Punch Almanack 1925 - the World of Cartooning

The Punch Almanack for 1925 offers a snapshot from 100 years ago of a long defunct popular humorous magazine.   Contributors had a long tradition of expressing offence at the vagaries of fashion in the broadest sense - anything novel or remotely faddish was a subject for mockery.  Less attractive was the tendency to direct their scorn downwards towards the poor and ill-educated as well as those with the misfortune not to have been born British. Non-white  imperial subjects were an especially favoured target for ridicule. Resistance to change was an enduring topic - defence of the vanishing countryside and assault on the tyranny of Modernism and its Cubist sideshow.  Turning to the colour cartoons of 1925, Frank Reynolds was the cover artist, not really at his best with this sombre image of Mr. Punch on horseback but fully compliant with the magazine’s veneration of fox-hunting.  HM Bateman was in an uncharacteristic mellow mood, his habitual malice under restraint. The dancing girl with her legion of admirers is relatively benign while the Plumber’s Paradise in its ramshackle complexity is a nod to W Heath Robinson. Kenneth Bird (1887-1965) signed his distinctive work as Fougasse - his simple style was instantly recognisable and first appeared in Punch in 1916. In 1949 he became the first cartoonist to occupy the editor’s chair at Punch having previously served as art editor since 1937.  Rugby Across the Ages is a product of his lifelong obsession with rugby - speculative projections from the present to the long distant past was a Punch staple. In a sceptical look at modern media Through the Seasons with the Magazine Cover he makes fun of reliance on cliché.  There’s an excellent anthology of Punch cartooning in colour, Best of Punch Cartoons in Colour (2012) edited by Helen Walasek - very easy to find on sale online.

 

Guinness Scrapbook 1937

We like to think of embarrassment as a uniquely British thing but the concept is present in every known language. It’s especially prevalent among the English thanks to the local tradition of invented codes of behaviour, vocabulary, idioms, pronunciations - all designed to divide outsiders from insiders and perpetuate class distinctions.  Cartoonist H M Bateman arrived in England from South Africa with a readymade chip resting on his shoulder, a grumpy disposition and a casual fluency in drawing social tableaus. Ideally qualified to explore the English world of embarrassment and unwitting social transgression, he took pleasure in distorting the human features to convey all the nuances of social terror and personal humiliation - hair that quivers as it uplifts from the scalp, eyes on the verge of exploding from their sockets, lips that tremble and splutter, bodies that vibrate with shame.  A new genre was created in which the discomfort of disgraced victims was mercilessly exposed for the entertainment of all. When he wasn’t working much of his time was spent in protracted and ultimately unsuccessful disputation with tax authorities having conceived an obsessive aversion to all forms of taxation.

The Guinness offer to the nation’s doctors for 1937 was a collection of literary and visual tributes to the virtues of the famous stout presented the reader as if pasted into a scrapbook with a cover design by Antony Groves-Raines, many if not all of them were extracted from previous advertising campaigns. The page sequence was broken up with full page colour cartoons drawn by Bateman, themed around the worlds of golf, cricket and performance, relatively gentle in tone. Several of these had already featured in press and magazine ads. The choice of subjects reveals an assumption that the medical profession of the day was exclusively male - not really unsafe for 1937. For another selection of Bateman’s work for Guinness, please follow this link.  As for the product, Guinness has never been more popular with a new generation falling for its distinctive charms to the point where the brewers were declaring a shortage late last year which had the desired effect of boosting sales even further as consumers rushed to stockpile.  Diageo (corporate owners of the brand) responded to their good fortune, not as you might expect by expanding production but by considering selling the company to take advantage of its increase in value.  Must be what they teach in business school. 

 

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.

Offensive Formations

The Olympic afterglow is fading fast and in just two days time will be brutally erased by the return of the true spirit of sport in the shape of Premier League football. The great dance of greed will recommence as players, agents, coaches and managers scrabble for a slice of the enormous cash-pile donated by the Great Satan, (Keeper of the Times, Master of the Sun and Emperor of the Sky) in his mission to chain the population to his TV platform. And even the most virtuous and scrupulous, free-to-air follower of football will not escape the spreading stain of abject venality. In the interests of sporting success there’s no ethical principle that cannot be discarded and no compromise that’s too great – it’s a festival of bad faith that has us all enthralled and transfixed. I, for one, can hardly wait. The advertising images are from the days of the maximum wage, when the ball was a water-sodden overweight clod and the players could be observed traveling to the match on the top decks of trams or trolleybuses. The long association of smoking with football persisted into the 1970s when senior professionals could still be seen extinguishing a last cigarette as they emerged on to the pitch. 

H M Bateman and Working Class Pursuits

Now that tobacco products are concealed from public view by a PVC curtain, the days when they were openly advertised seem increasingly remote. The shadow of the carcinoma had yet to fall in the 1950s when these were first published and smoking was still perceived as the first (and easiest) step towards adulthood in a world where seniority invariably prevailed over merit in the workplace. These vignettes of working class culture were intended to appeal to the lower income smoker and therein lies the irony. The artist, H M Bateman (1887-1970) was by all accounts an inveterate snob with a hearty contempt for his social inferiors; he also had a persistent problem with paying income tax. If he was alive today he would be voting UKIP and passionately supporting the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Bateman’s reputation rested on his masterly portrayal of embarrassment and apoplectic rage – in the 1920s he achieved a high level of public recognition for “The man who .......” series of caricatures in which hapless individuals experience the ultimate in public humiliation when their transgressions of unwritten social codes are cruelly exposed to howls of outrage, scorn and hilarity in equal measure. They were widely published on both sides of the Atlantic in magazines like The Tatler and Punch and republished in book form, on calendars, postcards and posters. Between the wars, Bateman was a wealthy and much sought after illustrator for whom advertising art was especially lucrative – he drew for Lucky Strike in the US and for Kensitas in UK. When he carried out this commission for Bar One his fortunes were at their lowest – his infinite variations on “The man who .......” theme had greatly outstripped the public appetite and his interminable battles with the Inland Revenue had left him bitter and impoverished to the point where he could have been the subject of one of his own drawings as “The man who drew working-class pursuits for Bar One”. To be fair, the Bar One drawings (of which there are many more than this) may have been dependent on a much used stock of characters but they still made a strong visual impression in the pages of Picture Post. Public interest revived in the 1960s and the quality of his best work continues to be appreciated – at the time of writing the Cartoon Museum in London is exhibiting a selection of his work, “The man who went mad on paper”.