By Norman Thelwell (Magnum/Eyre Methuen)
ISBN: 0-417-01000-1
Norman Thelwell (3rd May 1923 – 7th February 2004) is one of our most beloved cartoonists. His superbly gentle cartooning combined Bigfoot abstractions with a keen and accurate eye for background detail, not just on the riding and countryside themes that made him a household name, but on all the myriad subjects he turned his canny eye and subtle brushstrokes to. His compositions are an immaculate condensation of everything deprecatingly; resolutely Post-War, Baby-Booming British – without ever becoming parochial or provincial.
His work has international implications and scope, neatly achieving that by presenting us to the world for decades. There are 32 books of his work and every aficionado of humour – illustrated or otherwise – could do much worse than possess them all.
From 1950 when his gag-panel Chicko began in the Eagle, and especially two years later with his first sale to Punch, he built a solid body of irresistible, seductive and always funny work. He appeared in innumerable magazines, comics and papers ranging from Men Only to Everybody’s Weekly. In 1957 his first collection of published cartoons Angels on Horseback was released and in 1961 he made the rare reverse trip by releasing a book of all-new cartoons that was subsequently serialised in the Sunday Express.
His dry, sly, cannily observed drawings were a huge success and other books followed to supplement his regular appearances in a variety of newspapers and magazines. Thus we have here his shrewd pictorial observations of the growth of a Leisure Economy and the strange phenomenon of people of all classes with a little time on their hands…
These strips, culled mostly from the venerable and equally-missed Punch, (the others all originally appearing in the Sunday Express) come from a time when hobbies and holidays were just starting to become the inviolable, inalienable right of all Britons: no matter how annoying, painful and just plain frustrating they might be…
These cartoons range from the wonderfully silly to the near-mordant, created by a man who came to epitomise middle-class values, aspirations and self-delusions, but Thelwell was also an observer who could spot cupidity, cant and social imbecility a mile off and knew human nature never really evolved, so don’t expect to see a point of view… just the extremes of daftness and pigheadedness we can resort to whilst trying to relax and have a good time…
Subdivided into Leisure on Wheels, Messing About…, Strictly For the Birds…, Relaxing at Home, Drinks by the Pool, Away From it All, The Inner Man (an especially telling sally against food-ism and consumption), Leisurely Pastimes and a particularly exhilarating general section of gags, all still trenchantly relevant and bitingly funny today: another startling exhibition of the artist’s fantastic, funny foresight and the British unwillingness to embrace change.
We may do stranger things today than even Thelwell could have dreamed of, but the art of down-time still obsesses us all and these superb cartoons are simply the most effective cure to the stress of relaxation that I can imagine. Timeless and delightful, why not chill out to these gems and give the Leisure rat-race a miss this year…?
© 1968, 1978 Norman Thelwell.