Hold the Front Page
Mark Bryant describes how the Daily Mail nearly became the first national daily in Britain to feature large political cartoons on its front page, fifteen years before Dyson’s huge drawings appeared in the Daily Herald.
It is quite unusual nowadays for a full-scale political cartoon to appear on the front page of a national daily newspaper in Britain. Since the Second World War there have often been topical single-column or ‘pocket’ cartoons on the front page by the likes of Osbert Lancaster (Daily Express), Jon (Daily Mail), Belsky (Daily Herald), Mark Boxer (The Times) and more recently Matt (Daily Telegraph) and others. The one notable exception was the Guardian from the 1950s to the 1980s when drawings by, successively, David Low, William Papas and Les Gibbard frequently appeared under the masthead, but when Steve Bell took over in 1990 the paper began to follow the more common practice of printing its main political cartoon close to the editorial page.
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