A Hopeless Dud or The Man Who Kicked the Kaiser

George Melly called H.M. Bateman ‘the reluctant poet of Metroland, the Cassandra of Clapham’ and it was as the resident artist of Edwardian Clapham, acknowledged in 1905 as ‘the capital of Suburbia’ – that commuter district ‘outside the four-mile radius’ of central London – that he first became best known. As the chronicler of that perennial Everyman figure ‘The Man on the Clapham Omnibus’ Bateman later produced a book of cartoons entitled Suburbia (1921) and the celebrated illustrator John Hassall even called him the ‘Suburban Artist’. However, the advent of the First World War – and what was perceived as the very real threat of attacks by Zeppelins and long-range German bombers – forced him to move out of Clapham and opened up a new chapter in his career.