It's all Here in Black and White

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IT’S ALL HERE IN BLACK AND WHITE Written, remembered and researched by LES LILLEY with the help of...

Clive Abbot, Les Barton, Clive Collins, Jim Crocker, Pete Dredge, Dave Follows, Graham Fowell, Frank Holmes, Anthony Hutchings, Chic Jacob, Pete Jacob, Jack Kirkbride, Ted Monaghan, David Myers, Roy Nixon, Bryan Reading, Arthur Reid, Ian J. Scott, Chas Sinclair, Mike Turner

Original 1996 print edition Cover Design by Clive Abbott Production by Jill Kearney and Paula Kiernan This edition Designed and produced by Ian Ellery

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IT’S ALL HERE IN BLACK AND WHITE Copyright © The Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain October 1996 This online edition produced in March 2010 Published by The Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain All rights reserved.

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Les Lilley creates for the reader a good flavour of some of the events and characters that helped to make and shape the earlier days of the CCGB into such an interesting and exciting home for Cartoonists.Alas, many of the characters , including Les, are no longer with us but through the pages of 'It's All Here in Black and White' they can remain as legitimate Club Members sub-free!

Mike Turner

"I first came across the CCGB in the 1975 Writers and Artists Yearbook . At the time I was working in a small graphic design studio in Leicestershire. The work was dull and repetitive and, if I have to be honest , I wasn't very good at it. A Punch reader for some years I had toyed with the distant dream of being a gag cartoonist for that great magazine but was clueless on where to start. As soon as I discovered the existence of the CCGB I wrote off to someone called Manny Curtis for more details.

Some weeks later a chunky brown envelope dropped through my door and my life changed forever ( cue music and stock film of 'gentleman cartoonist' at work at his country cottage studio,framed artwork on the walls, a femme fatale draped seductively over a nearby chaise long etc).

The envelope contained a covering letter from Club Sec Manny Curtis, an application form and most importantly, the latest copy of "Second Sitting". Within its pages were littered the familiar names of Bill Tidy, Larry, Bryan Reading, Les Barton, Nick Baker, Clive Collins, Sally Artz, Chic Jacob, Stan McMurtry and many others. I was drooling.

There was just one snag. In order to apply I had to have had some work published. This spurred me on and some weeks later my first Punch acceptance had me filling out the CCGB application form with a reference from Bill Hewison, Punch art editor. I was in!"

Pete Dredge

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Chapter 1

‘In the beginning there was chaos, then the Cartoonists Club was created.’

(The Bible)

Cartoonists are solitary performers, if calling them such is not a contradiction in terms. A cartoonist will invent jokes in solitude, those published in the national press will each morning be seen by several million readers, and the combined laughter of these readers could well be loud enough to blow the roof off the London Palladium... but the cartoonists will never hear it. He or she is denied the adrenaline charge created by applause and will therefore live a life of abject insecurity, even if fully employed and handsomely rewarded.

That is the way things are today, but they were much worse before 1960 when only a few cartoonists who were under contract to papers and magazines worked in Fleet Street or its environs were known to one another. The rest of us, the small army of freelancers who lived and worked in attics throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles, wouldn’t have recognised a fellow cartoonist if he passed in the street. No one knew anyone and we all craved some sort of a club where we could spend a little time finding out how we stood in the great scheme of things.

Then sometime during either February or March of 1960, every cartoonist received a printed invitation to the inaugural meeting 6

of a cartoonists club that was to take place at ‘The Feathers’ in Tudor Street, just off Fleet Street, at two o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, APRIL THE FIRST. ~ Now, what would you have thought? Probably the same as we all thought, that this was some sort of elaborate cack-handed April Fools joke. We all tossed those invitations to one side, but gradually worried about them more and more during the following days and weeks. I remember that I was eventually prompted to get in touch with the Strip and Cartoon Department at Associated Newspapers to find out if they’d heard anything about a meeting. And, lo and behold, they had. I was told by Julian Phipps, then the cartoon editor of the Sketch and Mail, that the meeting was being convened by a respected gent named Ian J Scott who, before becoming a cartoonists representative had himself been a political cartoonist on the Daily Sketch.

That was enough for me. I made arrangements for an afternoon off from my ‘proper’ job and on Friday, 1st April 1960, I armed myself with an A to Z, found Tudor Street and eventually discovered The Feathers. It was packed to the doors, heaving and filled to overflowing with one or two ladies and a vast array of ink stained gentlemen both young and old who rushed around excitedly introducing themselves and claiming undying admiration for one another’s work. There was a huge pad on an easel on which everyone from Vicky to Reggie Smythe had paused in passing to dash off a quick sketch but, apart from that, nothing much seemed to be organised. Paul White, probably one of the best drawers of sexy teenagers that ever 7

existed, introduced himself to me and we huddled in the corner trying to pluck up enough courage to make our marks on the sketch pad.

Eventually, Ian J Scott made a short almost inaudible speech when he asked if the two hundred and fifty or so cartoonists in the bar would like him to go ahead with the formation of a club. The motion was passed unanimously and The Feathers was booked for a meeting to take place on the afternoon of the first Friday of every month from that day on. A very excited Leslie Harding (STYX) then stood on a table and made an impassioned plea in a very loud voice for volunteers to form a cartoonists cricket team of which he offered to be organiser, umpire, captain and chief scorer. This proposal was also received with great enthusiasm and agreed unanimously and that was the end of the official business.

The Cartoonists Club took off and was a huge success from that moment on. Only two things spoiled the launch. Someone walked away with the giant drawing pad and the cartoons of Vicky, David Low, Roy Davies, Norman Mansbridge, Reggie Smythe, Ian Scott, Abu, Paul White and me. It was never seen again. And Leslie Harding was never seen again, at least not at a club meeting. The cricket team remained a flight of his fervid fancy until sometime in the Seventies when a match was organised between cartoonists and the staff at Fleetway Juvenile Section. The Juvenile Section thrashed us and nary a game has been played since.

Friday afternoon meetings at The Feathers took place in a large inaccessible, attic type room with plaster walls and a board floor. As it was at least a five minute walk down to the nearest 8

bar, Ian Scott organised several crates of bottled beer to be left just inside the room’s door so that cartoonists could save their weary legs by helping themselves and leaving the money for it in the crate. This thoughtful facility was the cause of the club’s first great monetary loss.

We never managed to balance receipts with costs in all the meetings we had in that room. By the way, The Feathers was eventually torn down and ‘The Witness Box’ was built on the vacant site. ~ The late great Laurie Siggs attended a few meetings at The Feathers and it was he who urged that the club should be formalised by the adoption of a constitution and the election of a committee. When Ian Scott attempted to get a committee together he found that no one wanted to serve on it. Everyone was afraid that Fleet Street editors would think of the club as some sort of cartoonist’s union and they were all very worried about being blacklisted for being militants. It was therefore decided that a constitution should be written in legal terms that would categorise the club as social club only and contain sufficient constitutional obstacles to prevent it ever being turned into any sort of militant organisation whatsoever. The

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solicitor co-opted as an Honorary Member in order to achieve these ends was Alfred P Halberstam, one of the club’s greatest friends who remained with us in an advisory capacity from 1960 till his tragic death in 1995. The constitution he wrote was so good and so watertight that Ian had no more difficulty in getting names for our first ever election. ~ More was going on behind the scenes at the inaugural meeting than was apparent to those of us who were there by invitation.

Ian Scott had invited The Duke of Bedford to our shindig and he (a great self publicist) had eagerly accepted. But somehow he got lost, stuck in a traffic jam, or otherwise delayed on his way, and the organisers, knowing that he had left home and should now be with the cartoonists, feared for his safety as hours ticked by and nothing was heard of him. The police were therefore notified of his disappearance and squad cars raced up and down the M1 looking for him. He never did arrive at the meeting but managed to earn more headlines than from actually turning up. ~ That first elected committee was Ian J. Scott A.R.C.A. (Chairman), Eric Burgin, Bruce Cavalier, Roy Davis, Leslie Illingworth, Chic Jacob, ‘Larry’ T. Parkes, Reg Smythe, Bill Tidy, Keith Waite, David Myers (Treasurer).

There was also an Entertainments Committee that consisted of Leslie A.J. Lilley (Chairman), Peter Clarke, Ian Dickson, John Jensen, John Mortimer, George V Stokes.

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Our President was His Grace, The Duke of Bedford, and our Vice Presidents were Sir William Carr, Sir Edward Hulton, ‘Billy’ W.E.Butlin, Charles Forte.

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Chapter 2

Stay You Imperfect Speakers, Tell Me More (Macbeth)

The Cartoonists’ Clubs first ‘event’ (in those days we weren’t called The Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain) was a luncheon at Woburn Abbey given by our President, the Duke of Bedford.

Our second ‘event, the first to be mounted by our Entertainments Committee, was a splendid dinner held at the Cafe Royal on November 7th, 1960, in honour of David Low. It was a glittering affair and the speakers were (for those of you with good memories for names from the past) Gerard Fav, the Rt. Hon Lord Morrison of Lambeth P.P., C.H., Percy Cudlip, Herbert Gunn, Stephen Potter, Ian Scott and David Low himself, with Lord Boothby taking the place at very short notice, of the Rt. Hon. Earl Atlee K.G., P.C., O.M., C.H., who was indisposed.

And that wasn’t all. In the audience as a guest of Artie of the Daily Express we had Spike Milligan who, although himself a speaker, created more of an impression than any of them by refusing to sign autographs unless on an ice cream.

This was a salutary lesson in the art of getting attention. Some of the most influential men of the fifties demonstrated their wit and proficiency in the art of after dinner speaking, yet were completely upstaged by someone who didn’t speak at all and 12

wouldn’t even give a non-biodegradable autograph - though someone may still have one in the freezer.

At the beginning of the next year, Sir David Low was awarded a knighthood and claimed till the day he died that he would never have been remembered by the politicians had it not been for the jog given their elbows by the Club’s dinner in his honour. His gratitude was tangibly expressed. When his will was read it was found that the major part of his collection of books had been left to Australia House, but the remainder were bequeathed to us.

To date, he is the only club member to have remembered us in his will.

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Chapter 3

“Am I not shot with the self-same artillery?”

(Richard Lovelace)

A strange situation pertained while the club made its home at ‘The Feathers’ and later at ‘The Presscala Club’. Neither of these establishments were prepared to host us in the evening and our meetings therefore took place in the afternoon. Starting at two o’clock, they would be over at seven, thus leaving members out on the street and wandering aimlessly, wondering what to do with the rest of the day.

Few, if any, went straight home. They huddled together for company and warmth having split up into factions of ten or a dozen. A few went to dinner with Ian and Tanya Scott at their home in Finchley Road, some disappeared in the general direction of Soho where they caroused till the early hours of the next day. Most dispersed among the pubs of Fleet Street.

Having been looking on the wine when it was red since early afternoon, most of them got to feeling hungry about nine in the evening, and it was then that they started once again to congregate in a ‘greasy spoon cafe’ at the Fleet Street end of Shoe Lane. We called it ‘Momma’s’, and it was a wondrous place of refuge and sustenance that was a second home, a quasi club-house to most members of the Cartoonists’ Club.

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During the day it was just another busy eating place with Italian cuisine of the most fundamental kind, and with out-ofwork actresses pretending to be waitresses while ‘resting’. But at night trade slowed down to almost nothing and its scrubbed wooden tables were presided over by a small, plump, toothless, elderly Italian lady who responded to the name of ‘Momma’.

For a couple of shillings she would serve you with a two pint bowl of the thickest Minestrone this side of Napoli, half a French loaf sawn into chunks, a huge dob of butter and a mug of coffee. It was food fit for a king, and guaranteed to fill an inebriate’s belly to the extent that he found it downright difficult to fall over without popping up again.

It was possibly the best place for a cheap meal that ever existed in EC4 and was particularly beloved by an out-of-town Cartoonist Club member called Lewis Williams.

Lewis deserves a bit of a build-up at this point. He was very important and influential during the early years of the club. He was the staff cartoonist on one of Birmingham’s two dailies and, having worked hard and led a circumspect and blameless life for a whole month, he would travel down to London on the morning of the CC of GB’s monthly meeting, lose his inhibitions and cut loose in the most amazing way. For one day a month he would become the accepted leader of a small pack of cartoonists who created fun, frolic and fundamental mayhem whenever they found themselves after club meetings.

Added to which, he was an extremely handsome and well dressed man. Tall, burly, mustachioed and with a dramatic scar highlighting his shiny, beautifully barbered bald pate. His suits were of the best, his shoes gleamed, his shirts were of the 15

whitest and his taste in ties was impeccable. He was truly a thing of beauty and a joy to behold...... until about nine o’clock on the evening of our Friday meetings when he became unravelled and was usually seen stumbling his disheveled way towards ‘Mommas’ in the company of his friends.

Momma would shudder and cross herself like the good Catholic she was when she saw him approaching. Lewis had managed to convince himself that the old girl adored him, whereas she actually disliked him intensely. She lost no opportunity to berate him and to threaten him with disbarment from her establishment, but this only served to make him chuckle. Momma was treating him in this way only to conceal her true feelings, he told everyone. Theirs was a ‘Love - Hate’ relationship, he boasted.

And so the scene was set for the final debacle. Lewis came to London very early one Friday morning and first visited Saville Row to pick up a new suit he’d ordered. It being a sunny day, and feeling rather good about life, he decided to wear the new suit and have the one he’d worn for his journey down by train packed and deposited in the Left Luggage Department at Euston Station. He would pick it up, he said, when he went back to Birmingham, that night.

Dressed to nines and looking really good, he then got a taxi to Fleet Street, met up with a few compatriots and found his way to the club meeting after a liquid luncheon. He held his own while making decisions about the future of the club and even entered into civilised discussion with dissenters, but gradually his reflexes became a little less controlled.

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Being a heavy smoker he also became more extravagant with the gestures he made while holding a lighted cigarette. Then the inevitable happened. He knocked the glowing tip from his cigarette, it landed on the lapel of his new Saville Row suit and burned a neat, round hole in it.

At nine o’clock that same evening he turned up at Momma’s in a very happy state and tried to kiss the old lady. She took great offence and angrily told him he was barred from her establishment for good and that she was not going to serve him with the bowl of Minestrone he’d just ordered. This made Lewis laugh, this was further demonstration of their ‘Love Hate’ relationship, he explained to friends and onlookers. But he became a lot less happy when everyone else was served while he remained soup-less. He got annoyed, Momma was taking this Love - hate thing too far, he complained, and tried to wrest from her grasp a two pint basin on Minestrone she was carrying to another of her customers.

Together they struggled in the middle of the restaurant, pulling the slopping basin this way and that. Customers dived under tables to avoid the cascade of soup that was now inevitable.

They were right to take precautions. Momma suddenly let go her side of the bowl and , as it flipped back, at least half a pint of soup sloshed on Lewis’s chest. So, now there was not only a cigarette burn in the new suit, it was also dripping with tomato, cabbage and small pieces of spaghetti.

Lewis’ friends did what they should have done a couple of hours before, they took him to Euston Station, collected his gear from the ‘Left Luggage’ and pouted him on the next train

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to Birmingham. And that was the end of the story until Lewis later told us what had happened after he got home.

Apparently he had sobered up and now realised what a mess he was in, so decided to sleep in the spare room rather than risk waking his wife. But he wasn’t completely sober and, despite everything, he was consumed by the need to take elaborate care of his new suit. So he took it off, tip-toed into the room he usually shred with his wife, carefully draped and adjusted it on his bedside valet stand, then tip-toed out again and retired to the spare room. satisfied with a job well done.

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Came the dawn. His wife awoke and, finding no Lewis beside her, turned over in bed to look around the room. She saw the jacket of the Saville Row suit, draped on the night stand. There was a small round single hole over the breast around which was a large tomato red stain that looked like blood, together with congealed spaghetti that looked exactly like pieces of intestine! The poor woman went into a state of hysterics and woke Lewis by screaming the house down. She believed he had been shot!

I can’t understand how he managed to talk her into letting him come again to a club meeting the next month, but she did. It was Momma who remained obdurate. As far as I know, she never again allowed him to darken her door.

The scar on Lewis’ forehead was deep, dramatic and added to his handsome, swashbuckling appearance. I asked him how it had been acquired and, being deliberately vague, he implied a degree of secrecy because he’d earned it while in the Army Intelligence Service in Paris just after its recapture by the allies in the mid-forties. Words like Marquis, the Resistance and Communist Plot were dropped into the conversation.

Then a few months ago I was chatting to Larry, who lived near Lewis in Solihull, and he told me that the big fellah had earned the scar by diving head first into some Birmingham socialite’s empty swimming pool.

Somehow I prefer Lewis’ version. Finding his scar to be the result of a wayward jape was like being told James Bond was really a bus conductor.

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A few years after the Minestrone incident Lewis took early retirement from his job in Birmingham, bough a Range Rover, then together with his wife, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, made his way across Europe, down through India and South East Asia where for a while they tried opal mining.

He wrote long, interesting letters for a few years. But, as always happens they became fewer and finally stopped.

Then, one Friday afternoon, I walked into a CC of GB meeting and there was Lewis sitting in his usual corner seat. We were all overjoyed to see him again. He was back in England for a week or two to visit his son who still lived in Cornwall. But he wasn’t the same old Lewis that once we’d known. He was quiet, restrained out-of-place and even a bit dour. Australia had definitely dimmed his once bright flame. He asked about Momma, but we had to tell him the restaurant had closed a few years before, had been pulled down and that we had lost touch with the old lady.

He went back to the Antipodes and we never saw him again.

He died there. Those of us who knew him still miss him.

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Chapter 4

“To the Lord of convention ‘twas our Scott who spoke” (Apologies to Sir Walter Scott)

Late in 1961 we held a Christmas Party at the old Presscala Club in the alley beside Boots, just off Fleet Street. It was a very splendid party. Music was provide by Wally (TROG) Fawkes’ band and the guest of honour was Billy Butlin (as yet unknighted).

Wally’s band generously offered to perform, not for a fee, but in return for their drinks. This proved to be a not very clever idea. The trumpeter got so drunk that he accidentally stepped on his own trumpet and spent the rest of the evening crying in a far corner when his instrument proved not only to sound very flat, but also to look very flat. ~ But Billy Butlin turned up trumps. During the course of the evening he promised Ian Scott that he would host an annual convention for the CC of GB, starting the following May in 1962 when he was opening a brand new camp at Bognor Regis.

I was the secretary of the club at this time, and Ian and I couldn’t believe our luck. We thought Billy had made a rash

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promise and probably wouldn’t follow through on it. But we had no need to worry. The very next morning Billy Butlins secretary rang us from their Holiday camp HQ in Oxford Street 22

and set up a meeting when the whole committee of the CC of GB were invited along to discuss details of our convention with the great man and, at the meeting, were offered the facilities for a one week convention free of charge to club members and a reduction of 10% for family and friends accompanying them.

This was to include full board and suitable rooms to be made available for our conferences!

Needless to say, we had a huge turnout for the first ever convention. It seemed to those of us who organised the event that every cartoonist who’d ever had a cartoon published turned up with his wife, all his kids, his in-laws and, in some cases, his next door neighbours.

And we had no lack of speakers for the sessions when we got down (somewhat naively) to the task of putting the cartoonists' world to rights. Rich Cox spoke on animation, we had a couple of Czech cartoonists who spoke on the subject of the political cartoon, and our most popular speaker turned out to be Alfred Brockman, at that time editor of PARADE and MEN ONLY. Alfie spent the week with us, but when the time came for him to speak he made it short and sweet. He simply told us that he was putting up a prize of £25.00 to be awarded to the cartoonist who designed what was, in his opinion, the best logo for the club. And this was at a time when twenty-five quid was not far short of the weekly earnings of a Member of Parliament.

Consequently, everyone did their very best to come up with a suitable idea, but it was Chic Jacob’s jester’s head holding a paintbrush in piratical style that most appealed to Mr. Brockman. Chic was forthwith awarded his prize, in cash, bore 23

it in triumph to the nearest bar and ordered drinks all round for those cartoonists who closely followed in his footsteps. Since that day he has never stopped telling us that the round of drinks cost him £30. ~ Billy Butlin joined us when he arrived on the sports field in a helicopter and, later in the week, a film crew turned up to make a ten minute film for Pathe Pictorial, a weekly adjunct to the newsreel that was shown in cinemas on a weekly basis.

Reg Orlandini was our PRO and liaised with these people. It was eventually decided to make a short piece of film that would tell the story of a naughty cartoonist who crept up and drew faces on the backs of beauty queens as they sunned themselves by the pool, was caught by them, and was thrown in the water.

There was but one problem. The weather turned extremely cold and Reg couldn’t find a cartoonist to volunteer to be the patsy who was tossed into near freezing water. So, at the insistence of the film’s director, Reg was himself forced to take on the role of ‘naughty’ cartoonist.

This would have been bad enough, but for one reason or another the director was obliged to shoot and reshoot the bit where Reg was thrown into the water no less than five times.

Splosh! In he would go, the director would call for another take, Reg would be dried off, made-up to look a little less blue with the cold, given a brandy to stop his convulsive shivering, then in he would tossed, again and again. It was a wonder the 24

poor lad didn’t catch pneumonia before the director declared himself to be satisfied with everyone’s performance.

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Reg was at last taken back to his chalet in a semi-frozen state where his wife Vera severely castigated him for leaving her and their young daughter alone all morning while he was off enjoying himself with a crowd of beauty queens. He was left with a lot of explaining to do and later claimed that his second daughter was the direct result of this ‘making-up’ process.

An interesting side issue was that, while Vera was pregnant during the rest of that year, Reg declared his intention of naming the child, if it happened to be a boy, Billy, after Billy Butlin. There was no record of Vera’s reaction to this rash statement. It is more than fortunate that Little Orlandini Numero Two was a girl. ~ After this auspicious start, Billy Butlin, Sir Billy Butlin, Bobby Butlin and Rank Hovis carried on our tradition of yearly conventions at various of their camps for no less than twentyseven years. And for the last several years they entertained all conventioneers free of charge. Members, their families, their friends, speakers at the convention, the lot! It was a magnificent gesture and we owe thanks not only to the memory of Sir Billy, but to all those who followed him and made good his promise.

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Chapter 5

“He well knew the great architectural secret of decorating his constructions, and never descended to construct a decoration” (With apologies to Trollope)

During our first ever convention, Billy Butlin sat down with a few of us in his new ‘Beachcomber’ Bar in his new Bognor Camp and explained his theories on the subject of profit.

I believe the conversation was prompted by a remark by Johnnie Mortimer as to the garishness of ‘The Beachcomber’ Bar, the design of which Billy had ripped off from ‘Trader Vic’s’, a fashionable bar that operated in London’s West End. yet another cartoonist criticised the fifteen feet high wooden soldiers that decorated the front of the camp, and I had the temerity to mention my dislike of the many thousands of coloured plastic salad strainers that were hooked around plain light bulbs that lit the paths of the camp in, what seemed to me, a vain attempt to make them look like ‘fairy lights’ “Those were all my ideas, lads” he said proudly and not taking the slightest bit of offence at our rudeness. “I am responsible for the decor of all my camps” We sat in embarrassed silence, and he carried on.

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“It’s all very well for you southerners” he said. “But most of my customers, my holiday makers, come from little industrial villages and towns in the North of England, and things look pretty grim up there. But when they get down here and see my bar, my soldiers and my salad strainers, it’s all very colourful and they think they’re in fairyland. I bring a lot of brightness to their lives for at least one week in every year!”

“ I also give them a fair crack of the whip where cost is concerned” he added.

Then he went on to explain that although his holidays were relatively expensive for that day and age (Seventeen guineas a head per adult per week, if my memory serves me right) he always made it a firm rule to spend every penny of that cost on the campers themselves. To the last ha’penny it went on accommodation, three square meals a day, and free entertainment.

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We boggled a bit and wanted to know where his profit came from. He explained that the camps were so designed that it was impossible to make you way from your chalet to any other part of the camp without passing one of his shops - and he had a lot of shops. there were sweet shops, rock shops, ice cream shops, fruit stalls, tobacco kiosks, toy shops, clothes shops, shoe shops, photographic shops, souvenir shops, chemist shops and vast amusement arcades.

These, he explained, were all using space and staff that were already paid for by the small percentage of holiday costs that was earmarked for administration. This meaning that, though the prices of his goods were exactly similar to those outside the camp, the thirty three and a third percent margin of profit was all profit. None had to be siphoned off for overheads.

He mentioned how much the takings were at the Bognor Camp and multiplied this by the number of camps he was them operating. Thirty three and a third of that lot was totally huge.

We asked why he wasn’t busy developing camps on the Continent, as foreign holidays were already starting to take the public’s fancy. He looked sour and told us that he had acquired a hotel on the Belgian coast during the late thirties only to have it blown up by our gunfire during the beach landings after D Day. He had also, during the fifties, bought a large swampy piece of ground in the West Indies with the intention of turning it into a Butlins Camp. His idea was to drain the swamp, then to build.

But the people who sold him the land failed to explain to him the subtle fact that the far end of the swamp nudged its way 29

into the sea and that he would have to drain the entire Caribbean before he could gain a single inch of dry land.

These were the reasons why Billy Butlin didn’t much like ‘abroad’ and concentrated all his efforts on the home market.

He definitely worked best in the places he knew best, and he most certainly brought colour to the Cartoonists’ Club. ~ During that first convention someone had the bright idea of showing our gratitude to our host by putting cartoons on a large board that could be kept by him as an added camp decoration.

So, a carpenter was ordered to prepare a large wooden board, about eight feet by twelve feet, and to paint it with a flat white paint so that we could draw cartoons on it in memory of that particular convention.

George Ratcliffe was a first rate lettering artist and inscribed a commemorative heading that declared the board to be a souvenir of the Cartoonists’ Club Convention of 1962. the cartoonists present then went to work with a will and covered the thing with gags about Butlins. They were all in Black and White, but this proved a bit of a drawback to Bruce CAV Cavalier, an Australian cartoonist who wanted to point up the fact that a character in his gag was a Butlins Redcoat. So, he borrowed my wife Audrie’s lipstick and used that for the purpose of simple but effective coloration.

The rest of the cartoonists hated him, because, when the board was unveiled and presented to the camp manager at our last night party, CAV’s cartoon was the only one that was immediately noticed. So, from that year onwards there wasn’t a 30

member who didn’t arrive at the Convention complete with his quota of coloured inks. Yet another instance of Sir Bill bringing colour into our lives.

The ritual of presenting these boards to the managers of the camp at which we stayed persisted throughout the twentyseven year history of Butlins, Cartoonists’ Club Conventions, and I am told that some of these boards are still on display in the entrance halls of those few camps that still remain. I wonder if Bruce Cavalier’s Max Factor embellishment has faded, yet?

Many years later at Pwllheli, Ian Scott and I were ceremonially given awards at the Convention’s last night party. We had been very busy organising various lectures during the week and had both forgotten to put cartoons on the board. Consequently our awards were in the form of indolent looking golden frogs mounted on wooded plinths. Ian’s was First Prize and mine was Second Prize, and mine sits on my desk in front of me even as I write. It is inscribed as follows: “2nd MOST PROLIFIC CARTOONIST OF THE WEEK. 1981. LES LILLEY” Now, I know awards were given by way of being a sarcastic comment as to Ina’s and my slackness in not drawing cartoons, but for the life of me I can’t understand why he got First Prize, while I got Second Prize! Why was the cartoon he didn’t draw much better than the cartoon I didn’t draw? ~

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As part of our travels around the Butlins Camps and our efforts to garner publicity for our hosts, we sometimes attracted the attention of the local television companies, and this happened one year when we went to Clacton. Anglia TV sent a researcher to see us at the start of the week and, having seen he cartoons that had already been drawn on the ‘Butlins Board’, he became very excited and expressed his intention of bringing back a camera crew and conducting a series of interviews with cartoonists who had drawn gags on it.

The TV representative left with the promise that he would be back with a director and a camera crew on the Friday. The effect this had on our Convention attendees was alarming. I have never seen cartoonists work so diligently or prolific on any board before or since. This particular souvenir quickly became filled to the very last square inch with some of the best work I have ever seen.

But there was a problem. Some of the cartoons were, shall we say, a bit like seaside postcards, just a smidgen saucy. This caused one of the Convention organisers to throw a complete wobbler. He said the TV company would probably pack up and leave without filming if they were confronted with such a blatant show of bad taste.

So, most of the cartoonists responsible for the rude bits went into town, bought a couple of gallons of white paint and carefully blanked out all the naughty bits on display. All of them except Les Barton, who happened to be off the camp having a look at the surrounding countryside on the morning when the mass white-out took place. And, his ‘naughty’

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cartoon being relatively small and tucked away in a corner, it went unnoticed even by the censorious organiser.

Came the Friday, came the TV crew, and came the interviews.

Everything went extremely well and they did a nice little five minute piece for that evenings newsreel. the interviews having been given, the crew left and we waited impatiently to watch our ‘spot’ on the six o’clock news slot.

It was good, very good. We were proud of our board and our performances, and the Butlins PRO was very proud of us. In fact, we were all extremely pleased with one another until in the final seconds of the transmission, the camera slowly closed in on Les Barton’s cartoon until it filled the whole TV screen. It was very rude and exactly the sort of thing our organiser had said would scare off the director of the programme.

It is believed therefore that Les was responsible for what was possibly the first full male side-frontal nude ever to be seen on British TV.

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Chapter 6

“Some men there are who love not a gaping pig: Some, that are mad if they behold a cat: And others, when bagpipe sings I’ the nose, Cannot contain their urine” (Merchant of Venice)

Jack Kirkbride was the cartoonist I ever knew who bleached himself. Most of the day his prone body could be seen stripped to the waist as he took the sun, sheltered from wayward breezes between the chalet lines that bisected the camps, but he was never know to get a tan. the sun’s rays seemed to act on his skin at it would on fine linen. His epidermis actually seemed to bleach. He came down from Oldham with his wife Enid and their son and daughter, John and Anne and, while they went home looking fit and healthy, he invariable returned to his home on the moors looking even more parchment-like than was usual for him.

Year after year he tried to acquire a sun-bronzed look, but it never worked. His hair got grey, his son< John Kirkbride, became a novelist, and his daughter, Anne Kirkbride, became know throughout the English speaking world as ‘Dierdre’ of Coronation Street, and Jack remained as pallid as ever. But what did it matter? Despite his inability to tan, Jack and the rest of the Kirkbrides added their own particular zest to Club Conventions and they also occasionally brought with them an

34

actress named Judith Barker from Oldham Rep. She, for a short time appeared in Coronation Street as one of the several wives of ‘Ken Barlow’, and it was during this spell of national fame that I was privileged to serve with her on the jury of Butlins Amateur Talent Competition.

Members of the Club were always called upon to officiate on the many and various juries needed for competitions. There was the Amateur Night, the Beauty Pageant, Dad and his Lad, the Baby Show, the Knobbly Knees, the Glamorous Gran and a host of others. It was all in the luck of the draw which of these you were singled out for and on this particular occasion Judith and I joined the Entertainment’s Manager and the Chief Redcoat on the four-man jury that was to sit through a couple of hours of rather slow tap-dancing, a galaxy of instrumentalists and seven singers, five of whom had elected to sing :’My Way’ It was a positively brutal job, but someone had to do it. Judith was introduced as Ken’s wife from Coronation Street and received a storm of applause, I was introduced as a scriptwriter from the BBC’s children’s programme ‘Vision On’ and received a storm of apathy, and our two hours of penance got under way.

The kindest thing one could say about most of the performers was that they were enthusiastic. We, as judges, were positively battered against the backs of our seats by their enthusiasm, but we didn’t get to hear much that could have been described as talent till a tall, good looking, balding gentleman strode on stage in full Highland kilted glory. We gave him ten out of ten for presentation, then flinched as we realised he was carrying 35

bagpipes. This magnificent figure was announced as Arthur Middleton and he stuck the mouthpiece of his instrument firmly between his lips as the whole audience cringed.

Then something rather wonderful happened. Instead of giving forth with one of the usual run of Scottish dirges, he started playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’! He was good. He was very good. He was terrific. His act finished with the audience stamping and screaming for an encore and. to the best of my remembrance, I believe he obliged with Glen Miller’s ‘In The Mood’.

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Eventually we four jurors were shepherded into a room behind the stage where we were asked to arrive at a verdict. Judith and I immediately plumped for the very unusual piper, but the two employees of Butlins were equally as strongly in favour of a Heavy Metal group who were last on the bill and had left us with mild cases of tinnitus.

We commenced by discussing the impasse in a civilised manner. Within ten minutes we were arguing. Moments later and we were screaming at one another. Did you ever seen the film of, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Twelve Angry Menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;? Well, we four were in no way two thirds less vocal than were Henry Fonda and his other eleven. We went at it hammer and tongs.

But a decision of some sort had to be made. There was still an audience waiting in the theatre for the results of our deliberations, not to mention the hopefuls out there on stage.

So, a compromise was decided upon. For the first time since they had started holding the Amateur Talent Competition at Pwllheli, a tie would be announced. The prize would be divided between the piper and the group. A true judgement of Solomon.

There was an outcome to this event. Arthur Middleton was invited to attend the cartoonistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; last night party of the Convention where he wowed all and sundry with his rendition of jazz classics and was immediately offered associate membership of the Club. Since that happy day, he has been a dedicated follower of our activities and a good friend to all who have met him.

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Not many people know, however, that he actually composed and occasionally performs a ‘Cartoonists’ Club March’, also that he is no real Scot. He is an Englishman who lives in Durham!

On the reverse side of the same coin, the group went on to gain a contract with Butlins and performed the following season at another of their camps. This causes me sometimes to idly speculate as to who got the best of the deal, Arthur or the group?

~ In England we tell jokes about the Irish, in America they tell the same jokes about Poles, and I have it on good authority that in Canada it is resident of Nova Scotia who get the stick. It

38

therefore came as no surprise when also I learned that the inhabitants of Wigan make ‘Spinners’ the butt of their jokes.

We used to have a club member who came from Wigan. He was a semi-pro cartoonist named John Hamilton who was widely know under the pseudonym of ‘AMIL’. His day job was that of a gas meter reader.

Amil also turned his ever-ready sense of humour to performance. Every year he would come to our Convention at Butlins on his own, enter the Amateur Talent Competition as a comedian, win it, receive as his first prize a weeks holiday for two people at a Butlins of his choice, then go to another camp later in the season for the regional finals with his wife. He had made it. Three separate holidays for nothing!

John followed this routine for many years and was never know to lose a competition, no matter how heavy or persistent the opposition. I suppose that we helped in no small way. We would attend his performances in force, listen to his dialect jokes about spinners in the cotton mills, then roar with applause at the end of his act.

Not that we ever understood his jokes about spinners. His accent was so broad as to make understanding a compete impossibility for mere southerners. No, it wasn’t so mush what Amil said as how he said it. There was something about his confidence, his delivery, and the very way he stood, that made audiences of grown men oft’ cry with laughter. Women weren’t so easy to please. They used to say, “We can’t understand him and leave it at that. But grown men, particularly grown

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cartoonists, thought him the funniest thing with two legs and a beer belly theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d ever seen.

And so Amil came to expect the extra holiday for himself and lady wife. As far as he was concerned it was his by right. then the blow fell. Butlins decided that the main thrust of the talent competition that was held in the camp theatre would only be open to those performers under the age of thirty. Those over thirty would be asked to perform in a bar where the winner would receive not a free holiday for two, but a small silver cup.

Amil entered on the year of the change, won, but was never the same man again. Being over thirty, well over thirty, his efforts were rewarded with a trophy that most certainly didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep his wife as happy as a holiday at the end of the season.

He became an embittered man and transferred his efforts from the stage to the football pitch where he played for the Cartoonist Club Team (North) against the Cartoonist Club Team (South) and kicked the hell out of everyone who had the temerity to stand in his way.

It makes me wonder if Gazza may be a frustrated comedian.

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Chapter 7

“Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited Moved to delight by the sight of money White as an orchid she moved quite naked Unknowingly conned into running for free” (With apologies to W.H.Auden)

Once upon a time there was once a very good trattoria called Bistingo’s in Fleet Street, just opposite the old Daily Telegraph building. Downstairs it was lined with the traditional Italian style open-fronted cubicles with tiny table for four people and a bench seat either side. Upstairs the walls were lined with the same type of cubicles, but in the centre of the room was a very large table where it was possible to seat about twenty people.

This was a very good place for impromptu parties and, on a Friday evening after an AGM back in the mid-seventies when Bill Tidy had been elected as the new Chairman of the Club, a crowd of us, including Bill, made our way down Shoe Lane from the Press Club and took over that upstairs room and its convenient table. I can’t for the life of me remember who was there on that memorable occasion, but I do know that Ella Samuels was seated to a young, attractive, blonde lady member of the Cartoonists’ Club.

Now, Ella was an elderly, silver haired, regal looking lady who ran a successful cartoonists agency and was an active Associate

41

Member of the Club. But her appearance was deceptive. She had a wicked sense of humour that was, at times, know to border on the mischievous or downright evil. And, on his particular evening, she was firing on all four cylinders.

The food was good, the Chianti flowed freely, and talk around the table had turned to a recent phenomenon, streaking. It was impossible to walk down Oxford Street, attend a dignified function, the theatre or a sporting event without someone, either man or woman, getting out of his or her kit and running naked through the proceedings. It had become for a short time, a national pastime and had prompted Dixon’s sale of binoculars to unprecedented new heights.

Ella was full of admiration for streakers it seemed. Her opinion was that it must take an awful lot of courage to strip off in public, even if you were only going to be viewed on the run, as it were. The lady member on Ella’s right pooh-poohed this comment. She claimed that appearing fleetingly in all ones pristine glory would present no problem at all.

This assertion was a great mistake on the girl’s part. Ella’s eyes glittered behind her silver spectacles and she immediately produced a five pound not from her reticule. She then carefully placed it in the middle of the table and said, “Here’s a fiver that says you wouldn’t do it, now!”

A deathly hush followed as all attention was turned towards our lady member. The blonde went red in the face and eventually replied with a shrug and a remark to the effect that she

42

certainly wasn’t going to provide a free cabaret for a mere fiver. there was a pregnant pause before a member tossed another bank note on the table to join Ella’s.

“Here’s another five that says you won’t do it!” he croaked, obviously getting a bit excited. And, before we knew what was happening, a positive shower of money was being thrown into the ‘pot’. Fivers, oncers, ten bob notes and even a few thru’penny bits. I don’t think there was a person round that table who didn’t contribute to the best of his or her financial ability. Or lady member stared pop-eyed as she was confronted by wealth beyond the dreams of avarice (well at least thirty quid or so).

“Okay I’ll do it!” she finally said, and disappeared into one of the cubicles around the walls to get her gear off in semiprivacy. Pandemonium broke loose. Our waiter, who had been listening attentively to what had been going on, ran downstairs like a greyhound and reappeared only moments later with every other waiter in the joint and the entire kitchen staff. They jostled and literally stood on one another in the framework of that upstairs room’s door as they tried to maintain some sort of foothold on the stairs.

All eyes were on the cubicle, then suddenly our lady member broke cover and streaked around the table at a speed that would have put Olympic athletes to shame. Truth to tell, she moved so fast that I don’t think any of us got to see more that her bare bottom and the soles of her flashing feet. But there was a huge cheer split the heavens as she completed her circuit and 43

scampered back towards the cubicle, and that was only from the kitchen staff.

After a short pause during which there was barely time to pass the Chianti bottle around, she reappeared in her underwear and made her way purposefully towards the money on the table.

Then, just before she got near enough to pick it up, Bill Tidy reached out, took it from under her nose, folded it carefully and pocketed it. The girl looked stunned and Bill smiled a smile that combined congratulations and thanks.

“Thank you” he said. “Thank you for winning such a large amount of money and donating to the club. It will do much

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towards bolstering up our somewhat depleted fundsâ&#x20AC;?. He then shook her by the hand and everyone cheered and clapped.

So, even though all this happened about twenty years ago, it should be remembered with gratitude that any club expenditure is being underwritten, even if only a smidgen, by the brave baring of a memberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bottom at Bistingoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.

When honorarium and medals and being handed out it has often occurred to me that it is she who should be honoured, possible more that anyone.

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Chapter 8

“How Potent cheap music is” (Noel Coward)

It was during Bill Tidy’s all too brief six month reign as Club Chairman that we held a particularly memorable Convention at Butlins Pwllheli Camp. For years Butlins had found its place in social history and British folklore by organising various competitive group activities. They sponsored beauty queens, possessors of the knobbliest knees, glamorous grannies, amateur entertainers and even winners of the Donkey Derbys, but during this particular year they outdid themselves. They sponsored a nation-wide competition to discover the Worst Singer in the Country (which was something they had been doing accidentally at their talent shows for several decades).

The announcement of this competition gave our Mr Tidy pause for thought and he brought every last ounce of his native ingenuity into play when he conceived what he thought would be a dead cert for the Worst Singer Stakes.

Bill’s thinking was as follows: The worst sort of singer is a singer the audience can’t hear. Ergo, several singers an audience couldn’t hear would be proportionally worse than a single one. Then how about a choir that couldn’t be heard? A choir of thirty men! Surely, thirty inaudible voices would be thirty times as bad as one audible voice.

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And, on the strength of this theory, Bill sallied forth and recruited such a choir from the ranks of club members who had previously been enjoying themselves by boo-ing those contestants who had competed for the honour of being the Worst Singer in the World thus far. So, on Wednesday evening of our Convention week, having rehearsed them all afternoon, Bill registered the choir for competition time and we were announced as being the world renowned Russian ensemble.

Knowing that we weren’t going to be heard and that the words of our chosen opus, ’The Song of the Steppes’, would not therefore matter at all, we devoted our rehearsal time only to making sure that we looked a bit Russian. This meant pulling out our shirts and belting them, thus making it seem to the casual eye that we wore mujik-style tunics. Needless to say, we didn’t look very Russian, with the exception of Ted Monaghan whose visual concept of a mini-Rasputin was so convincing that he could have played the lead in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ had he been three feet taller and the roof been a whole lot lower.

But I digress. We were ushered to the podium to be confronted

by Comrade Tidy who, armed with a lethal looking baton, was our conductor. A hush fell over the audience, the baton was raised. It fell and thirty grown men managed to make as much noise as a couple of emasculated mice. The audience leaned forward and hands were cupped to ears as they strained to ascertain whether or not we had actually started to sing. This orchestrated silence then droned on throughout three verses and one chorus of ‘Song of the Steppes’ till Bill gave his baton an extra flourish and brought the debacle to an end when we all shouted, ‘Hoy!’, extremely loudly and almost in unison. We

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then obediently filed from the podium as Bill took a few flamboyant bows to absolutely no applause at all.

We did not win the competition. The winner was a young man who did an impression of Elvis in a timorous, off-key, falsetto voice. I often wonder what happened to that lad. I have a feeling I heard somewhere that he had changed his name and appeared fleetingly in a subsequent Eurovision Song Contest.

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But our efforts were not uncrowned with success. We were so pleased with our own lack of talent that, for many years after, whenever ten or more cartoonists got together we always ( and I do mean always) insisted on giving our impression of a Russian choir. I don’t know why we stopped giving these impromptu performances. We choirboys were most enthusiastic. Particularly Chic Jacob who became so Russian looking over the years, especially when his shirt was hanging out, that at one time we were thinking seriously of having a whip-round and presenting him with his own samovar. We gave up on that idea when he started slowly to mutate into an American.

I have it on good authority that on foggy nights he can sometimes almost be seen sitting at the bottom of his garden and singing ‘Ol’ Man Ribber’, very quietly and with his shirt still hanging out. But this is only hearsay.

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Chapter 9 “Let me be dress’d fine as I will, Flies, Worms and Flowers, exceed me still” (Isaac Watts) The year after the introduction to the western world of the almost noiseless Russian Choir, we went again on Convention, but this time without the benefit of the inventive genius of William Tidy. And, as if this wasn’t bad enough, to find that Butlins had given up the quest for the World’s Worst Singer.

Our pseudo Russians were bereft, but Chic Jacob gallantly took up the baton and, for wanting of something else to do with them, he entered what had now become his Russian Choir for the Amateur Talent Contest. A brave gesture, if not a totally foolhardy gesture.

This time even more rehearsal took place and I believe that there were at least two singers of the thirty assembled who actually new the words of ‘Song of the Steppes’. Our joint talents were on the verge of blazing forth, and even more care was taken as to the costuming of the ensemble. An added degree of verisimilitude was achieved by wearing shirts back to front, buttoned down the back and with a tie round the midriff and trousers tucked into socks - the true Cossack look!

A few of the choir met in the bar before the upcoming performance for a ‘butterfly in the stomach’ drowning vodka.

One of the terrified performers was a friend of Mike Turner, an amiable soul with countless Convention trips to his credit, ‘Keithley’ Dunhill.

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Well, poor Keith’s rotund, dishevelled, used-laundry-bag appearance, when in costume, drew many an amused stare from holiday makers and a loud guffaw from tactless Clive Collins before two bemused your girls approached Keith and asked between giggles, “Why are you dressed like that then?”

Without hesitation, Keith explained, “Cos my Mum isn’t here and I had to dress meself today!”

It is on record that the subsequent performance was chalked up as another non-win for the Cartoonists’ Club and another bemused evening for the stunned and mystified audience. ~ 51

A lot of good things happened to the Club at Butlins, but the camps also had their ‘terrors’. The most feared of these being the dreaded ELECTRICITY METER. In the early days of our Conventions, club members were entertained free of charge, while their families and friends were charged the normal rate less ten percent. In return for this we received ‘full board’. Three huge meals a day taken in the camp dining room. A situation that meant the only use of electricity ion the chalets was for their occasional heating, the heating of water for washing and bathing, and the making of the odd cup of tea.

In later years we were all entertained entirely free of charge, but in ‘self catering chalets’ in which Club members were obliged to concoct their own strange and variable menus such as boiled cornflakes, baked salad and fried cake. This led to an enormous extra use of electricity on our part. Find a constant flow of 50p coins with which to feed those ever demanding meters became one of the aggravating activities of the week.

Then came the year when we arrived at Pwllheli to find that all our meters had their cash boxes unlocked and removed. This meant that a 50p inserted in the slot would register but would immediately fall out again and into your hand when it could be constantly re-used and re-registered.

A buzz of excitement and the clinking of the same coins being used and re-used was then heard throughout our chalet lines. It was significant that frowns fell from erstwhile worried faces, steps became lighter and more bouncy, and considerably more money was spent on hop based beverages.

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Now, SECOND SITTING (the Club newsletter at that time) reported that Butlins management was alerted to the failure of one of their staff to replace the coin boxes by a sudden upsurge in the use if electricity in chalets used by cartoonists. But this was not the truth of the matter. In actual fact, one of our number had a chalet in which the coin box had been replaced, and was therefore having to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;feedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; the meter in the normal expensive way. When speaking to other cartoonists, he learned of the cash saving facility in their chalets and became very annoyed.

Believe it or not, but he actually went to camp administration centre and demanded that his cash box should be removed as he had been left out of what he believed was obviously intended to have been a concession enjoyed by all cartoonists!

In a matter of moments a crew of camp employees was despatched to the chalet lines armed with cash boxes and locks, and in seven minutes thirty eight seconds every one of those meters had been restored to its normal state of monetary voracity. Loud counterfeit moaning and wailing was then heard from the chalet lines as cartoonists pretended to have been thwarted. This was not the case.

They had already (to a man) taken the precaution of activating each 50p register to the very maximum of its capacity. Kettles were then boiled for hours on end and some feet were washed as many as twenty of thirty time a day. Enough to last their owners the rest of the year!

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When you come to think of it, Butlins had no cause for complaint. It was an obvious case of roundabouts and swings.

What they lost on meter revenue they made up for on the sales of Watneys, Worthington and Andrewsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Liver Salts.

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Chapter 10

“All I ask is a tall ship and the star (or the Daily Mail) to steer her by” (Apologies to John Masefield)

We occasionally attract members to the Club who burn brightly but briefly in our firmament. They make a huge impression on our activities then, without warning, move on to pastures new either because of a restless nature or force of circumstance.

Such a member was Anne Spano, a lady cartoonist par excellence and one of the best Public Relations experts I ever had the pleasure of working with.

She was PR to the Cartoonists’ Club in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. And, when we decided to hold an e x h i b i t i o n c a l l e d C A RTO O N R E F L E C T I O N S t o commemorate this event, Anne joined our team.

Together with the then Club Secretary, Manny Curtis, I undertook to organise the loan of cartoons to be displayed, (all drawn and published during the preceding twenty five years of the Queen’s reign). Clive Abbott took on all the design work including the design of the catalogue, and Anne made herself responsible for absolutely everything else.

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Her first coup was to acquire as our showcase for the event, the loan of ‘The Tattershall Castle’, a brilliantly restored paddle steamer, used as a gallery and moored on the Thames near Hungerford Bridge and Charing Cross Tube Station.

She then persuaded Prince Philip to loan some of his collection of cartoons and also to write a piece for the catalogue. She got ICI not only to provide the paper for our catalogues but also for it’s cover, some unique reflective board they were in the process of developing, plus all the picture mounts. She proved to be a positive genius at finding good things, then getting them for free.

Needless to say, the exhibition turned out to be one of the best we ever mounted. We displayed work by (among many-many others) Gilbert Wilkinson, Rowland Emmett, Paul Rigby, Vicky, Sir Osbert Lancaster, Sir David Low, Eric Burgin, Ian J Scott, Posy Simmonds, Stan McMurtry, Giles, William Rushton, John Jensen, Bill Tidy, Trog, Leslie Illingworth, Keith Waite, Emmwood, Larry, Ernest Ratcliff, Frank Dickens, Harry Bishop, Alfred Bestall, Arthur Ferrier, Frank Bellamy, Reg Smythe and Jim Holdaway.

Where, I hear you ask, does this list of achievements turn into a club anecdote?. Well, it is not so much a Club anecdote as an exhibition anecdote.

The ‘Tattershall Castle’ was owned at that time by two brothers from North London who also happened to be admirers of the Art of the Cartoon. They helped us hugely during the run up to the exhibition and, at one of the many conferences and discussions they hosted, I was told the following story.

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Back in the Thirties when Cunard shipping line built the ‘Queen Mary’ their original intention was to name it the ‘Queen Victoria’. Consequently, the Chairman of Cunard’s board of directors sought an audience with King George V to ask his permission to name the new liner thus.

An audience was granted and the chairman started his plea rather ambiguously by saying, “Your Majesty, we would like to name our new passenger liner after England’s favourite queen”, meaning Queen Victoria.

King George beamed.

“Her Majesty Queen Mary will be delighted!”, he said.

And so, the chairman of Cunard left the royal presence with pie on his face and permission to call the new ship ‘The Queen Mary’ But there was another problem. Plying it’s trade somewhere on a lake in the North of England there was a paddle steamer that already had been named and registered as ‘The Queen Mary’.

Hasty conferences and the passing of much hard cash took place and the paddle steamer was de-registered and renamed ‘The Tattershall Castle’, thus leaving the way clear for the Cunards to win the Blue Ribband with their ‘Queen Mary’ and create a large slice of maritime history.

So, it was on the erstwhile Queen Mary that CARTOON REFLECTIONS, our Silver Jubilee Exhibition, took place with an extra royal connection of which we had all been completely unaware.

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~ Prince Philip loaned cartoons from his collection with the stipulation that, although he was happy for the public to know the exhibition contained cartoons owned by him, he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want it known which cartoons were his. The reason for this being the fact that someone could possibly count the number of pro-Socialist cartoons and measure them against the number of pro-Conservative cartoons, thus coming up with a calculable difference and jumping to the conclusion that the Prince had a particular political bias.

Personally, I knew which cartoons belonged to him and could find no bias at all. The only thing they proved to me was that the esteemed gentleman had a damn good sense of humour...He 58

also had a pretty good understanding of what cartoonists were trying to do, as was proved by the introduction he wrote for our catalogue.

‘There are cartoons and cartoons. the visual funny story variety are capable of giving universal pleasure, provided of course that they are funny and that everyone has the same sense of humour. Then there is the lampoon variety which gives various degrees of satisfaction. Most satisfied is the cartoonist himself, followed by those who agree with him, followed by descending order of appreciation by the don’t knows, then by those who don’t agree with the cartoonist and finally by the subject of the lampoon.

There is also an intermediate variety which might be described as the commentary cartoon which puts into picture and words the views of a perceptive observer of the human scene perhaps the most beneficial of cartoonists as he prevents us taking life too seriously.

I am delighted to see that all varieties are represented in this exhibition because only a free society can tolerate the freedom of all cartoonists.

(Signed) Philip.’

It is nice to know that at least one person out there knows what we’ve been trying to do, all these years.

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Chapter 11

“One thing is certain, and the rest is lies” (Edward Fitzgerald) In an effort to involve out-of-town members, the Club embarked on a long series of weekends when we held very convivial meetings in may different parts of the British Isles.

Bill Tidy organised a meeting in Liverpool, Anne Spano set one up in Southampton, Bristol became an almost regular venue under the aegis of Ted Monaghan and John Pace, while Gren Jones had us down to Cardiff on a couple of memorable occasions.

The Welsh visits were noted for the amount of eating we did, the amount of drinking we did, and the amount of Welsh choirtype singing we managed to perform with Gren as out leader and soloist. We also had our photos taken on the hallowed turf of Cardiff Arms Park. We were given to understand that this was the only time this had ever happened to other than Rugger players. What an honour. The first group to be photographed on a Rugger pitch without a broken nose in sight.

On our first visit to Wales we were taken on the Saturday evening to a rather posh night-club where, as usual, we were royally entertained. The only trouble was, there was an awful lot of us there on that occasion and the other punters in the place got a bit bored with being regaled by conversational gambits that started with the opening line, “I am a cartoonist on a national newspaper”. Our one social advantage quickly lost its cache, and this frustrated one of our members, Reg Orlandini.

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Reg died several years ago, but back in those days he was the Club PRO and a very lively, very sociable guy indeed. The fact that “I am a cartoonist” was giving him no novelty value proved to be an insurmountable aggravation that caused him to lie. When we were introduced to a small group of Gren’s acquaintances, some of whom were young ladies, he informed them that he was a visiting surgeon from London called in at great expense to perform an urgent operation at Cardiff General Hospital on the following day. One of the young ladies seemed vastly impressed by this and plied him with so many questions that he was soon floundering and getting well out of his depth.

Eventually she let him off the hook when she said, before turning her back on him, “You are a lying little toad! You must be one of those bloody cartoonists! I should know, ‘cos I am the theatre sister at Cardiff General and I happen to be on duty in the theatre, tomorrow!”

But that isn’t the end of the story. Several years later we were invited back in Cardiff at the same night-club on the Saturday night, and Reginald was again trying to make an impression on another group of local people. Again he introduced himself as a visiting surgeon and was in full flight of fanciful fabrication.

This time, however, he made absolutely sure his listeners had nothing to do with Cardiff General and no one was going to be able to call his bluff.

Then the music stopped, there was a hush, and a voice was heard over the club’s public address system. It announced: 61

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Will Mr Orlandini please report at once to Cardiff General where he is needed to perform an urgent pencilectomy!â&#x20AC;?

The people Reg was trying to impress commiserated with him and wished him goodbye and good luck as he was forced to leave the club. We found him two hours later, waiting for us in a coffee bar on the other side of the road and trying to persuade three bag ladies he was a visitor from outer space!

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Chapter 12 “Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie” (George Orwell) The ‘Butlins Years’ were much enlivened by a large squareshaped man with the build of an all-in wrestler. His name was Harry Maggs. Harry wasn’t a cartoonist, but he and another character called Brian Cooke were friends of Ted Monaghan, a Bristol member who was coincidentally built like small wrestler. He brought the pair of them to our Conventions as guests.

They were friends because Ted did a lot of trade exhibition work and Harry and Brian were involved in the same line of business. They therefore seemed to have unlimited facilities for printing, the production of leaflets, posters and even badges, and it was this that gave Harry Maggs his edge when it came time to demonstrate his virtuosity as now of the greatest practical jokers who ever had the wrath of God called down on his head by his victims.

Harry’s modus operandi was based firmly on two simple facts of life. An ability he possessed that enabled him walk away from an elaborate practical joke without compulsively having to hang around to gloat over it’s pay-off, and the gullibility of the average man when confronted with the printed word, especially the elaborate printed word. Most people live by the dictum, ‘if it is printed it is true’, (for example, see the cash results of most advertising campaigns). This is what makes them prime subjects for Harry Maggs’ style of humour.

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Picture if you can Butlins main bar at noon on a Sunday morning. The place was the size of an aircraft hangar and sweating campers were lined three deep along it’s length as they tried to get service. Then, suddenly, leaflet dispensers carrying printed leaflets appeared in front of every till.

Campers grabbed for these leaflets (they were apt to grab for anything that didn’t have a price tag on it) and were confronted by a photograph of Bill Tidy wearing a clerical collar and staring off the page at them in solemn grandeur.

The leaflet purported to be a tract issued by ‘THE SAINT BRIDES’ LEAGUE OF TEMPERANCE’ and told the simple story of the Reverend William Tidy who, having gained success and a modicum of fame under the name of Emmanuel, of ‘EMMANUEL & HIS MUSIC OF THE MOUNTAINS’ (Recorded by Pye), had turned his back on fame and fortune to become religious adviser to Idi Amin before returning to England to further spread the word of total abstemiousness among the heathens of Fleet Street.

Barely had this information been read and had time to sink in than the main doors of the bar swung wide and a procession of men walked solemnly through. In truth they were members of the Cartoonists’ Club but each wore a badge bearing a reproduction of the photo of the Reverend William Tidy. They marched slowly forward and handed larger leaflets than those on the bar to anyone who would accept one. They also bore aloft elaborate screen printed banners that declared them to be followers of ‘The Saint Brides’ League of Temperance’ on a mission of salvation.

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A hush fell over the bar a campers waiting to be served with their beer turned and looked guilty. Even more slowly the banner bearing column made its way across the floor and out of the opposite door, but not before a bemused camper had

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managed to stop Barry Knowles, a very young cartoonist at the time, and hardly looking fit to carry his banner.

“Do you belong to this lot?” asked the camper of Barry.

“Yes” replied Barry, nodding solemnly.

“Well, I’d keep my eye on that bloody Reverend Tidy, if I was you” confided the camper. “He was in ‘ere last night an’ he was definitely drinking - definitely”.

This was one of Harry’s greatest triumphs and , to the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t even part of the procession. He was probably supping ale in another bar somewhere. ~ Butlins at Pwllheli used to have a long, covered arcade in the middle of the camp. Vaguely Victorian in style it was lined with shops, the cinema and a huge bar that boasted an amazing ceiling decorated with thousands of parrots and multi-coloured hoola-hoops. The place was without doubt one of the most important visual shocks of the western world, but sadly it burned to the ground one winter when a couple of workmen tried to redecorate it with seven hundred pots of paint and one blowlamp.

So, it came as no shock when whose of us who had booked for the upcoming Convention received letters on Butlins headed notepaper. These letters drew our attention to the recent fire and said that, despite a massive rebuilding project, it was to be business as usual as far as we were concerned. They 66

apologised, however, for the fact that the fire had burned the entire bedding store and they would be unable to provide pillows for our visit. Would we therefore please bring our own pillows?

A simple enough request, one would think, until you carefully thought the thing through. Your average sleeper uses two pillows, therefore a family of four arriving by car would be obliged to find room in their vehicle for no less than eight pillows. And, believe me, eight pillows take up a lot of room.

And things were even worse for the non-drivers among us.

Those arriving by train or bus had to physically carry their pillows as well as their luggage. Rationing themselves to one pillow apiece still left the Dad of the family with a whole lot of awkward extra luggage to hump.

And what did our members find when at last they arrived in Wales, hot and irritable after an extremely cramped and uncomfortable journey? They found the Butlins letters of apology were forgeries, devised and sent by Harry Maggs.

But one victim at least got his revenge on this particular occasion. A letter later appeared in the Club newsletter (then called ‘Second Sitting’) purporting to have been written by Harry Maggs and asking for contributions to his collection of Belly Button Fluff. It is understood that he was inundated by the stuff. Some of it sent by second class post and therefore somewhat ripe and festering on arrival. Touché.

This wasn’t then end of Harry’s pranks that used the burning of that arcade as a catalyst. Rebuilding was finished when we 67

arrived the following year. In place of the arcade was a new theatre and a row of custom built shops. These shops were being made ready for immediate occupancy by a crew of workmen.

Well, one sunny morning I was walking across the camp in the company of Sally Artz when we were accosted by Harry Maggs and Brian Cooke. Would we help them with a gag, they asked? Sally was to be Anne Summers, the sex shop queen and I was to be an architect. To aid the impersonation I was given a large roll of blueprints and Sally a briefcase to carry.

The four of us went into one of the new shops where half a dozen workmen were putting the finishing touches to the decorations. We didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t speak to them, other than a nod and murmur good morning, and we were viewed with some degree of unspoken suspicion until Harry took the blueprints from me, unrolled them on the concrete floor and started to explain to Anne Summers (Sally Artz) exactly how he intended to organise the shop fittings in which she could store her stock and use as the backbone of various displays she needed.

Brian Cooke produced a metal tape measure and started measuring the place. I made encouraging noises, Sally stood around and looked important, while Harry carried on waffling for at least twenty minutes. By this time he had thoroughly established our right to be there in the midst of the workmen. I believe they would have changed the buildings colour scheme had we asked for their co-operation.

Then came the coup-de-grace. Harry produced twenty or thirty screen-printed posters from a folder, when he and Brian 68

proceeded to cover the window of the shop with them. The workmen looked on approvingly, obviously impressed by the speed and efficiency they were witnessing. The posters well and truly up, we wished them good morning, and left.

A crowd of campers slowly started to gather and to read the posters. They announced the opening of Anne Summers sex shop on the site, on the Monday of the following week when there would be some amazing special offers and competitions.

Blow-up dolls at half price, free condoms, the chance to win a trip to Amsterdam and sample its nightlife, and many other sexy goods of like nature. Harry made us walk away from the swiftly growing scene of interest, but apparently a crowd of over five hundred campers had to be moved on before lunchtime.

It tool the camp management two days to realise that Head Office and those responsible for shop leases had not taken leave of their sense. Then it took another half day for a very annoyed manager to scrape the posters off the window with a razorblade.

The manager of the camp was a very relaxed old guy and saw the joke. He later confided in me that he actually received two enquiries from campers wishing to book a second weeks holiday to coincide with the opening of the sex shop.

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Chapter 13

“Thou art noble and false and a mystery” (Apologies to Swinburne)

Always a firm believer in leaving the best bits till last, I’ve left Harry Maggs most elaborate and involved practical joke as a bonne bouche to round off my potted history of his exploits.

Once again the scene was set at Butlins Pwllheli Camp, But at this time the spadework that led up to the gag took place on the very afternoon we all arrived.

The camp manager was conducting a purge. He had become paranoid about cars being parked in the chalet lines, albeit for a few minutes. He therefore had a squad of employees policing offending cars with labels and buckets of paste. If they had discovered a car parked in a restricted zone they had no ability to penalise or take any action against the offending parkee, but what they could do was to paste a large sticky notice across your windscreen that informed you of your wrongdoing and with a request not to repeat the offence.

This was a very clever ploy because few if any parkers ever offended again. Not because of guilty consciences, but because it took at least an hour to scrape the notification from your windscreen and to clean off the viscous gunge with which it had become attached.

Harry Maggs knew of this purge, it having started while we were on camp in the previous year. So he turned up in a Rolls 70

Royce with himself dressed in morning suit complete with top hat, while Brian Cooke drove the car in a chauffeur’s uniform.

They arrived at the gate and were met by an elderly local, part of the casual Saturday afternoon labour force recruited each week to greet new campers. the old boy stuck his gnarled head through the Rolls’ window and asked for the booking forms of the car’s occupants. There was a moment’s shocked silence, then Brian bounded from the driver’s seat, grabbed the old man by the arm, led him to one side and said, “You fool! This is Lord Maggs and he is one of Butlins directors! How dare you impeded this very important gentleman’s progress!” (or words to that effect).

The old man hastily gathered together the rest of the team of pensioners and the opened the Main Gates to their full extent, something only ever done before for Billy Butlin himself. Then they lined up and stood to attention as the Rolls oiled its way noiselessly into the chalet lines where Brian immediately parked. No one stopped him, as, getting out of the car again, he opened he boot and produced a mallet and a small ready assembled signpost. He hammered the sign into the grass verge beside the car.. It read, THIS PARKING SPACE IS RESERVED FOR LORD MAGGS. This went on throughout the week. Whenever and wherever the Rolls stopped, Brian hammered a reserve parking space sign into the ground. Time came when there were almost more reserved parking spaces in the chalet lines than there were spaces in the main car park, and none of the Butlins staff had the temerity to remove even one of them.

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On the evening of their arrival Harry and Brian went to the dining room where Brian had a conversation with the dining room manager while Harry stood aloofly to one side. He explained that, while Lord Maggs would be eating Butlins food, he would require a small table to himself by the main window, that Brian would act as his waiter, and that he would using his own damask tablecloth and silver cutlery.

When the main body of campers queued for their evening meal they were therefore obliged to shuffle past an elegant gentleman, sitting at a plastic table laid with fine napery, silver cutlery, a silver condiment set and a crystal vase containing fresh picked flowers as he ate exactly what they would be eating in a few minutesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; time - Cold Ham and Beetroot Salad with a slice of Hard-boiled Egg, followed by Arctic Roll.

Beside the table stood a wine cooler in which rested an open bottle of champagne from which the uniformed Brian, now with a serviette draped over his arm, served his lord and master. The camperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chatter toned down to a respectful silence as this apparition was noticed. Such is the respect the hoi poloi have for their betters.

After the campers had finished their meal, Harry still not having finished his, several of them stayed behind and watched him as he smoked a cigar and drank an after dinner brandy.

The next morning the same sight met them when they came in to breakfast, but with a small addition. A silver stand near the window held a small card, the size of a visiting card, on which was printed in tiny copperplate script the legend, 72

PLEASE DO NOT WATCH LORD MAGGS WHEN HE IS EATING THANK YOU. In consequence to this request, at least fifty people stood outside the window to watch Harry Maggs plough through vast plates of Butlins fodder for the whole of the rest of the week. It became a pastime second only to feeding the ducks on Butlins lake with bread rolls stolen from the dining room tables.

Never at any time was Lord Maggs accosted by any of the security staff but, at the end of the week, two CID men turned up and questioned Harry and Brian as to their reason for ‘hiding out’ in a holiday camp. I believe they were suspected of being international criminals on the run, which give lie to the belief that all wide-boys end up on the Costa Brava.

Albert Cosser was not only the editor of Odham’s juvenile comics ‘Wham’, ‘Smash’ and ‘Pow’, for which most of us worked at one time or another, but he was also an ex-naval killick who, having been a boxer while in the service, was the proud possessor of an extremely broken nose.

It came as something of a shock therefore when on turning to see the ‘Glamorous Granny’ competition, we found Albert attired in straw bonnet, black bombazine and a lot of lipstick.

He had entered himself as a contestant and would have finished in the first three had he not blown the gaff and chased the compere while trying to thrash him with a rolled umbrella -

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Which didn’t say a lot for the looks of the rest of the contestants, did it? ~ Butlins sponsored many competitions and another of them was ‘The Dad and His Lad’ parade. Gentlemen campers and their young sons, usually dressed in identical clothes, would take place in a masculine fashion parade from which a pair of winners would be selected for their smart appearance.

When my son Matthew was about seven years old, I got together with Les Barton’s next door neighbour, a fun guy who emigrated to America many years ago, and the pair of us entered together with Matthew.

WE prepared a script, both for ourselves and for Matthew, and the compere of the competition was a bit non-plussed when two grown men turned up on stage with one small boy.

“Which of you is the father?” he asked.

“We’re not sure” I replied, “We were campers at Butlins when this lad was conceived, but we’re not quite sure which of us was the actual father”.

The Redcoat sweated copiously and turned his attention to Matthew, hopefully to carry on with the questioning on safer ground.

“How old are you?” he asked.

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“Twenty two, bit I’m a bit on the small side because I haven’t been well” said Matthew, dead on cue.

And so it went on. The compere didn’t know how to handle the situation and wasn’t prepared to outface us because we were answering so seriously and sincerely. But eventually he did get rid of us and, as we left the stage, Matthew turned to me and said, “I hope you didn’t mind, Dad, But I did a bit of ad-libbing”, which was more than could be said for that bloody compere.

There is every possibility that it could have been Des O’Connor in his formative years. Who can say?

~

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Was this penchant for practical joking catching? Perhaps it was. Even erstwhile staid and well behaved Frank Holmes eventually succumbed to the wave of anarchy.

One evening he was talking to one of our seldom seen North Country members, Roy Mitchell, when Roy remarked on the fact that the chalet of George Ratcliff was always a ‘busy’ chalet. Everyone seemed to find an opportunity to drop into George’s chalet for a chat, and it often seemed more like a club-house than someone’s living space.

“It’s strange” he mused. “No-one ever seems to drop by to visit me in my chalet”.

Frank felt sorry for Roy and resolved to try and cheer him up.

So it came to pass that the next morning during one of the Club’s conferences, there was a Tannoy announcement asking Mr. Roy Mitchell to go straight back to his chalet after the meeting was over. Roy looked surprised, but no-one was able to enlighten him as to why he was needed, so, the meeting finished, Roy hastened back to his chalet.

Perhaps ‘hastened’ is too strong a word as he allowed himself to be side-tracked by shop windows, beauty queens, and even a couple of glamorous grannies before he eventually reached his own front door unknowingly having been surreptitiously followed by Frank Holmes and a number of conventioneers.

So it further came to pass that, having let himself into his chalet and found no reason why he should have been called

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back, a large number of club members knocked at his door, each having a valid excuse for doing so.

The first wanted to borrow a pencil sharpened, the second had run out of sugar, the third needed money for the electricity meter, the fourth wanted to borrow a sheet of paper, the fifth had found a key and wondered if it belonged to Roy, and so it went on.

Gradually the chalet filled up with a vast number oh heaving bodies jammed shoulder to shoulder from wall to wall. It came to resemble the famous ‘cabin scene’ of the Marx Brothers, though the Marx Brothers visual image could have given no conception of the terrible pong fifty or sixty sweaty men in one chalet can create on a hot Summer afternoon.

No-one can quite remember the outcome of this particular prank as a crate of beer was passed into the chalet at some point of the proceedings. This served to obliterate memories already made weak by several nights of carousing, and it also served to obliterate any need for a punchline to this story.

Frank Holmes is the only one to have a tangible memory of that afternoon. He claims to have an empty can of ‘Dinkel Acker Pils’ among his bits and pieces of convention memorabilia. A well crushed can.

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Chapter 14

“The Game’s Afoot: Follow Your Spirit!”

(Henry V)

Cartoonists are, generally speaking, kindly and gregarious people. They come from many different backgrounds, have vastly different earning potentials and pursue many and various lifestyles, but at heart they are all as one. They are cartoonists and are bonded by a shared ambition to make people laugh...Until they play football.

When the first Club Convention was held at Bognor Regis, an impromptu football match took place on a strip of flat sand between two breakwaters on the beach. Half-time and a change of ends also saw a change of tide after which the pitch became progressively more narrow and corner kicks were taken ankle deep in sea water.

I well remember seeing a short piece of cine film of this match.

What started as a gentle knockabout ended as a display of naked aggression. John Hamilton, Amil, played stripped to the waist with only his braces to protect his pink torso from the heat of the sun. He used his feet to great advantage and his stomach to even better advantage, bouncing the opposition off it and forcing them into the sea. I believe it was he who scored the entire margin of seven goals with which the Northern Cartoonists beat the Southern Cartoonists on that occasion.

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This match alone set the seal on the rift between North and South. Subsequent matches were needle matches, only slightly more sophisticated. On the second year the match was played on a real pitch and with a real football, on the third year some sort of ‘strip’ was devised and on the fourth year we actually had a referee. A job that was willingly undertaken by Alfred P Halberstam, the Club’s solicitor, and was held by him for a further twenty three years.

Alfred was an incomparable referee. Being a rather large and increasingly elderly gentleman he was not much good at running, but truly came into his own when he trilled long obligato on his whistle.

No one argued with him. No one dared argue with him. His was a court of no appeal.

But he had to be strict because those matches were dead rough.

The Northerners played the Southerners while Midlanders exercised their right of choice as to which team they played for, 79

invariably showing a distinct bias towards ganging up with whoever happened to be favourites for any particular match.

After one of the early matches someone, I cannot now remember who, went home with a broken collar bone. Some years later Edward Taylor, Script Editor for the Light Entertainment side of BBC Radio and with us as a lecturer, played the entire second half of a match with the toenail of his right foot hanging off! Ugh! While Larry ( a Midlander if ever there was one) was brought on at half time by the North as a prospective death threat to the South and, being somewhat out of condition, tripped over a tuft of grass while running on to the pitch, fell over, twisted his ankle and never got to kick the ball. This was a unique occasion when a player actually fouled himself and caused Alfred to spend sleepless nights trying to find a precedent for this in the rules of football.

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After one of those very first matches my wife, Audrie, went into town and bought a silver egg cup that she had suitably engraved for the winning team. This lasted well, but was eventually replaced when Chic Jacob, Chairman of the Club at the time, bought a magnificent trophy that was inscribed as being, ’THE ED COOMBS TROPHY’, Ed having been a Secretary of the Club who died in harness.

This trophy was presented to the captain of the winning team (almost always the North) at our last night party when yet another trophy was handed out. This was the ‘ALFRED P HALBERSTAM TROPHY’ and was given to the person deemed by the committee to have done the most towards making a success of that particular year’s Convention.

Strangely, the Club no longer has these two trophies in it’s possession. The last recipients of both have forgotten they were theirs for only a year, and no-one can remember who the winners were to ask for their return. Does anyone out there have a guilty conscience?

But the armed warfare that passed as football initiated in its wake another club tradition. It was Marilyn Halberstam, Alfred’s wife, who decided that a celebratory tea should take place on the grassed area between the chalets after the matches.

These became known as ‘The Football Teas’ and she was assisted in the preparation of them by the wife of Tom BayleyHughes, the Protestant religious administrator of Butlins Pwllheli Camp who was also the Deacon (or was it Archdeacon?) of Merioneth, a semi-pro cartoonist, a long time Club member and a fine fellow, to boot.

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Club teas calmed tempers lost of the field of battle, Fish Paste sandwiches served to plaster cracks and fissures in the Club’s edifice, and it gave cartoonists’ wives a chance to shine and show off their virtuosity when it came to the strength of the tea brewed (again North v South) The football matches and football teas are presumably part of history, never to return. But when Mike Turner toiled mightily and reinstigated Club Conventions with one held at Caister in ‘96, a Rounders’ match was organised, after which the wives prepared a ‘Rounders Tea’.

It was then discovered that, although not shrouded in the mystic qualities of a Footer Match, Rounders seemed to be able to engender the same sort of competitive spirit as had been seen in the past...Only more so! Rounders as a game was being played members and families of cartoonists from the age of three to seventy three and they all succumbed to the will to win.

My own six year old granddaughter so keenly that the shadow of Amil’s stomach could almost be seen to fall on her narrow shoulders as she belted around the diamond, inflicting damage to the opposition and screaming encouragement for the North.

The unfortunate child’s father just so happens top come from Blackpool so at least I can now associate myself, if only by marriage, to the winning side!

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Chapter 15

“Come, Pensive Nun, Devout and Pure, Sober, Steadfast and Demure” (John Milton)

There was a time during a tenure at the Presscala Club when it became a rule that every member attending a Club Meeting should tell one new(ish) joke during the ‘Matters Arising’ section of the meeting, a joke with ‘smut’ being an optional extra.

Don Roberts and the late Eric Burgin proved to be particularly gifted raconteurs and Peter Jacob found his niche in the reciting of Bernard Miles’ monologues (“When it rains it don’t ‘alf rattle”), but there were members who had no flair for joke telling. Such a one was George Ratcliff who confessed that this monthly trial by joke caused him great worry during the three or four days before meetings, having to stretch his brain to remember any joke at all.

He then hit on the idea of finding one good joke and repeating it on all occasions when he was called upon to perform. His theory was that there would always be someone listening who hadn’t heard it before. The joke he decided to use was so politically incorrect in so many ways that to repeat it on these pages would be tantamount to calling on the wrath of the gods.

Let it suffice to say that the joke started with an over eager nun outside a pub, and finished with the landlord remarking: “Oh 83

no! Surely not that blessed nun again?”. I will leave you dear reader, to either research the joke or to use your own foetid imagination to fill in the middle bit.

George’s repetition of the same joke eventually became a joke in itself. After several years of having it inflicted on them, Club Members would sit around with baited breath not knowing how long or how soon it be before George started the preamble which went: “There was this nun standing outside a pub....”, at which point a room full of professional jokesmiths would fall about laughing as they behaved like Pavlov’s dogs, their funnybones tickled by the merest hint of ‘George’s joke’. The riotous reception of the story was always the same and George therefore convinced himself that he ‘had the knack’. That he was arguably up there among the world’s best raconteurs.

Several years passed during which the effect of the telling of ‘George’s Joke’ built, and built, and there was an occasion when Peter Jacob and I were to travel down to Butlins Minehead together for the annual Convention in Pete’s old Austin A40. Pete surreptitiously conceived the idea that we should run a sweepstake based on the fact that George was sure to tell the nun’s story at some point during the journey. So, knowing at what time we would be setting off and roughly how long the journey would take, he sold sweepstake tickets to Club members, each ticket signifying a specific time-slot during the journey. The winner of the Sweep was to be the holder of the ticket with the time on it that best matched the time when George embarked on his telling of the story.

We did magnificent business with the tickets and, on the appointed day, Pete drove the car while I sat beside him, armed 84

with a list of ‘runners’ and a stopwatch. George snoozed quietly in the back seat. Time passed and we were in the middle of Salisbury Plain when George stirred, rubbed his eyes, fortified himself with a nip of Booth’s gin and spoke.

“Have I ever told you the story about the nun?” he chirped.

Poor Pete exploded, lost control of the car, and we left the road heading over the grassy plain in the general; direction of Stonehenge.

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It took so long to get back on the road that George had fallen asleep before we got on our way again. Then. making sure the old boy was really asleep and couldn’t hear him, Pete asked me who had won the sweepstake. I checked the stopwatch and our lists.

“You did!” I assured him, at which point he drove off the road again, now completely hysterical.

Peter has since confessed to me that this was the only time he ever organised a sweepstake and, furthermore, it was the only time he actually won a sweepstake.

It’s a good thing I’ve become a little bit cynical in my old age.

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Chapter 16

“Show Me a Man Who Cares No More For One Place Than Another, And I will Show You In That Same Person One Who Loves Nothing But Himself.

Beware Of Those Who Are Homeless By Choice” (Southwell)

In the dreary days when the CC of GB was homeless and staggering from one temporary meeting place to another, Reg Orlandini set himself the task of finding a pub in the Fleet Street area that was being ‘made over’ and therefore possibly prepared to be the HQ of the Club in return for an injection of ‘decoration by cartoon’.

He visited a vast number of hostelries, swinging out in an ever decreasing circle, (a chore to which he didn’t seem particularly averse), before finding a place in Shoe Lane that had previously been a home from home to Grub Street’s homosexual community. It was being torn down to make way for a Press Centre and the freehold contained a proviso that a new pub should take the place of the old pub on the ground floor of the building.

Reg made his approach to the brewery at the precise time when building had been completed, the pub had been taken over by Saint George’s Taverns, and they were looking around in

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desperation for a name that would give the place a Fleet Street flavour.

There was already a ‘Printers Pie’, there was already a ‘Wig and Pen’, and there was even a ‘Punch Tavern’. What was left?

Reg suggested ‘The Cartoonist’ and they almost fell over themselves in their haste to give us a home and get that name over the door.

The pub was completely undecorated. It was in ‘builders’ finish as the phrase goes, and we suddenly became actively involved in its refurbishment and design. Reg, Ian Scott and I worked in association with a young lady hired to design the pub’s interior.

So, jointly we must take the blame for the way the place looked until very recently.

She found old bars from ancient pubs that were cut to size and fitted in our new home. She ordered paint for the ceilings that came pre-stained with nicotine, and she bought masses of old frames in which the cartoons our members supplied were displayed on the walls. It was also decided that the first floor of our building would be a restaurant during the day and would become the CC of GB headquarters in the evenings. But this was not to be.

Shortly before the proposed opening the premises were visited by a member of the London Fire Brigade who immediately put a block on the restaurant idea. It would be a fire hazard, he said, but eventually allowed its use as accommodation for the landlord and his family who, it was previously thought, would be living off site.

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This left us with a major problem, but the designer came up with a concept in which the downstairs bar was fitted with a sliding door that ensured the Club’s privacy if, as, and when we wished to use it for meetings.. ‘HOORAY’ we all said, and the pub opened amidst great celebrations on our part.

There was only one snag. The first landlord, who seemed virtually autonomous, had a built-in clientele of printers from the Daily Express and needed not only the ground floor but also the downstairs bar to accommodate their mid-evening rush. A stalemate ensued.

We eventually agreed to still call the pub our HQ, to hold parties there, to hold an annual competition to choose a new cartoon-style inn sign (it is the only pub in the country where the inn sign changes once a year), and to hold an award ceremony there when we would present a gold stickpin to the person we claimed had given us the most ammunition as a subject for cartoons during the previous year. In the meantime, we moved upstairs into the Press Centre where we made our actual home and held our meetings as guests of the London Press Club, a situation that existed for many years till the Press Club went bankrupt.

Among the people to whom we made Golden Jester Awards were Enoch Powell (the first ever recipient), Wedgie Benn, Maggie Thatcher and Hercules The Bear among several dozen others.

Hercules The Bear was a weird one. He toured with a keeper who staged a wrestling act with him.. Then somewhere in the wilds of Scotland, he escaped and everyone north of Edinburgh 89

seemed to be out searching for the animal. This situation existed for many weeks and the whole of the British Isles was rooting for the bear. Then he was caught, and it is easy to see how his bid for freedom became almost the sole topic for comment by the socio/political cartoonists at the time. He was the clear winner of our stickpin, though what the poor beast would do with it, goodness knows.

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With a great deal of advanced publicity, Hercules was welcomed by us to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Cartoonistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; where a party was to be held in his honour. He turned up in a mobile cage of splendid proportions and, much to our dismay, an RSPCA man stepped out from the waiting mob of sightseers and forbade us to take him into the pub. It was not, he said in a very loud voice, a fit place to take a bear.

It was at this moment that we cartoonists learned our true place on the ladder of evolution.

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Chapter 17

“Nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair” (Emerson)

The craze for foreign travel caught up with the Club during the year in which we presented Sir Fred Pontin with our Golden Jester Award. Sir Fred was a larger than life character cast very much in the same mould as Sir Billy Butlin. To the general public it seemed there was no love lost between them, being, as they both were, proprietors of holiday camp empires. But in reality they were both rather more than mere acquaintances and had much respect for one another.

After Sir Fred received his award he spent some time at the ‘Cartoonist’ with us and talk got round to our annual convention at Butlins.

“What about having two conventions a year?” Sir Fred eventually suggested. “You can have your usual bash with old Billy in the Spring, and you can come to Torremolinos, in Spain, next Autumn when I am opening a new holiday hotel down there”.

Our redoubtable Reg Orlandini lost no time, and the next morning he dragged me along to Sir Fred’s sumptuous office that overlooked Oxford Circus. We were offered brandy and cigars, then our new friend’s offer was made. He couldn’t meet 92

Sir Billy’s ‘free for everyone’ terms, but he did offer us eight days at his hotel on Torremolinos with full board plus our flights there and back for a price that worked out something just over twenty pounds a head.

We accepted this generous offer (of course) then Reg got down to the job of organising a general migration of cartoonists to sunnier climes. He had a great take-up of the offer. If I remember correctly there were over a hundred of us cartoonists, wives, children and a few friends that eventually made the trip.

On arrival we were treated like royalty by the staff. Sir Fred had obviously stressed our importance in the great scheme of things. The hotel manager held a cocktail party and press reception in our honour and went to great lengths to tell us what a very convivial atmosphere we now found ourselves in.

His staff, he said, were just one great big happy family and would attend to our every whim. No matter what our needs were we had but to lift a finger and an attentive employee would rush to do our bidding. And this proved to be no exaggeration. This was exactly how things went from that moment on.

I was working for ATV on ‘The Golden Shot’ at that time and I remember sitting in the main bar with Anne Kirkbride when she was just reaching the end of her first contract with Granada for her appearance in ‘ Coronation Street’. She was a bit worried about her future, she told me. She didn’t know whether her contract would be renewed and she had no idea what she would do if it was terminated. She had gone into the ‘Street’

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straight from her drama training with Oldham Rep. and had no other experience of the entertainment industry.

Feeling hugely magnanimous and wanting to do my best to cheer her up, I said that I could offer her a job. If her contract finished with Granada I could get her work as a ‘Maid if the Month’ on ‘The Golden Shot’. Four of five weeks certain employment. Who could ask for more?

Well, Anne’s contract was renewed and, at the same time, ‘The Golden Shot’ folded. Some twenty odd years later Anne is still playing the same role for Granada while, not only does the ‘Shot’ not now exist, neither does ATV! I sometimes wonder if she could organise four weeks work for me, if I asked her nicely.

On of the Cartoonists’ Club’s regular rituals was a form of dancing when we all made a circle and people from that circle took it in turns to get in the middle and cavort while everyone else clapped their hands in time to the music. Chic Jacob usually organised this funny fifteen minutes mainly, I believe, because he himself was particularly good at cavorting. But, be that as it may, it was a routine we all performed nightly in the ballroom of Pontins Pontinental Hotel at Torremolinos.

Doubtless we bored the pants off the other hotel guests, but we loved it and couldn’t wait for the evenings to come around when again we could slough off our inhibitions. One of our party was Frank Dickens of the Evening Standard and ‘Bristow’ fame, and Frank proved to be particularly uninhibited.

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On one particular evening the orchestra, consisting as it did of Bass Viol, Flute, Organ and Maracas, gave out with a spirited rendition of David Rose â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Stripperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Frank needed no more encouragement than that. As we clapped enthusiastically and shouted words of encouragement he slowly started a strip, a complete strip.

This took us by surprise and one by one we fell back a few steps. A condition reflex usually noted when a crowd is either embarrassed or trying to disassociate itself from imminent disaster.. If any of us had a shred of decency we would have gathered more closely around our featured performer to shield him from the prying eyes of other hotel guests, but we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t.

We fell back a few paces and left him very much out there on his own as at last his underpants went the way of his other clobber and he stood pinkly floodlit in the glare of disco lighting.

The band fizzled to a halt, several cartoonists went back to their tables, silence descended on the place for the first time in a week and still Frank stood there, presumably trying to work out which way to face when he took his bow. Then all hell broke looses! A posse of hotel staff burst onto the dance floor, Frank was seized by his upper arms and elbows, he was lifted till his feet no longer touched the floor and he was hustled around behind the bandstand with a speed that left us wondering whether what we had just seen really happened.

A few minutes later I got a message from the hotel manager.

He wanted to see Mr Orlandini and me in his office - pronto!

We obeyed the summons and found ourselves in company with a man who was truly wide-eyed with worry.

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“Does Frank Dickens often do that?” he enquired.

“Have you ever seen him do that before?” I asked Reg. “No” he said.

“We’ve neither of us ever seen him do that before but can’t vouch for the frequency of such occurrences” I said to the manager. He groaned and collapsed in his seat with his head in his hands.

“What’s the problem?” asked Reg, being particularly obtuse.

“It’s the Spanish Police!” exclaimed the manager. “They’re very hot on things like this. We had a German tourist here a couple of week ago and he tried nude bathing off our private beach in the middle of the night”.

“Well?”

“Well, the police saw him, shot him in the leg, and we received our first warning!” groaned the manager.

First warning?”

“Yes, you get one warning only about nudity in or around the hotel, then, if it happens a second time they close the place down!”

We sympathised with poor man and Reg tried to console him.

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“Well no police saw Frank, tonight, did they?” he said comfortingly. Then I added my two penn’orth.

“The only people there were hotel guests and the hotel staff.

You’re as safe as houses.”

“Don’t you believe it!” he literally shouted. “I wouldn’t trust my staff as far as a could throw a piano by its leg! One of the bastards is sure to shop me! Most of them are police spies anyway!”

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I still remember that conversation almost word for word after all these years. It made a great impression on both Reg and me and left us wondering what had happened to the great, big happy family of employees he had been boasting of only a couple of days before.

A fairly recent member of the Club was Pete Field, and it was he who went home to his wife one evening and said, “We’re going on holiday to the South of France”.

“How?” she asked, knowing at that time they were particularly hard-up.

“The magazine I’m working for is ending us to a holiday camp down there so that I can do a few cartoons on the place and also give it a write-up for the Travel Section” “Wow!” said Angela, Pete’s wife, getting very excited. “I’ll need some clothes. What can I afford?”

“You won’t need any new clothes” Pete assured her. “It’s a Naturist Holiday Camp!”

The magazine for which Pete was working for was ‘Health and Efficiency’, the only publication in which adolescent boys got to see naked (airbrushed) girls before 1960.

Angela subsequently went on the holiday with Pete. They had a chalet on the beach and, while he stripped off and dashed around the place within three minutes of their arrival, she reluctantly disrobed and stood hesitating just inside the French 98

Windows for two whole days before she became courageous enough to sidle on to the beach and bury herself up to her neck in the sand!

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Chapter 18

“Lap your loneliness in heat” (Sir John Betjeman)

Flushed with the success of the trips he organised to Torremolinos, in 1978 Reg Orlandini organised yet another trip for the CC of GB. This time it was to be a little more adventurous, a little more up-market and a little more glamorous. It was to Majorca and was, in consequence, more expensive. He announced to Club members details of the deal he had negotiated and immediately had a taker. Clive Abbott booked for, not only himself, but his entire family.

Reg was delighted to get such an early enthusiastic response. If his previous experiences were anything to go by, this fast ‘takeup’ boded extremely well for the trip. He envisaged landing on Majorca at the head of a contingent of at least eighty or ninety cartoonists, their wives, families and friends.

But Clive’s booking proved to be something of a false dawn.

As the days, weeks and months passed by, Reg didn’t receive a single other enquiry, let alone an actual booking. In desperation he mounted an onslaught by phone. He rang every Club member who’d every been on a convention or a trip with him, but form all of them he got the same embarrassed reply - the trip was too expensive.

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Eventually in a state of panic, he rang Clive and pleaded with him not to change his mind about taking his family on the trip.

There had been very few bookings, he explained, and the only people going would be the Abbotts and the Orlandinis. Clive reassured him. He was looking forward to the trip and nothing would stop him. Reg breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked him from the bottom of his heart.

And the Abbott family, true to their word, did go to Majorca.....but they went alone. At the last moment, Reg had a family crisis and had to cancel his own bookings.

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Clive and his appendages therefore arrived in Majorca as the sole representatives of the Cartoonistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Club of Great Britain!

It is not know what were the subjects of the many Abbott family group discussions that doubtless took place on the island, though one could chance a reasonably accurate guess.

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Chapter 19

“An Englishman does not travel to see English Men” (Laurence Stern)

During 1978 there was but one name that hit you in the eye every time you opened a newspaper. It was Sir Freddie Laker.

Sir Fred was riding high during that year having only recently inaugurated his Sky Train and cheap fares across the Atlantis to America. So, late in ‘78 he willingly cam down to ‘The Cartoonist’ to receive ‘The Golden Jester’ Award and to judge the Inn Sign contest (that year won by Cliff CLEW Lewis).

He appeared to enjoy himself and, instead of staying with us for the half hour as promised, he junked all his appointments for the rest of the day and stayed on for hours, and hours, and hours.

Ale flowed fast and furious and our guest managed manfully to keep pace with our team of connoisseurs. Then, eventually, fantasy took over from reality and Ian Heath suggested that Sir Fred should allow us members of the club to draw cartoons all over the outside of one of his planes. This suggestion must have been made very late in the day because Sir Fred welcomed it. In fact, he was very enthusiastic about it. He said he was taking delivery of a new Jumbo Jet in a few weeks when he would ask for it be delivered painted plain white

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instead of his usual Laker livery, thereby giving the Club a chance to climb all over it and to embellish it.

The next day he rang, full of apologies. In the bleak light of morning after the night before he had been reminded by his staff that it was illegal to fly an airline plane in anything but the livery of that airline. So, our plans to decorate a complete fuselage came unstuck.

But Sir Fred offered us a remarkable consolation prize. He suggested that he would mount an eight day trip to New York on our behalf. The flight there, the flight back, and hotel accommodation for about ÂŁ200 per head! We jumped at this prospect and forgot our disappointment about not being able to mutilate one of his flight.

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So, in the middle of September ‘79, members of the Cartoonists’ Club together with a dozen or so members of the Society of Strip Illustration, totaling about one hundred and sixty in all, undertook a great exodus in the westward direction.

I liaised with the Laker executives on the general arrangements and bookings while Manny Curtis, our Club Secretary at that time, contacted the Americans and managed to organise no less than ten events to take place in or around New York during our eight day visit. It seems that between us we had performed miracles, but we had reckoned without the Americans capacity for doing everything bigger and better including the organising of cockups.

We were sited in three different hotels, and this caused our first major problem. Nineteen cartoonists trippers booked into one particular downtown hotel, staged a walkout in the middle of their first night there when they found the esteemed establishment to be crawling with ‘hookers’, drug pushers and cockroaches and found shelter on one of the other hotels on our itinerary, only to be confronted with a surcharge of fifty pounds each that was generously picked up by Sir Fred.

The following evening Manny Curtis had booked two Greyhound Buses to take us on a relatively short twenty-five mile trip to see an exhibition of the work of British Cartoonists that was being held at the American Cartoonists’ Museum.

Now, when you charter a bus in the UK it is expected that you will be provided with drivers who will actually know the way to your destination. But in New York there seemed to be no such guarantee. Neither of the drivers had the remotest idea of 105

how to get to the museum, and neither did we. This led to our driving around in ever increasing circles until wild cries of complaint were heard from the back seats claiming we had passed the same landmarks no less than three times.

Manny it was who became particularly exasperated, stopped the lead bus, got out and went into a neighbourhood liquor store to enquire the way. This helped things go a little better until one of the drivers rather capriciously drove his bus up an unmade road, got stuck in a huge pot-hole, and called for total disembarkation from the vehicles when we all put our shoulders to the wheel, so to speak, and literally pushed one bus for the last few hundred yards of our journey.

This twenty-five mile journey took two and one half hours to complete, and we arrived at our destination two hours late to find that half our hosts and the promised TV coverage had already gone home to bed. This particular event turned out to be not so much a reception as a frosty reception.

There was another evening when we were asked to a reception at the Waldorf Hotel in New York, two or three minutes walk from our own hotel. The reception was given in honour of Ron Embleton, a Society of Strip Illustration member who drew â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Wicked Wandaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for Penthouse Magazine. The bash was being hosted by its proprietor, Bob Guccioni.

We all arrived at the hotel in good time and stood in the reception area while I went to ask where we would find the actual event. I then got a firm brush off from a remarkably vocal sixty three year old bellhop, a receptionist, and the hotel manager who all claimed no 106

knowledge of the booking. These enquiries took nearly an hour and I was running around the hotel on sheer desperation as our British delegation stood in the lobby, displaying slight but ominous signs of mutiny.

Eventually, in a quiet passage down near the hotel’s kitchens I met Ralph Steadman, in America to launch his book on Sigmund Freud and carrying a life size wax model of Freud himself that was on loan to him from Madame Tussaud’s. He was on his way to the same Penthouse reception as were we, and told me it was being held in the ‘Shah Abbas Suite’.

Having given my abject thanks to Ralph, and patted Freud o the bum for luck, I raced back to the hotel lobby and was just in time to stop ‘our lot’ stomping out into the night in high dudgeon.

Further words with the hotel manager elucidated that there was a reception in the Shah Abbas Suite to which we were invited, but that it had inadvertently slipped his mind. The bellhop hung around looking for a tip, but didn’t get one.

And so we were eventually welcomed to the Party by Bob Guccioni, Ralph Steadman, half a dozen half naked ladies attired as characters from Ron’s cartoon strip, and a dozen bartenders waiting to assuage the terrible thirsts we had built up while storming the Waldorf. On this occasion we were only a hour late.

Now, it used to be a little know fact that a Martini acquired in an English bar consisted of just that - Martini. But a Martini served by an American bartender comprised mainly of neat gin with only the suspicion of Martini introduced as a lethal 107

mixture to give it a slight different flavour. Very few of us knew this Trans-Atlantic foible at that time, and we all supped copiously from the large ewers of ready-mixed Martini that sat on every ledge in the hospitality suite.

One of our more venerable members, George Ratcliff, was particularly intrigued by the flavour of the American Martini and supper more copiously than most. Eventually he succumbed to the ingestion of the brew, sat down on gilt chair and went sound asleep. Well, he actually passed-out, but going sound asleep sounds more gentlemanly, doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it?

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There he was, propped up in corner, slumped on the seat with his snow white hair awry with guacamole dip spread liberally over the lapels of his black jacket. Nobody bothered about him at all. Then Reg Orlandini decided to test Harry Maggs theory of the power of the printed word and transferred a small card from the wax Sigmund Freud to the living but sleeping George Ratcliff. The sign read: “ON LOAN FROM MADAME TUSSAUDS.” Within minutes a small crowd of Americans had surrounded George and were speculating on who this thing was supposed to be an effigy of. Guy Fawkes, Jack the Ripper and Queen Victoria were names we heard being bandied about but, as far as I know, they are still puzzled to this very day.

But we all had a great time while in America although I slipped and fell on my elbow in Chinatown, Mickey Durling’s wife, Nin, had a gold chain snatched from her neck outside Macey’s, another wife caught a small boy with his hand in her handbag, Kipper Williams witnessed a slight case of murder, and no less than ten of our party staying at the Cater Hotel had their luggage looted when they lost all their cameras, American souvenirs and sundry other valuables.

The flights were also prone to so much delay that we coined the phrase, ‘SOONER OR LAKER’. Flights were either early (yes early!) or late in take-off and their timetable proved to be either a triumph of optimism over experience or a superb piece of mystery fiction with only very slight travel overtones.

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Having said which, we all enjoyed ourselves so much that we declared the intention of doing the same thing again some time in the future.

So far that day has never arrived.

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Chapter 20

“A time to get, and a time to use; a time to sleep, and a time to earn one’s crust” (Apologies to the Bible)

One of the most enthusiastic members of the Club has always been Vic Gibbons. But I have always thought Vic’s concept of time to be somewhat suspect. When meetings have been scheduled for five o’clock in the afternoon, Vic has been know to arrive at ‘The Cartoonist’ at eleven o’clock in the morning...on a regular basis.

But the lad truly surpassed himself with his manipulation of time when he joined us in 1979 on the occasion of the Club’s trip to New York. Before leaving he told me he had devised a plan whereby he would get almost two days more vacation than the rest of us. His theory was as follows: He was going to be in New York for eight days. Normally he had eight hours sleep each night. Therefore, if he only took four hours sleep each night he would have thirty two extra hours waking time that he would otherwise have spent sleeping. So, he would achieve a whole day and a half more than the rest of us in which to savour the delights of the Big Apple..... ..... Quad Erat Demonstratum.

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Believe it or not, he rigorously followed this self imposed regime of only four hours sleep each night and actually thus earned thirty six hours more exploration time for himself.

As with all other seemingly infallible ideas, there was a hidden catch in this one. An extra day and a half sightseeing is expensive, and Vic arrived with enough money only for the advertised eight days junket, so his cash ran out a couple of days before we were due to go back home.

But he is nothing if not resourceful. he had once been a printer by trade an so scoured the backstreets of Manhattan until he found the basement premises of a small print shop. He then persuaded the proprietor to take him on for a half dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s casual labour for which he was paid the same rate as any other illegal immigrant.

Problem solved. He had eating money for the rest of the trip having lost only half a day of the day and a half he had already managed to acquire. So, not only did he have a longer holiday than the rest of our party, he also contravened USA employment regulations and, even now, is probably still on the FBIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most wanted list. ~ During the same New York visit, Dave Follows and Pete Shea got up one morning, left the hotel and spent the early hours strolling around the streets that led of Times Square. It was usually a bustling and overheated thoroughfare, but at that time of day everything was fresh and sweet, (well, relatively fresh

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and sweet). Everything except the disheveled citizen who hurried towards them looking wild-eyed with worry.

“C’n either of youse let me have ninety eight cents, quick, please?” he gasped.

The urgency of his demand was obvious and the lads hastily sifted through their holiday money. Dave offered a dollar, but this was emphatically declined.

“Nope, it hasta be ninety eight cents” the guy replied.

Eventually, between them, Dave and Pete managed to get together exactly the ninety eight cents in very small bits and pieces of American money. They gave it to the man. He mumbled his thanks and turned to shamble away at high speed.

Pete was curious and wanted to know exactly where his share of ninety eight cents was going.

“Er...why did you need exactly ninety eight cents?” he called out.

“Cos that’s the price of a bottle of Budweiser!” the man yelled over his shoulder as he disappeared through the just opening door of ‘Riley’s Bar and Grill’ Dave Follows said this gave him a new insight into the ethics of New Yorkers. Apparently they had no compunction abut bumming the price of a drink from a passer-by, but they were scrupulously fair about their pan-handling. A mere two cents over the top would probably have preyed on that man’s mind as he feel into the gutter an hour or so later.

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~ Members of the Cartoonistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Club are, by reason of their professional status, eligible to join the Federation of European Cartoonists Organisations, and it was the same Dave Follows who joined their ranks and found himself in Amsterdam as he and I strolled past the American Bar and Grill after spending a great weekend at a FECO Exhibition of the work of British Cartoonists held in a hotel in Lisse, a few miles out in the country.

I had recently suffered a mild heart attack and Dave, always concerned for others, asked how I was. Like any other survivor I forthwith launched into a detailed description of my experiences in hospital, my convalescence and my condition right up to the very moment of his asking. I concluded by taking a small pill box from my pocket and showing it to him.

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“These are TNT tablets” I said. “If I should have another attack I’d be grateful if you would take one and quickly force it under my tongue. It should revive me in a second or two” I added reassuringly.

Then one of those happened that can’t work if they are rehearsed. I stumbled on an uneven piece of Amsterdam pavement and fell to my knees. Cursing, I stood and starting dusting my trousers down before turning towards Dave who was a white as a sheet and on the verge of chucking a wobbler.

Others in our party dashed forward to find out what was wrong with him!

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So, while endorsing the fact that he is one of the nicest and kindest guys I know, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t keep company with him if you are likely to need urgent medication. He would be worse than useless in a crisis, being more than likely to distract attention from you!

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Chapter 21

“By our first strange and fatal interview by all desires which thereof did ensue” (John Donne)

Our Conventions reached an incredible high during the year when Granada TV contacted us and politely asked if they could make a half hour television documentary featuring our exploits.

We were honoured, we were flattered, we wondered how long it would be before we would become household names and be featured en masse on ‘Celebrity Squares’ When word of the Club’s impending fame leaked out, members who usually came along for only a couple of days conventioneering suddenly found themselves available for the whole week. And those who genuinely couldn’t manage the whole week arranged to arrive when the TV crew was in situ.

We were holding our yearly talk-fest at the Pwllheli camp, not an unusual circumstance, and it was to this small blot on the Welsh National Park that the TV bods descended.

There was a whole crew. A Director, a director’s assistant, a director’s personal assistant, a cameraman and his assistant, a lighting man with his assistant a sound man, his assistant, a secretary and no less than the venerable and revered William Rushton as the interviewer.

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With Mr Rushton at the helm the proceedings took a slight but very positive turn towards the farcical. His opening commentary took place in a scene that was set up in which he spotted various cartoonists boating in kindergarten size boats on the duck pond outside the Windsor House dining room, and his further dissertations on life as a cartoonist were planned to be taped in the bar of the ‘Blinking Owl’.

In those days, before the centre on the camp burned out, it was the proud boast of Butlins PR that ‘The Blinking Owl’ had the longest bar in the United Kingdom. Mr Rushton therefore decided to make full use of this happy circumstance when he and the director set up a long tracking camera shot that would move down the length of the bar and disclose, one after another, parties of six or so cartoonists as they stood meditatively supping ale and talking about the business of trying to be funny for a living.

It was a good idea and one that would guarantee getting pretty well every cartoonist into shot without making the quest for faces with well known names seem to deliberate. We all appreciated the plan. None more than Hugh Morren who in those days was responsible for the script and artwork for a strip called ‘WACK’ that I believe, was running in the old Daily Sketch at the time.

Hugh, without confiding to anyone about his plan, appeared as part of the first group of cartoonists to be shown at the bar.

Then, as the camera moved slowly onwards, he left that group and doubled around the back of the camera and crew to join the second group of cartoonists just before the camera got them in

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shot. This he managed to do four or five times out of the six or seven stops made by the tracking camera.

No-one noticed what he had done, least of all the director. So, when the film was at last shown on TV we were confronted with about seven groups of cartoonists in five of which was Hugh Morren taking part in their various discussions....Weird!

The remainder of the programme was taken up by separate interviews with various cartoonists singled out by the director for Mr Rushton’s attention. I can’t remember who exactly they were or where they were interviewed, but Mickey Durling, Manny Curtis, Barry Knowles and I were some of the chosen few, and the interviews took place (one at a time) in the boiler of a full size railway engine, on a seesaw, and riding on giant cockerels back on a roundabout. Mine was scheduled for the swimming pool.

The swimming pool interview was visually to be the piece de resistance of the director’s oeuvre. Butlins pools all have panels in their sides that allow spectators to watch other campers from an underwater viewpoint as they frolic and flounder. There are also huge girders supporting the roof. It was therefore decided that Mr Rushton and I should stand in the pool, Willy wearing a swimming costume and a trilby hat, and me with just a costume. Willy standing up to his neck in the water while, because of the difference in our heights, it would come only up to my chest.

The interview was then to consist of a series of cuts and edits that would encompass viewpoints from underwater, from water

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level and from the girders in the ceiling immediately above our heads. A truly ambitious and visually stunning montage.

I was obliged to admit that, not being very fond of swimming, I didn’t have a costume with me. No worries, the director’s personal assistant assured me. She would buy me a costume.

Then arrangements had to be made with Butlins management for us to use the pool when there were no other holiday makers about. This proved very difficult, and eventually four o’clock in the morning was the time when it was agreed that Willy, the crew, the PA with the costume and I would meet and start filming.

I stumbled down the chalet lines on the appointed morning at about three thirty and was very surprised to see how many young lads (and a few old lads) were trying to find their way back to their own beds at that time. But eventually I met up with the others and had a huge pair of woollen trunks thrust into my hand by the succulent young lady who had promised to buy them for me. I gaped at them in amazement.

“They’re enormous!” I protested. She eyed my shrunken loins disparagingly.

“Humph...I thought you were larger than that” she sneered. At that moment I realised that this was not the happiest morning I had ever endured.

Eventually the interview took place, was filmed, and I stumbled bleary-eyed back to my chalet. We then had to wait over two months before the film was shown on TV. 121

Cartoonists all over the country were glued to their sets on the appointed evening as they waited for the most influential piece of film since ‘Birth of a Nation’. It started, and very quickly we were confronted by a series of events that owed more to Mack Sennett than D.W.Griffith.

Truth to tell, it wasn’t a bad film at all. The cartoonists came well out of their spasms of badinage with Mr Rushton and all went well till my waterlogged interview. the underwater shots were the worst. Those grey, woollen trunks were indeed massive and filmed from a viewpoint beneath water level they billowed about my nether regions like a clump of waving kelp.

The shots taken at water level were fairly reasonable, enlivened as they were by the sogginess of Mr Rushton’s felt hat. But it was the overhead shots from the girders in the roof that cut me to the quick. The shots were brilliantly lit and crystal clear.

They were a triumph of the cameraman’s art and they revealed to me and the rest of the viewing public of Great Britain that I was very definitely going bald! Not only did it show me for the very first time that I was balding, the revelation was floodlit!

This was a trauma from which I have never recovered. My only consolation would have been an opportunity to sell that small expanse of skin as advertising space, but even that consolation has been denied to me. ~

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Ern Shaw was a very old cartoonist whose history seemed to go back about as far as the cartoon itself. He was so old that he laid claim to having invented the ‘Dot-To-Dot’ cartoon puzzle so beloved by children. The page full of numbered dots that, when joined in sequence, reveal a caricature or funny drawing.

None of us ever disputed this claim of Ern’s. He was on safe ground. Let’s face it, who else had been around long enough to even remember when the ‘Dot-To-Dot’ was invented?

I think Ern was nudging his way out of his eighties when he first joined us and, living in the country, he found it difficult to attend our monthly meetings. However, he did attend the Convention every year where he gave every sign of enjoying himself, though not always remembering whether he had enjoyed himself or not.

As time went by, he started to find it difficult to travel even to our Conventions and it was then that a small coterie of his devotees made themselves more or less responsible for making this yearly treat accessible to him. On one particular occasion, Chic Jacob, Peter Jacob, George Ratcliff and Albert Cosser, among others, were going to Butlins Minehead using a small convoy of cars and it was they who arranged to pick up the by now infinitely aged Ern at Shrewsbury Station.

The meeting was achieved and everyone repaired to the station buffet for a light liquid luncheon. Ern met George Ratcliff for the first time and the two elderly gentlemen delighted in the company on one another as they exchanged increasingly more improbable stories about the past. Then, lunch over, the convoy

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started off again with Ern as a passenger in the leading car and George in the one that followed.

Ern asked his driver if it would be possible to stop off at a commercial nursery garden on their way as he wished to say hello to a friend who worked their. But unfortunately the nursery was off the main road and Ern didn’t know the way to it. The driver therefore stopped the car and suggested that his passenger should ask the way from a local.

In the meantime, the driver of the car following the car that had just stopped was completely non-plussed. He had no idea why the stop had taken place and thought perhaps that there had been a breakdown of some sort. So he stopped his car and asked his passenger, George, to nip out, run up to the car in front and find out what was happening.

George obediently did as he was told and, as he tottered towards the lead car, Ern wound down its window and leaned out.

“Can you tell me the way to Doddington’s Nursery Garden, please?” he asked.

George shambled to a halt and scratched his head.

“How the heck should I know?” he expostulated. “I’m a stranger here myself!”

And, with that, Ern wound up his window and instructed his driver to drive on, this leaving poor old George to run back to

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his own car and scramble in before Ern and Co drove out of sight and were lost.

Ern turned to the other passengers in his car as they sped away.

“What a very rude man that was” he complained, then looked thoughtful. “Though I did get the feeling that I’d seen him somewhere before”

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Chapter 22

“From every house the neighbours met, The chalet lines fill’d with joyful sound” (With apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

I hope recounting the chapter and verse of the adventures and misadventures of the members of The Cartoonists’ Club hasn’t created an impression that they are, or ever have been, irresponsible drunks. Such is not the case. By and large they have all been ‘nice people’.

When at home in their studios, propping up a drawing board on the end of the kitchen table, they are hard working, sober and mostly ‘normal’ individuals. It is the long hours worked and the loneliness of their working lives that sometimes caused them to ‘flip’ on that one evening a month when they meet and unwind in the company of those who appreciate and understand the frustrations of a career as a devisor of jokes and funny drawings.

It is usually in the nature of their jobs to be funny without an audience and. it is a well know fact that, being funny without an audience used to call for incarceration in Bedlam. That was in the ‘good old days’, the days before our own Bedlamsubstitute of a club existed.

The yearly Conventions on Butlins camps also provided cartoonists’ families with a built-in facility for wives and 127

children to get to know one another. For one week of each year we lived as next door neighbours in the chalet lines of Pwllheli, Minehead, Clacton, Bognor Regis or Skegness. For one week of each year our wives and children were free to pop round to one another’s chalets, to grumble, to gossip, to scandalise and to talk about those many and various things good neighbours always grumble, gossip and scandalise about.

This was the circumstance that I have always called the ‘Coronation Street Syndrome’. We have been exposed to twenty seven one week episodes of an on-going soap opera in which romances blossomed, evil was occasionally done, some families united one with the other, while other families argued and fell out.

Ian Scott was our Mr Swindley, Chic Jacob our Len Fairclough, Ella Samuels our Ena Sharples and we’ve even had one or two trainee JRs, if you will pardon this mixture of soapy metaphors.

We have seen friends children change from very small lads and lasses into highly successful firemen, policemen, computer programmers, solicitors, actresses, publishers, back room boys in the West End theatre, artists, columnists, novelists and even editors. To have been a Club member for the whole of the last thirty six years has been a truly wondrous experience and, having been speaking of the children, please let me finish with one child inspired anecdote.

The scene was a Butlins camp on a Convention twenty seven or twenty eight years ago, when my wife Audrie and I had parked at the end of the chalet lines and were humping our 128

luggage into our chalet as daughter Sue, about two and a bit years old, pottered about in the open door of what was to be our abode for the next week. She was very interested in the strange world in which she found herself and was making journeys of exploration to the bathroom, to the bunk beds, and to sit under out built-in Tannoy that was playing (as it almost always did) ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah’.

Then her exploration must have taken her further afield for suddenly she was no longer there. We panicked! We charged up and down the chalet lines asking everyone if they had seen anything of our relatively new daughter. But she was nowhere to be found. the panic didn’t last long because just around the corner from the next row of chalet lines there appeared a nice, kindly looking lady with Sue in her arms.

“Is this your little girl?” she asked. Sue glared at us balefully and kept her mouth tightly shut - not her usual habit. Abject thanks were given, Sue was taken back and Audrie comforted her and then spoke to her.

“Why didn’t you tell the nice lady your name?” she asked. Sue looked even more truculent then spoke for the first time since her return.

“She didn’t tell me hers!” she explained.

The nice lady turned out to be Myra Curtis, wife of Manny Curtis who went to be for years not only the Secretary of the Cartoonists’ Club but also the Secretary of the Freelance 129

section of the National Union of Journalists and a great fighter for higher fees on behalf of all cartoonists.

I believe this tiny event goes to show how the Club works.

Cliquishness is something new members often claim is practiced by older members. They say that new members are sometimes ignored when first attending Club meetings, and this is possibly true. But, believe me, they won’t be ignored or ‘lost’ if they themselves ‘tell the kind ladies and gentlemen their names’!

To open ones mouth is all that is necessary.

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Chapter 23

“I noted one odd saying of Lamb’s that ‘The last breath he drew in he wished might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun” (Macready when writing of Charles Lamb)

There is one sort of joke that never gets a laugh. The pun.

When practicing his art the punster can hope for no more than a groan. The louder the groan, the more it is supposed that the pun has been appreciated. It must therefore be a strange humorist who employs his agile mind striving to achieve vocal disapproval for his verbal skill.

Such a particularly strange humorist was (and still is) Ian J. Scott, founder of the Cartoonists’ Club, ex-political cartoonist and at one time possibly the most important and powerful cartoonists’ agent this country has ever seen.

Richard Whitely, presenter of televisions’ ‘Countdown’ is a mere tyro in the art of bending language when compared to our founder. Ian J. Scott in his prime was incapable of speaking more than twenty words in sequence without spraying his listener with puns. He was even known to make puns of puns and, never in the history of that particular form of humour have such loud groans been know to emanate from Fleet Street and its environs as when he was firing on all cylinders.

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At one time, when I was Ian’s partner in Kingleo Studios and we had Barry Knowles working with us, Barry and I became so stunned and battered by Ian’s badinage we jointly instituted a Studio Pun Box to take the place of the more usual Swear Box. Our idea was that anyone (well, anyone actually being Ian) making a pun should put an old penny (1d) in the box as penance. Pun penance for pence, so to speak. A fair enough idea, one might think. But it proved disastrous.

At the end of two days Ian was so depleted of pence as to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and threw the box out of the window having broken under the strain of trying to go Cold Turkey on puns! (There is no truth in the story that Barry Knowles was seen later that night as he surreptitiously gathered up the pennies from the four corners of the garden - though somebody did).

So, when I was researching Cartoonists’ Club anecdotes and asked Ian for some remembrances it should have come as no shock when I got from him some visual notes from his Sixties Sketch Book and a letter that I will now produce verbatim as a solitary example to young Club members. Together with a stern warning that the pun, once adopted as a method of communication, is impossible to get rid of. Be double-warned. the only cure-absolute is the severance of the head of the punperpetrator from his/her shoulders.

Herewith then, the letter and the sketches:

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“Of course the first meeting of the Cartoonists Club’s potential members was a memorable one. Anyone who tried to bring together ten people on a given date and time will appreciate that this was no easy task. In point of fact 250 cartoonists turned up. It is hard to believe that never before or since has any collection of cartoonists of this dimension assembled together.

The venue ‘The Feathers’ was a rather apposite one. Well feathers are associated with tickling - and isn’t this just what cartoonists are trying to do through their art?

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I was asked what on would call a collection of cartoonists? The obvious pun which came to mind was an ‘ART - TICKLE’ of cartoonists. Another, that feathers were used in early arrows and darts, and that feathers were carried in a quiver, which I would commend as a possible name to relate to a group of cartoonists - A QUIVER OF CARTOONISTS. (Signed) Ian J. Scott

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LES LILLEY was a founder member of the ‘Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain’ and with the exception of two years in the early Seventies was a dedicated committee member throughout his life. He also held the offices of Club Secretary for a six year period and that of Chairman of the Committee for thirteen and a half years. On his retirement as Chairman he was given a silver medal by the Club and made Honorary Vice Chairman (Life), an honour he shared with Bill Tidy, Chic Jacob and Clive Collins.

While still Chairman of the CC of GB he became one of a working party that devised and launched the ‘Society of Strip Illustration’, an organisation of which he became a committee member, Society Secretary for a year and Chairman for a year.. After long and enthusiastic service he left the SSI when it changed direction by becoming the ‘Comic Creators’ Guild’, no longer being representative of the type of Strip Art with which he had always been a practitioner.

In 1984, together with representatives from Belgium, Holland and Yugoslavia, he founded the ‘Federation of European Cartoonists’ Organisations’ and served continuously as President FECO (UK). For three years he served as President General of the Federation during the time when he opened it to cartoonists’ organisations from the rest of the world.

For twelve years he was a permanent jury member of the Wereldcartoenale (World Cartoon Festival) held each year at Knokke-Heist in Belgium and served as a jury member for many other cartoon festivals including those held in England, Scotland, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia.

He organised the first six CC of GB’s Butlins Conventions, a FECO Convention for Americans and Europeans in Edinburgh attended by the American Ambassador, a nine week long cartoon festival in Margate opened by the Minister of Culture and, together with Arthur Reid, eight exhibitions on behalf of FECO at the Edinburgh Festival.

He was also involved as organiser with many, many cartoon exhibitions including a hugely influential British Exhibition at Knokke-Heist at the opening of which he was privileged to introduce a large party of CC of GB members in the presence of the British Ambassador.

For reasons of health and expediency he travelled much less in later years and restricted himself to aggravating readers by writing a sometimes testy and contentious column in the Jester, the monthly connection of widespread members of the Club with the dream of making the Art of the Cartoon their career and motivation.

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