut) and later the Front Cover took over in revealing the surreal and the cynical. Just as these cartoons dealt with racial issues in the 60s and 70s with 'token blacks' now it was the irony of ‘token women’ in corporate boardrooms
or exclusively male committees on female equality. Later however, the dynamics of this
Mass travel, motoring and cheap flights in
a new Jet Age from the 1950s enhanced a global economy: cartoons on regional
dialects or cultural differences, holidays, corporate settings and immigration appear
in the 60s acknowledging a re-evaluation of Britain 's
status within Europe and the World. The Come
to Europe and Come to Britain cartoons of 1960 developed into questions of the English North-South divide; while Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, economic
recession, unemployment, De-valuation, strikes and neo-fascism by 1970 are counterpointed
by anti-British immigration cartoons from an Australian perspective.
And a
spine-chilling 1977 front cover cartoon by Jensen If We Had A Fascist Britain highlights how far the country had gone, could go and in so doing, how it had
to retreat. By being extreme or surreal, cartoons infuse important issues with
humour and like the best comedy, question and re-balance a country's morals.
This was PUNCH's strength: it showed you the abyss in advance. It was an early
warning alert, a satnav for the cultural psyche. On many occasions the Big Cut
political cartoon was a cautionary tale of what could happen: The Awful
Warning by EH Shepard, still pertinent in today's international affairs, was
superbly cynical in its anti-appeasement stance when British and European
opinion at the time was largely pro-appeasement. We also see Neville
Chamberlain building a sand castle as Mussolini splashes with him in the rising
tide; or as a hesitant firefighter as buildings burn, a foretaste of the Blitz and
WW2.
North-South Divide |
If We Had a Fascist Britain |
The Awful Warning |
But the nature of ‘detail’ changed: from du
Maurier’s fascinating Society cartoons of the 1860s-1890s rendering every
crease and crumple of a lady's dress (including theatrical instruction in the
caption), to Phil May's simplified Art Nouveau lines of street life in the
early 20th Century, to Fougasse’s distanced view of crowds as detailed
squiggles, to the fine-art illustrative colour detail of Frank Reynolds and Leslie
Illingworth; the graphic style starting from Linley Sambourne and running
through to Norman Thelwell, Mike Williams and Quentin Blake, to the gradually
changing facial expressions in HM Bateman's panel cartoons; Pont's backgrounds
and genteel familiarity, Rowland Emett's surreal fantasies, Michael ffolkes’
delicate, comical rococo line, Ronald Searle and Ralph Steadman’s sharp scrawls,
David Myers’ childlike simplicity and Andre Francois' cartoons where readers
deciphered the joke by making connections within the details. These were all
masters of their art.
The Choice |
In ‘cartoon reality’ people go about their
daily business conversing with neighbours, going to the office, boating, buying
houses, holidaying, driving, playing tennis or parlour games, dining and
entertaining; and tripping over metaphorical objects, concepts or speech. In so
doing they distil the dreams and harsh truths of ‘our reality’. And we also see
the imagined but likely, private conversations of politicians and royalty in
their offices and chambers. Bernard Partridge places you directly inside the
room where Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin addresses Edward VIII over the
abdication crisis in The Choice.
It is this privileged 'fly on the wall
history' that PUNCH invites us into that is most exciting. Another cartoon parodying
the Concert of Europe shows foreign powers waiting to dance with a partner; one
chooses an unsatisfactory partner to John Bull’s consternation. The real-life Ping-Pong
Diplomacy of 1971 between the USA
and China
was borrowed from PUNCH in 1901.
Frequently cartoons dared to go even
further than what was possible in an age of optimism and discovery. One could hardly
imagine a plasma TV with two-way communication in the 1870s but PUNCH ‘made it real’
in one of George du Maurier's visionary cartoons, the Telephonoscope. Another
by Charles Harrison in 1901 shows a flying policeman stopping speeding cars in
the sky. As soon as a new invention appeared, PUNCH re-invented it with its
attendant quirks. This was the cutting edge of PUNCH’s Brave New World: humans
combining with technology and creating confusion.
Telephonoscope |
Video Calling |
This contrasts with Tenniel's political cartoon fifty years earlier of The Lady of Threadneedle Street bailing out the banks - represented as naughty boys, heads bowed in shame. Corporate and institutional capitalism of the previous century had given rise to personal capitalism in the Thirties just as the European nations were beginning to settle their Great War debts.
In 1951 the Festival of Britain renewed the
legacy of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and PUNCH had its own Festival of Punch.
In this special edition sub-titled The New Elizabethan Age the modest yet proud,
quirky yet sure-footed English are examined through cartoons and humorous
articles. Kenneth Bird, whose non-de-plume "Fougasse" was famous for
his wartime Careless Talk Costs Lives posters resurrected his own type of Mass
Observation, The Changing Face Of Britain from WW2: a series of
spot-the-difference cartoons showing London crowd behaviour before and after
war.
The Charivari pages at the start of each
issue were the equivalent to today's Twitter: short snippets of news, trivia, jokes
and gossip from the previous week and sparked off a dialogue with its readers.
In the Victorian era the magazine was postage-stamped so one could re-post the
magazine- this media sharing was as high technology as you could get in the
1860s. For every 1 magazine of PUNCH sold 9 other people would have held that
copy as it was passed around, re-posted or left on coffee tables to enjoy. In a
circulation of around 125,000 in 1973 this equated to more than 1 million
readers, or ‘followers’ in today's currency. But it wasn't a one-way dialogue. Starting
in 1958 PUNCH started a weekly Toby Competition setting readers challenges: to
write a fictional review on a well-known work of art, or a poem in the style of
Homer; the top prize being a cartoon original. In 1965 PUNCH published reader
letters for the first time and held a cartoon competition for children (a teenage
cartoonist Ken Pyne was discovered) and in 1969 started the long-running
Caption Competition, really a cartoon 'remix' by readers. Winners received a
cash prize of five pounds (later rising to ten pounds). These important
features of the magazine made PUNCH a companion in the livingroom or a home
from home for Colonials abroad, a small A4-ish sized corner of England in a
remote outpost of Empire.
The Fancy Portraits series in the 1870s of
Victorian celebrities, politicians, authors, do-gooders, innovators and icons
re-emerged in the 20th century with Punch Personalities and Heroes of Our Time.
In one portrait Arthur Conan Doyle is dramatically chained by an evil Sherlock
Holmes in Bernard Partridge's excellent full page cartoon.
In the 1950s
PUNCH made brilliant use of Ronald Searle's talents to produce double-page
colour posters of Princess Margaret, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh,
Bertrand Russell and Sir Malcolm Sergeant among others, while William Hewison
added Sporting Heroes and Artist's Corner. His As They Might Have Been re-cast
celebrities such as Graham Greene, Richard Dimbleby and Joe Orton in different
occupations.
Later the portrait became an illustrated
interview in Passing Through. The actors Roger Moore, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Telly
Savalas and many legends from film, music and the arts were interviewed by
David Taylor and sketched by the inimitable ffolkes. Michael Parkinson, Melvyn
Bragg, Clement Freud, Humphrey Lyttelton and Harry Secombe were regular
contributors and occasional pieces appear by Michael Palin, Terry Jones and
John Cleese, Joanna Lumley and even Paul McCartney. PUNCH had not just absorbed
a readership of the 'silent majority' but the glitterati.
Several lightbulb moments go off: the
future poet laureate John Betjeman regularly contributed to PUNCH and was an
editorial member of the Punch Table; Alfred Lord Tennyson in the 1840s
submitted two poems (and was accepted, unsurprisingly). Caran D'Ache in the
1890s drew one of the first captionless panel cartoons in PUNCH (though there
is evidence of a Charles Keene panel cartoon in the 1860s), PG Wodehouse was a
regular since 1902, Graham Greene wrote once or twice a year, and the inspiration
for the John le Carré spy ‘George Smiley’, John Bingham, wrote poetry and prose
on occasion: his “Telephone Conversation, 1943” of a supposed cross-wired
eavesdropped exchange is a revelation. Readers at the time would not have known
his day-job was an MI5 intelligence officer. Charles Dickens, Garibaldi and
Mark Twain visited the Punch Table. Winnie the Pooh first appeared in PUNCH as
Edward Bear with the prototype drawing by Alfred Bestall not EH Shepard; and the
illustration of a girl which later became Alice in Wonderland had already been
created by Tenniel in a PUNCH Title Page of 1864, a year-and-a-half before her
official ‘debut’.
Although largely male oriented in content
and readership, PUNCH did attract women readers with its “For Women” section
written by women (though edited by novelist Peter Dickinson), and was later
renamed “Judy”. The poets and writers Margaret Drabble, Joan Bakewell, Angela
Milne, EM Delafield, Mary Dunn, Elspeth Huxley and Joyce Grenfell wrote
regularly for the magazine; Virginia Graham's poems are wonderfully evocative
of the struggles that Londoners endured during WW2. Great women cartoonists
included Georgina Bowers in the 19th and Fish, Anton, Merrily Harpur, Sally
Artz and Riana Duncan in the 20th Century. In 1972 with MP Barbara Castle guest-editing
the magazine, an all-female editorial staff included Joan Bakewell, Molly
Parkin and Irma Kurtz.
Some great comic characters were created in
the Twentieth Century, (just as the Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody had with
Charles Pooter in the 1880s or the Mr Briggs series of cartoons by Leech in the
1840s-60s), and all first appeared in PUNCH before being published in book form.
In 1924 Winnie the Pooh (as Teddy Bear) in the When We Were Very Young series
of illustrated poems- was a creative merger of two masters: journalist AA Milne
and cartoonist EH Shepard. Geoffrey Willans' Nigel Molesworth first appeared in
1939, HF Ellis' The Diary of AJ Wentworth (1938) and Max the hamster by
Giovannetti (1952). Another hugely successful series was ex-barrister AP
Herbert's Misleading Cases (1924) which parodied the absurdities of British law
using hypothetical cases. These were collected in book form and made into a BBC
series in the 1960s. During WW2 and the immediate post-war era Mary Dunn’s Lady
Addle’s Domestic Front and The Memoirs of Mipsie series were also hugely popular.
In the 1970s and 80s it was Alan Coren's Correspondences of Idi Amin, turning
him into a first-person fan-fiction comedy character, Miles Kington's Let's
Parlez Francais, Merrily Harpur’s The Nightmares of Dream Topping and Michael
Bywater’s Bargepole column.
It is often said that cartoons in PUNCH are
great social commentary; while many are snapshots of time that describe the way
people lived and thought, one often overlooks the writing. Even greater
analysis can be found in Bernard Hollowood's serious articles on the state of
the international, political and economic landscape, Elspeth Huxley on how
immigration was changing society in the early 60s and how society was treating immigrants;
William Hardcastle on Britain's crisis of identity, William Davis on strikes
and a New Europe, Francis Williams on the media. And reading Joan Bakewell you
can gather what it was like for a woman living in a changing society: the
sexual freedoms and expression in the 60s hadn't translated to equality in the
70s where sexism and misogyny still reigned. As a whole, PUNCH is a barometer
for measuring Britain 's
status in the world, measuring class struggle, measuring sexual and racial
equality; measuring its own medium against the media. The magazine absorbed,
magnified, parodied and re-imagined reality in its own parallel universe
threaded with a needle of home truths that were particularly English. This
interplay of the Arts, Science, Politics, Fashion, Technology and Class in the
form of a cartoon, poem, comment or story makes for a fun, engaging experience.
In the end, PUNCH remains the chronicle of
English culture from its minutest foibles to its grandest achievements. In
terms of years served, three cartoonists: John Tenniel, Bernard Partridge and
David Langdon span 142 years from 1850-1992, overlapping and working for more
than 50 years each to continue the line from the Victorian Age to the Modern Era.
Just as the East India Company boldly forged its own destiny and that of the British Empire in the 19th Century, PUNCH had done so in
the media, achieving world coverage. But just as the East India Company had
been absorbed by the Empire, PUNCH belonged to a certain greatness, to a period
of time, to History. No longer an institution, but a monument. Like Father
Time, Mr Punch could never be wrong: he was merely an observer; an actor on the
finest stage reciting lines that we the public, through the satirists, had
given him.
Andre Gailani
Punch Ltd
All images copyright Punch Ltd.