A War Cartoonist at the Foreign Office
Mark Bryant examines the wartime work of Osbert Lancaster, the centenary of whose birth this year is marked with a new exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London.
This year [2008] marks the centenary of the birth of Sir Osbert Lancaster CBE (1908-86). Writer, theatre designer, art critic, painter and illustrator, he is nonetheless still probably best known for the single-column topical cartoons – some 10,000 in all – which he produced for the Daily Express for more than forty years, notably those in the postwar period up to the 1970s which featured Maudie Littlehampton, her monocled husband Willy and their family and friends. Perhaps less well known is that during the Second World War Lancaster also worked for the Ministry of Information and the News Department of the Foreign Office, and served as press attaché to the British embassy in Athens where he met Winston Churchill. During this period he not only began drawing his first daily ‘pocket cartoons’ (a name he coined himself), often featuring Nazi and Axis figures, but also contributed large-format political war cartoons to the Sunday Express under the pseudonym ‘Bunbury’.
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