David
Low
was born in Dunedin, New Zealand
in 1891. His father's family had originally come from Fifeshire in
Scotland. As a young man he had discovered a pile of old copies of
Punch Magazine in a second-hand bookshop
in Christchurch. Deeply impressed by the work of Charles
Keene, Linley Sambourne and Phil
May, Low decided he wanted to become a cartoonist.
At the age of fifteen Low began to have his drawings published in
magazines and newspapers in New Zealand. This included anti-gambling
cartoons for the War
Cry, the
newspaper of the Salvation Army, and
illustrations for New
Zealand Truth,
a weekly newspaper specializing in sensational crime and sex . Still
a teenager, Low was appointed the regular political cartoonist of
the New
Zealand Spectator.
His fame spread to Australia and at the age of eighteen he was asked
to join the Sydney
Bulletin,
where he worked with two other great cartoonists,
Livingstone
Hopkins and Norman
Lindsay.
The British writer Arnold Bennett was impressed
when he saw Low's cartoons and wrote an article about him in the New
Statesman. This resulted in Low being offered a job in England
with The Daily News
and the company's evening paper, the Star.
Low arrived in England in 1919 but was unhappy with the space that
he was given for his cartoons. After threatening to resign, the editor
of the Star agreed to publish the large,
half-page cartoons that he had been doing in Australia. In London
Low became a close friend of the other great political cartoonist
of the period, Will Dyson of the Daily
Herald.
Low was commissioned by the Star to
draw the portraits of the fifty most distinguished people in Britain.
His subjects included George Bernard Shaw,
Arnold Bennett, H.
G. Wells, Hilaire Belloc, G.
K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Only two men refused to sit for him: John
Galsworthy and Rudyard Kipling.
After a disagreement with the editor about how this should be presented
in the Star, Low eventually had them
published in the New Statesmen.
Low also had cartoons published in other journals in Britain such
as Punch Magazine and The
Graphic.
In 1927 Low was persuaded by Lord Beaverbrook
to work at the Evening
Standard.
Although Beaverbrook was a strong supporter of the Conservative
Party, he promised Low that he would have complete freedom to
express his own radical political views.
Unhappy with the political leadership of the
British establishment David
Low created his cartoon character, Colonel Blimp in 1934. In his autobiography,
Low explained that Blimp represented everything he disliked in British
politics: "Blimp was no enthusiast for democracy. He was impatient
with the common people and their complaints. His remedy to social
unrest was less education, so that
people could not read about slumps. An extreme isolationist, disliking
foreigners (which included Jews, Irish, Scots, Welsh, and people from
the Colonies and Dominions); a man of violence, approving war. He
had no use for the League of Nations nor for international efforts
to prevent wars. In particular he objected to any economic reorganization
of world resources involving changes in the status quo."
In the 1930s Low joined with other radicals, such as Stafford
Cripps, Nye Bevan, Ellen
Wilkinson, J. B. Priestley, Victor
Gollancz, Henry Nevinson and Norman
Angell to complain about Britain's foreign policy. Low was especially
appalled by what he called the "Government's supine attitude
to foreign intervention in Spain" during the
Spanish Civil War.
Low's cartoons criticizing Adolf
Hitler and Benito
Mussolini
resulted in his work being
banned in Germany and Italy.
After the war it was revealled that in 1937 the German government
asked the British government to have "discussions with the notorious
Low" in an effort to "bring influence to bear on him"
to stop his cartoons attacking appeasement.
David
Low, Evening Standard (10th October, 1938)
Low was attacked in the press as a "war-monger".
However, others welcomed his criticisms of Hitler. This included Sigmund
Freud
who wrote: "A Jewish refugee from Vienna, a very old man personally
unknown to you, cannot resist the impulse to tell you how much he
admires your glorious
art and your inexorable, unfailing criticism."
In the Second World War Low's cartoons such
as All
Behind You, Winston
(14th May, 1940), Stay
There! I'll Be Back
(24th May, 1940) and Very
Well, Alone
(18th June, 1940) were used to inspire the British people at a time
when many feared a German victory. Low became an official British
War Artist and in this role attended the Nuremberg
War Trials with
Joseph
Flatter.
Low left the Evening
Standard
in 1949 and later worked for the Daily Herald
(1950-1953) and the Manchester Guardian
(1953-1963).
Published collections of Low's work include: A
Cartoon History of the War (1941), Low's
Company (1952), Low's
Autobiography (1956)
and Years of Wrath: 1932-1945
(1986). David
Low, who was knighted in 1962, died in
1963.
(1) David Low, Autobiography
(1956)
A pile of old copies of copies of Punch I found in the back
room of a fatherly second-hand bookseller introduced me to the treasure
of Charles Keene, Linley Sambourne, Randolph Caldecott and Dana Gibson.
The more I poured over the intricate technical quality of these artists
the more difficult did drawing appear. How impossible that one could
ever become an artist! But then I came on Phil May, who combined quality
with apparent facility. Once having discovered Phil May I never let
him go.
(2) David Low joined the
Sydney Bulletin in 1909.
The men behind the Bulletin, notably Jules Francois Archibald,
a master journalist, and William Macleod, an artist with solid business
ability, had made it a major policy of their paper to encourage native
Australian talent. The supply of poets and writers began to flow almost
immediately. That of comic artists and caricaturists had to be primed
at first by a couple of importations, Livingstone Hopkins (Hop) from
America, and Phil May from Britain.
The Bulletin was radical, rampant and free, with an anti-English
bias and a preference for a republican form of government. No more
imported governors nor doggerel national anthems, no more pompous
borrowed generals, foreign titles, foreign capitalists, cheap labour,
diseased immigrants, if the Bulletin could help it.
(3) In his autobiography, David
Low explained how his cartoons usually took three days to draw.
I worked an eight-hour day - sometimes ten-hour - day and with evenings
spent moving around seeing people, it was a busy life. Making a cartoon
occupied usually about three full days, two spent in labour and one
in removing the appearance of labour. Sometimes I wondered whether
I was not taking too much trouble. But when I learned that the methods
of Brueghel, Callot, Daumier, Gillray and the other Old Masters of
Caricature had been similarly thorough, that Tenniel took two or three
days to make a Punch cartoon.
(4)
While working for the Sydney Bulletin in Australia, David Low
got to know H. H. Champion.
Who
in 1915 would have identified the mild old gentleman, editor of a
tiny literary monthly, walking tremulously with the aid of two sticks
in the Melbourne sunshine, with the determined young ex-artillery
officer H. H. Champion of the 1880s, who introduced John Burns and
Keir Hardie to political life, and who with Burns and Hyndman led
a riotous mob of unemployed through London's clubland, leaving a trail
of broken windows? No one, I wager. Illness, disappointment and age
had long since withdrawn Champion from politics to books. But he retained
an interest in justice and right. Whenever I did a cartoon which in
content departed from the strictly sane view I was sure next day to
run into Champion, advancing slowly down the street like a conscience.
He would stop, look me in the eye, smile gently and say, "Not
quite, David, do you think?" Very effective criticism, coming
from that old war-horse.
(5)
David Low found it difficult to adjust to life in London. Will Dyson
of the Daily Herald was one of first friends he made in England.
I
had just left the warmth of a wide circle of friends in Australia
to come to this desert island. The contrast was painful. "It
will take you ten years to learn the English," said Will Dyson,
the Australian cartoonist, whom we found crouching over a sinking
fire in a large dark studio, nursing a great grief at the death of
his wife.
Will, despite his sadness, was a great comfort in the cheerless winter
of 1919-20. From his early Bulletin days I had been his great admirer
as one of the master caricaturist-cartoonists. Will Dyson had broken
up the pattern with his striking Socialist cartoons in the Herald
from about 1910 onward, and had led the field during the First World
War with his large war cartoons in which the monumental and the satirical
had been powerfully blended.
(6)
David Low was commissioned by the Daily Star
to draw portraits of fifty of Britain's most distinguished men.
One
of the first subjects I called on was Bernard Shaw. A solid-looking
domestic showed me in. Shaw was lying on a settee, wearing fancy slippers,
very pleased with himself, talking to Barry Jackson and another man
about details of the production of his new play Saint Joan, but I
did not pay much attention because I was more interested in our host.
Peculiar high skull, jutting beard, small eyes, pinkish bulbous nose,
small mouth with false-looking teeth. I walked about the room, which
seemed to be well furnished with portraits of Bernard Shaw. On the
table was a bust of Shaw by Rodin, not too good. All these works represented
a cocky Shaw, the head standing erect on a straight spine. When the
others left I hadn't been talking to him long before I began to suspect
that he was really a shy man, that the cockiness was a defensive facade.
(7) Some people believed that
David Low's cartoons of David Lloyd George
helped to force him out of office.
David Lloyd George was the best-hated statesman of his time, as well
as the best loved. The former I have good reason to know; every time
I made a pointed cartoon against him, it brought batches of approving
letters from all the haters. Looking at Lloyd George's pink and hilarious,
head thrown back, generous mouth open to its fullest extent, shouting
with laughter at one of his own jokes, I thought I could see how it
was that his haters hated him. He must have been poison to the old
school tie brigade, coming to the House an outsider, bright, energetic,
irrepressible, ruthless, mastering with ease the House of Commons
procedure, applying all the Celtic tricks in the bag, with a talent
for intrigue that only occasionally got away from him.
I always had the greatest difficulty in making Lloyd George sinister
in a cartoon. Every time I drew him, however critical the comment,
I had to be careful or he would spring off the drawing-board a lovable
cherubic little chap. I found the only effective way of putting him
definitely in the wrong in a cartoon was by misplacing this quality
in sardonic incongruity - by surrounding the comedian with tragedy.
(8) David Low first met Winston
Churchill in 1922.
As might be expected from his origins and temperament, Churchill was
inwardly contemptuous of the 'common man' when the 'common man' sought
to interfere in his (the 'common man's) own government; but bearing
with the need to appear sympathetic and compliant to the popular will.
In those days, whenever I heard Churchill's dramatic periods about
democracy, I felt inclined to say: "Please define." His
definition, I felt, would be something like "government of the
people, for the people, by benevolent and paternal ruling-class chaps
like me."
Churchill was witty and easy to talk to until I said that the Australians
were an independent people who could not be expected to follow Britain
without question. They were, in the case of new wars, for instance,
not to be taken for granted, but would follow their own judgment.
Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh
give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another.
It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated.
(9)
David Low, Autobiography (1956)
The spectacle of Mussolini so masterfully beating up his Liberal and
Socialist opponents was one that could not fail to evoke admiration
in some Anglo-Saxon breasts. A British Fascist Party grew up overnight;
and the Daily Mail, then Britain's biggest popular newspaper, approved
it. With the zest I added the first Lord Rothermere, its proprietor,
to my cast of cartoon characters. He made up well in a black shirt
helping to stoke the fires of class hatred. Lord Rothermere was much
incensed and complained bitterly. "Dog doesn't eat dog. It isn't
done," said one of his Fleet Street men, as though he were giving
me a moral adage instead of a thieves' wisecrack. "You forget,
old boy," I replied, "I'm a moa."
(10)
David Low, Autobiography (1956)
The unending arguments about presentation, space and position in the
Star became wearing. I had foreseen the possibilities of personal
crisis about all this, so, as an insurance, I began to develop some
footholds in quarters where I could place some better drawing: Punch,
The Graphic and elsewhere.
The portraits I had been working on so long were now coming up to
the final stage. I had Robert Lynd introduce me to Clifford Sharp,
the editor of The New Statesman, and I offered them to him
for a first publication at a small fee on condition he agreed to do
them as offset plate-stamped loose supplements.
(11)
In his autobiography, David Low wrote about his friendship with Sir
William Joynson-Hicks.
My personal contacts with the Tory Party were slight until I became
acquainted with the Home Secretary. Sir William Joynson-Hicks (Jix
for short) was a spectacular success as a 'red' hunter. He was in
his element rushing the police around to seize sinister documents
from some branch of the then insignificant Communist Party. Most of
the time it seemed to me, of all Baldwin's men, the most intolerant,
narrow-minded and dictatorial of anti-democrats. Week by week, I derided
his moments of triumph. A letter arrived from Jix inviting me to come
along to the Home Office if ever I wanted to bring my portrait up
to date. Jix's vanity and giggling goodwill were irresistible. I abhorred
his politics but I liked him and he liked me. There he was at the
Home Office with a heap of reproductions of my bloodhound cartoons
of himself on his writing-table, obviously put there for my benefit.
I met him often after that, always with enjoyment. For years we exchanged
Christmas presents regularly, I a little drawing, he a box of cigars:
"With best wishes from your devoted assassin, Low": "With
all good wishes from your most loyal victim, Jix."
(12)
Lord Beaverbrook first approached
David Low to work for the Evening Standard
in 1926. Although Beaverbrook offered to double his salary he refused.
In 1929 Beaverbrook tried again to capture Britain's leading cartoonist.
He
fixed me with a steady calculating eye and I put on my best Simple
Simon look. The proposition was that I should leave The Star and
draw cartoons for the Evening Standard at double my salary,
whatever it was. Flabbergasted, I made refusing noises. "What
do you want?" he asked. He was persistent. To close the subject
I said I wished to take the advice of my friends H. G. Wells and Arnold
Bennett.
Negotiations ended when I called on Lord Beaverbrook one morning at
noon, finding him sitting up in bed, a plaintive figure like Camille,
reading the Bible. He had promised me four half-pages a week, but
I wanted precise guarantees about presentation. "Dammit, Low,"
said Beaverbrook. "Do you want to edit the paper, too."
The Evening Standard advertised my coming lavishly. No one
took seriously the announcements that I was to express independent
views. that was a novel idea, except for an occasional series of signed
articles by some big name. Free and regular expression by the staff
cartoonist was unheard of and incredible.
Beaverbrook did not always laugh in the right place at my cartoons,
and some galled him, but in the twenty-three years of my association
with his newspapers I can recall only one cartoon being left unprinted
because of a disagreement over its political content - a spirited
effort about the situation in Greece in 1945 which was blocked at
the request of Churchill the Prime Minister in what he held to be
the interests of western democracy.
(13)
In his autobiography, David Low compared cartoonists such as
James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson,
John Leech, John
Tenniel, Richard Doyle, Leonard
Raven Hill and Bernard Partridge.
Some critics of my work took the view that a satirist should defer
to the finer feelings of his readers and respect widely held beliefs.
I explained that whatsoever might be the duty of a satirist, it certainly
could not be too reflect, confirm or pander to popular beliefs. Rather
the opposite, for it was popular beliefs themselves that were frequently
the aptest material for the healthiest satire.
The circumspect cartoons of John Leech and John Tenniel were a sign
of the times; so also were the respectful pencillings of Dicky Doyle.
I took as a standard the works of Gillray, Rowlandson and company,
who were generally agreed to be the old masters of caricature.
Bernard Partridge and Leonard Raven-Hill were ultra-conservative,
even reactionary. Partridge, the last of the cartoonists of the Victorian
grand manner. His knighthood troubled me, for I could not think that
critics or commentators ostensibly of satirical temper on public affairs
should accept, like other men, the insignia of trammelling loyalties.
Partridge, as the inheritor of the Tenniel tradition in Punch,
specialized in cartoons dealing with national occasions, such as laying
laurel wreaths on the tombs of dead statesmen, congratulating epic
sportsmen, extending the helping hand in disasters, etc., in which
he represented the Anglo-Saxon people by Britannia, a massive matron
moulded according to the Graeco-Roman idea of beauty.
(14)
David
Low, Autobiography (1956)
The British Fascist Party was comparatively insignificant until Mosley
took over its leadership. Mosley was young, energetic, capable and
an excellent speaker. Since I had met him in 1925 he had graduated
from close friendship with MacDonald to a job in the second Labour
Government; but he had become disgusted with the evasions over unemployment
and had resigned to start a party of his own.
Unfortunately at the succeeding general election he fell ill with
influenza and his party-in-embryo, deprived of his brilliant talents,
was wiped out. Mosley was too ambitious to retire into obscurity.
Looking around for a 'vehicle' he united himself to the British Fascists,
rechristened 'the Blackshirts', and acquired almost automatically
the encouragement of Britain's then biggest newspaper, the Daily
Mail, which was more than willing to extend its admiration for
the Italian original to the local imitation. That was a fateful influenza
germ.
(15)
David Low was attacked in the press as a war-monger" because
of his hostility towards Neville Chamberlain
and his policy of appeasement. Margot Asquith, the wife of the former
Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, wrote
to Low about his cartoons on 22nd April, 1938.
I
thought your cartoon on Wednesday (20th April) in the Evening Standard
both cruel and mischievous. I know the P.M. - do you? He is a man
of iron courage, calm and resolution. Neville is doing the only right,
wise, thing, unless you want war. Hate, threats - which you can't
carry out - and suspicion do not advance peace, and if the P.M. fails
we can always go back to the policy of the war-mongers - Winston Churchill
and Co. I think Neville has saved the world by his courage - and so
do much cleverer people than I.
(13)
Boris Efimov, letter to David Low (17th September, 1942)
I wish to tell you, Mr. Low, with interest I and other Soviet artists
have been and are now following your magnificent work, which has won
for you the well-deserved fame of the best cartoonist in the world.
The future of history hangs in the balance. On one hand light, progress,
democracy, life; on the other darkness, corruption, barbarism, death,
that is Hitlerism. I am happy, dear Mr. Low, that in this decisive
hour I am with you - a great artist whose creative work I regard with
admiration and from whose works I learn.
