12: POST-WAR CARTOONISTS
WILLI AM PA PAS William Papas (1927-2000) Banned from working in his native South Africa for producing anti-Apartheid cartoons, William Papas moved to England in 1959, where, working for the Guardian and The Sunday Times, he quickly established a reputation as one of the leading political cartoonists of the 1960s. For a biography of William Papas, please refer to The Illustrators, 2007, pages 363-364. His work is represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A; the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent (Canterbury); and the Vorres Museum (Athens) and the Old City Museum (Jerusalem). Further reading: Mark Bryant, Papas. politics people places, London: Guardian, 2004 309 WE’RE ON OUR WAY, HAROLD signed pen ink and monochrome watercolour 8 3⁄4 x 15 1⁄4 inches Illustrated: Guardian, 18 December 1964
We’re on our way, Harold In October 1964, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party came to power with a majority of just four seats. Published a few months into Wilson’s premiership, Papas’s cartoon highlights the early difficulties faced by Wilson’s government, set against the backdrop of the particularly heavy fog that enveloped London in the winter of 1964. Having crashed in the fog, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, sit in the wreckage of the country’s economic problems and his stuttering policies. The budget deficit for the coming year was forecast at £800 million, double what Labour had predicted pre-election as a worst-case scenario. The Wilson government had inherited a large trade gap from its
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predecessor, and many economists advocated a devaluation of the pound, something that Wilson had initially strongly resisted. At this stage, the economic issues facing Wilson and Callaghan prevented Labour from increasing social benefits such as pensions, although this was only a temporary hurdle, as they were later able to raise pensions to a record 21% of average male industrial wages. The edition of the Guardian in which this cartoon was published also raised concerns over Harold Wilson’s desire to create an Atlantic Nuclear Force, an organisation of the
nuclear capabilities of NATO members under a single unified control system. The only man seen making progress is George Brown, Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. As head of the newly created Department of Economic Affairs, Brown was charged with negotiating a strict incomes policy to establish wages and prices below free market level in order to combat inflation.