Bateman Through the Guinness Glass

The cartooning abilities of H M Bateman fitted very comfortably into the Guinness tradition of humorous, quirky and eccentric advertising. The standard had long been set by the work of John Gilroy but Bateman brought something fresh with his carefully considered variations on themes of shock and social outrage. Most of Bateman’s contributions came during World War 2 or immediately after and provided welcome splashes of colour in an otherwise drab and dreary Britain, relentlessly pressured by the exigencies of war. Compared with the illustrations Bateman produced for Bar One cigarettes in the 1950s the Guinness drawings have a precision and bite that would later be replaced by a more slapdash approach. This is less than half of Bateman’s Guinness output but it’s enough to give a flavour of what he achieved.