Colonel Blimp's England
David Low, the cartoonist, met Horatio Blimp, a retired Colonel, in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross in the early 1930s. Many agree with C.S. Lewis that Colonel Blimp was 'the most characteristic expression of the English temper in the period between the two wars.'
His name entered the language, he appeared in a West End review, he was discussed in Parliament, the press and on the radio, and he graced a set of bathroom tiles. Blimp's hearty idiocy so impressed Low that he included the Colonel in Low's Topical Budget and other cartoons. Clad usually in his dignity, walrus moustache and bath towel, he dispensed advice on a broad range of topics.
During the war he made frequent declarations in Low's cartoons and elsewhere and starred in Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Reports of his death, then and later, were premature. He emerged from retirement at irregular intervals after the Second World War. Various accounts of his ancestry exist. Either he or a relative were pictured by Will Dyson in the Daily Herald in 1913, by various artists in Punch, and H.M. Bateman certainly met him. Some predict he will re-emerge when Britannia needs him.
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