Imagine the most terrifying figure of the 20th century – ruthless, blood-thirsty and menacing. Now imagine the same figure ridiculously bandaged up and sprawled on a rickety hospital bed, with only his (in)famous moustache visible. Despite his obviously German roots, he speaks with all the charm of the British he was fighting: “I hope you won’t think me unduly inquisitive, Benito, but just where were you on Thursday afternoon?”
The image is a reference to the bomb plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, on Thursday, July 20, 1944. In the plot were implicated several of his trusted generals, adding to his building paranoia at the time and leading to another major purge. Already stout, Hitler now walked with a limp, an injured arm and cut ear. Three days later, this cartoon published in the Daily Express, picking on his deformities and exaggerating them. To add insult to injury, it displays a bottle of Eno as the only medication he seems to be taking. A bald, blasé pate of Mussolini is lurking around in the background, uninterested in answering the question.
Laughter, like Eno, might well be the best medicine, and when it’s a dictator one is up against, perhaps the only one. The tradition of British satire met its match when Hitler starting terrorising the world – and British cartoonists, like Carl Giles does in this one, made him suffer indignity after ridiculous indignity through their cartoons.
Heckling Hitler: World War Two in Cartoons and Comics, the latest show at the Cartoon Museum in London, tells the story of World War II as it unfolded through the eyes of British cartoonists over 120 original drawings and printed ephemera from news dailies and magazines. With their immediacy and universal accessibility, these could spread the message faster than words, their virulent charm working like balm on the wounds of a broken British public.
Curated by Dr Mark Bryant, who has authored World War II in Cartoons (2006), the works have been put together from the British Cartoon Archive, the Beaverbrook Collection, the Cartoon Museum collection, private collectors, Cambridge University Library and the National Archives. Included are works by HM Bateman, "Fougass"’, Carl Giles, Leslie Grimes, Leslie Illingworth, "Jon", ‘Kem’, Joe Lee, Donald McGill, "Neb", Eric Roberts, "Pont", William Heath Robinson, Ken Rolfe, Ronald Searle, EH Shepard, Sidney Strube, Bert Thomas, ‘Vicky’ and Dudley D Watkins. Also included are works by the Australian Will Dyson and New Zealander David Low, whose foreign credentials made them more disrespectful of British proprieties and, perhaps for that reason, among the finest cartoonists of their time.
Low’s contract with the Evening Standard – enviable to any artist of war-torn England, or present-day India – guaranteed “complete freedom in the selection and treatment of his subject matter”. It wasn’t for nothing that Low would go on to become one of the most celebrated cartoonists in the Age of the Dictator. He had favourite targets and created many memorable characters of his own, such as the old buffer Colonel Blimp (modelled on Sir John Anderson, British Home Secretary 1939-1940).
Blimp makes many an appearance at this exhibit, including in one work titled Blimpapore, after one of Britain’s most ignominious defeats of the War, where a disorganised Britain saw 138,000 of its troops surrender to Japanese forces in Singapore. Unfazed by the defeat, Blimp reads a note to his battered troops: “No reinforcements yet: But I’m sent to read you this Parliamentary debate proving: that Air Chief Marshall Blimp is a Great Statesman; that there are no lessons to be learnt from this; that Blimpapore will be defended to the last.”
The attack column
One category of cartoons in the exhibit is attacks: against not only Hitler and the Axis powers, but also (as represented by Blimp for instance), the Allies and their poor political strategies and defeats. Neville Chamberlain’s much-critiqued policy of Appeasement is quite literally devoured when Low depicts a swastika-sporting tiger chomping on the remains of Churchill. The signature umbrella and hat, unappetising as they might have been, lie untouched.
All the World War II’s critical episodes are documented, although documented is perhaps not the right word. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression in 1939, followed by the invasion of Poland by the Germans and separately by the Soviet Union, is cannily depicted by Bert Thomas in an Evening Standard cartoon. Titled Lending Library, this shows Stalin and Hitler sitting upright with their backs resting against each other, reading. Stalin reads Hitler’s Mein Kampf, while Hitler reads Marx’s Das Kapital. In a split second, the cartoon has conveyed the complexity of the relationship between Stalinist Marxism and Nazism, seemingly contradictory, yet oddly similar in many ways.
After Britain’s successes in the Battle of Britain and the thwarting of Operation Sea Lion, Churchill, usually a cartoonist’s delight with his portly physique, bald head and double chin gets quite a makeover by EH Shepard. Almost unrecognisable as a dashing Arthurian knight (and matching physique), he’s standing next to a dragon he has slain in this Punch cartoon, titled Dragon Slayer: “So much for that one – and now to face the next.” This was just 1941, the war was a long way from being won.
Hitler’s coming to Mussolini’s rescue in 1940 was predicted in literal terms by Shepard in a Punch cartoon, where the Fuhrer is shown assisting Mussolini in a burglary, by grabbing his derrière. “I suppose you want me to come up and push you in,” The Burgler’s Mate says. As Shepard predicted, Hitler did have to come to Mussolini’s aid the following year. The buttock metaphor is used also by Kem (Kimon Marengo), who makes a cardboard pincushion with Hitler (buttock) serving as one side and Mussolini’s on the reverse.
Apart from the pincushion, cartoons, realistic drawings, leaflets, postcards, propaganda material, the exhibition also features unpublished cartoons drawn in prisoner-of-war camps and by civilians on the home front. One such civilian was Ken Rolfe whose scrap paper drawings present a perspective that was anti-Nazi, but not anti-German.
Rolfe, an employee of the Ministry of Food in Wales who had earlier worked in a German company and had a whiff of the German scenario, shows, as in this cartoon here, how German civilians – not necessarily Jewish – were also suffering under the Nazi yoke. The cartoon depicts Anarchy and Murder as two characters, waiting to unleash themselves.
The defence lines
The other category of cartoons directed at civilians is the morale-boosting variety. There’s Heath Robinson telling fellow Britons “how to make the best of things”, and Joe Lee encouraging them to keep “smiling through”. Low’s Topical Budget series for the Evening Standard, a weekly digest, sums up the life of an ordinary Briton during the war. There are messages from the milkman (who is “in the confidence of all the governments in Europe”), there are air-raid sirens punctuating the sleep of every citizen, and playwright-musician Noel Coward hoping that discordant sirens be harmonised. At the bottom right, Low figures himself, talking to his favourite character Colonel Blimp: “We must shut down all amusements and make ourselves so blue that air-raiders won’t be able to see us even in daytime.” In the bottom, a bunch of goats and cats have signed an Anti-Aggression Pact against “dopes who talk of putting away respectable pets in wartime” (September 9, 1939).
Sir John Anderson (in real life) introduced the Anderson Shelters during the war: an underground structure usually in the family’s back garden, which could house six and which became for most families a second home. In a cartoon hat-doffing these shelters, Carl Giles shows a family surrounding a shelter overrun with wild grass. “You can come out now Grandma, they’re not going to drop anymore bombs for a long time.” A pair of eyes stares back from the dark shelter (Reynolds News, July 2, 1946).
To save British children and pregnant mothers from aerial bombing, the government had also launched Operation Pied Piper in 1939, where many were evacuated from London and moved to rural centres. A cartoon by Joseph Lee depicts the life of these children cheerfully crammed into country houses that barely had room to accommodate all of them. “All right then, two more…as long as the old walls will stand it,” says one of the officers, while children are almost spilling out of one of these houses, grins intact (Evening News, 31 October 1940).
During the war, government ministries were on overdrive, issuing advisories in every sector – information, food or health. A Ministry of Information poster features a cartoon by Fougasse, where two women in a bus are gabbing on, while two men occupying the seats behind theirs are eavesdropping on their conversation. One of those men bears the familiar toothbrush moustache. “Careless Talk Costs Lives,” it ominously suggests. The Ministry of Health’s advisory to keep coughs and colds away ends with the signoff: “Keep the Nation Fighting Fit.” Meanwhile, the government sells the idea of rationing, the one big wartime issue, in a succinct message: “Better Pot Luck with Churchill Today, than Humble Pie under Hitler Tomorrow. Don’t Waste Food!”
Despite the cheerful tone and colourful sketches, there’s an underlying sadness to the posters and cartoons to do with civilian life. Images of children escaping aerial bombing, or rationing out how many ounces of butter they can have in a week, underground shelters, even told in a funny vein, are strongly evocative of the harsh realities of life during war.
Although the really inescapably grim section of the series is the reportage drawings by the cartoonists, such as Carl Giles’s drawings on the Belgian town of Breendonk, which became a reception camp for Jews and political prisoners before they were taken off to Antwerp. “The Main Tunnel: Each Door Leading to a Torture Chamber,” with the accompanying visual is perhaps the most chilling few square inches of the exhibition.
When you want to cheer yourself up though, look no further than the favourite muse of these caricaturists. He swings a revolver around to make it look like a swastika one day, and tells a dog he must groom his moustache to look like his, the next. He loses sleep over his “fortress” being stormed in another, his crazed eyes glinting with nervous energy you best feel sorry for. He dusts up his old paintbrushes in another, confident of getting back his old job as a painter after the war (“Of course I’ve saved them – they’re bound by law to give me my old job back after the war.” Ronald Neibour, Daily Mail, January 15, 1945). In another, he develops the body of a Hercules, his Aryan arteries and veins running riot through his muscles. “I want all German blood to be pure,” he says. He then proceeds to sing the Nazi Hymn of Hate with all the passion of Maria Von Trapp, although his mouth looking like it is poised on the last note of “Hallelujah”. You could hate him if you like, but wouldn’t you just rather laugh?
Heckling Hitler is on at the Cartoon Museum in London till July 12.
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The image is a reference to the bomb plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at his headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, on Thursday, July 20, 1944. In the plot were implicated several of his trusted generals, adding to his building paranoia at the time and leading to another major purge. Already stout, Hitler now walked with a limp, an injured arm and cut ear. Three days later, this cartoon published in the Daily Express, picking on his deformities and exaggerating them. To add insult to injury, it displays a bottle of Eno as the only medication he seems to be taking. A bald, blasé pate of Mussolini is lurking around in the background, uninterested in answering the question.
Laughter, like Eno, might well be the best medicine, and when it’s a dictator one is up against, perhaps the only one. The tradition of British satire met its match when Hitler starting terrorising the world – and British cartoonists, like Carl Giles does in this one, made him suffer indignity after ridiculous indignity through their cartoons.
Heckling Hitler: World War Two in Cartoons and Comics, the latest show at the Cartoon Museum in London, tells the story of World War II as it unfolded through the eyes of British cartoonists over 120 original drawings and printed ephemera from news dailies and magazines. With their immediacy and universal accessibility, these could spread the message faster than words, their virulent charm working like balm on the wounds of a broken British public.
William Heath Robinson, Mare Nostrum
'Heroic attempt to convoy light refreshments to Italian troops through a minefield in the Mediterranean - escorted by fighter aircraft'
The Sketch, March 14, 1941
© Cartoon Museum collection
Curated by Dr Mark Bryant, who has authored World War II in Cartoons (2006), the works have been put together from the British Cartoon Archive, the Beaverbrook Collection, the Cartoon Museum collection, private collectors, Cambridge University Library and the National Archives. Included are works by HM Bateman, "Fougass"’, Carl Giles, Leslie Grimes, Leslie Illingworth, "Jon", ‘Kem’, Joe Lee, Donald McGill, "Neb", Eric Roberts, "Pont", William Heath Robinson, Ken Rolfe, Ronald Searle, EH Shepard, Sidney Strube, Bert Thomas, ‘Vicky’ and Dudley D Watkins. Also included are works by the Australian Will Dyson and New Zealander David Low, whose foreign credentials made them more disrespectful of British proprieties and, perhaps for that reason, among the finest cartoonists of their time.
Low’s contract with the Evening Standard – enviable to any artist of war-torn England, or present-day India – guaranteed “complete freedom in the selection and treatment of his subject matter”. It wasn’t for nothing that Low would go on to become one of the most celebrated cartoonists in the Age of the Dictator. He had favourite targets and created many memorable characters of his own, such as the old buffer Colonel Blimp (modelled on Sir John Anderson, British Home Secretary 1939-1940).
Blimp makes many an appearance at this exhibit, including in one work titled Blimpapore, after one of Britain’s most ignominious defeats of the War, where a disorganised Britain saw 138,000 of its troops surrender to Japanese forces in Singapore. Unfazed by the defeat, Blimp reads a note to his battered troops: “No reinforcements yet: But I’m sent to read you this Parliamentary debate proving: that Air Chief Marshall Blimp is a Great Statesman; that there are no lessons to be learnt from this; that Blimpapore will be defended to the last.”
The attack column
One category of cartoons in the exhibit is attacks: against not only Hitler and the Axis powers, but also (as represented by Blimp for instance), the Allies and their poor political strategies and defeats. Neville Chamberlain’s much-critiqued policy of Appeasement is quite literally devoured when Low depicts a swastika-sporting tiger chomping on the remains of Churchill. The signature umbrella and hat, unappetising as they might have been, lie untouched.
All the World War II’s critical episodes are documented, although documented is perhaps not the right word. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression in 1939, followed by the invasion of Poland by the Germans and separately by the Soviet Union, is cannily depicted by Bert Thomas in an Evening Standard cartoon. Titled Lending Library, this shows Stalin and Hitler sitting upright with their backs resting against each other, reading. Stalin reads Hitler’s Mein Kampf, while Hitler reads Marx’s Das Kapital. In a split second, the cartoon has conveyed the complexity of the relationship between Stalinist Marxism and Nazism, seemingly contradictory, yet oddly similar in many ways.
After Britain’s successes in the Battle of Britain and the thwarting of Operation Sea Lion, Churchill, usually a cartoonist’s delight with his portly physique, bald head and double chin gets quite a makeover by EH Shepard. Almost unrecognisable as a dashing Arthurian knight (and matching physique), he’s standing next to a dragon he has slain in this Punch cartoon, titled Dragon Slayer: “So much for that one – and now to face the next.” This was just 1941, the war was a long way from being won.
Hitler’s coming to Mussolini’s rescue in 1940 was predicted in literal terms by Shepard in a Punch cartoon, where the Fuhrer is shown assisting Mussolini in a burglary, by grabbing his derrière. “I suppose you want me to come up and push you in,” The Burgler’s Mate says. As Shepard predicted, Hitler did have to come to Mussolini’s aid the following year. The buttock metaphor is used also by Kem (Kimon Marengo), who makes a cardboard pincushion with Hitler (buttock) serving as one side and Mussolini’s on the reverse.
Hitler/Mussolini Pin Cushion, Kem (Kimon Marengo)
On loan from the collection of the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent.
Apart from the pincushion, cartoons, realistic drawings, leaflets, postcards, propaganda material, the exhibition also features unpublished cartoons drawn in prisoner-of-war camps and by civilians on the home front. One such civilian was Ken Rolfe whose scrap paper drawings present a perspective that was anti-Nazi, but not anti-German.
Rolfe, an employee of the Ministry of Food in Wales who had earlier worked in a German company and had a whiff of the German scenario, shows, as in this cartoon here, how German civilians – not necessarily Jewish – were also suffering under the Nazi yoke. The cartoon depicts Anarchy and Murder as two characters, waiting to unleash themselves.
The defence lines
The other category of cartoons directed at civilians is the morale-boosting variety. There’s Heath Robinson telling fellow Britons “how to make the best of things”, and Joe Lee encouraging them to keep “smiling through”. Low’s Topical Budget series for the Evening Standard, a weekly digest, sums up the life of an ordinary Briton during the war. There are messages from the milkman (who is “in the confidence of all the governments in Europe”), there are air-raid sirens punctuating the sleep of every citizen, and playwright-musician Noel Coward hoping that discordant sirens be harmonised. At the bottom right, Low figures himself, talking to his favourite character Colonel Blimp: “We must shut down all amusements and make ourselves so blue that air-raiders won’t be able to see us even in daytime.” In the bottom, a bunch of goats and cats have signed an Anti-Aggression Pact against “dopes who talk of putting away respectable pets in wartime” (September 9, 1939).
Sir John Anderson (in real life) introduced the Anderson Shelters during the war: an underground structure usually in the family’s back garden, which could house six and which became for most families a second home. In a cartoon hat-doffing these shelters, Carl Giles shows a family surrounding a shelter overrun with wild grass. “You can come out now Grandma, they’re not going to drop anymore bombs for a long time.” A pair of eyes stares back from the dark shelter (Reynolds News, July 2, 1946).
No Title, Ken Rolfe, July 22, 1944. Cartoon Museum collection.
To save British children and pregnant mothers from aerial bombing, the government had also launched Operation Pied Piper in 1939, where many were evacuated from London and moved to rural centres. A cartoon by Joseph Lee depicts the life of these children cheerfully crammed into country houses that barely had room to accommodate all of them. “All right then, two more…as long as the old walls will stand it,” says one of the officers, while children are almost spilling out of one of these houses, grins intact (Evening News, 31 October 1940).
During the war, government ministries were on overdrive, issuing advisories in every sector – information, food or health. A Ministry of Information poster features a cartoon by Fougasse, where two women in a bus are gabbing on, while two men occupying the seats behind theirs are eavesdropping on their conversation. One of those men bears the familiar toothbrush moustache. “Careless Talk Costs Lives,” it ominously suggests. The Ministry of Health’s advisory to keep coughs and colds away ends with the signoff: “Keep the Nation Fighting Fit.” Meanwhile, the government sells the idea of rationing, the one big wartime issue, in a succinct message: “Better Pot Luck with Churchill Today, than Humble Pie under Hitler Tomorrow. Don’t Waste Food!”
Despite the cheerful tone and colourful sketches, there’s an underlying sadness to the posters and cartoons to do with civilian life. Images of children escaping aerial bombing, or rationing out how many ounces of butter they can have in a week, underground shelters, even told in a funny vein, are strongly evocative of the harsh realities of life during war.
Although the really inescapably grim section of the series is the reportage drawings by the cartoonists, such as Carl Giles’s drawings on the Belgian town of Breendonk, which became a reception camp for Jews and political prisoners before they were taken off to Antwerp. “The Main Tunnel: Each Door Leading to a Torture Chamber,” with the accompanying visual is perhaps the most chilling few square inches of the exhibition.
Hitler, Goering and Goebbels all sing the Nazi 'Hymn of Hate', Rowland Emett, Turner Brothers Press Tools advertisement c. 1940
© The Estate of Rowland Emett/ Cartoon Museum
When you want to cheer yourself up though, look no further than the favourite muse of these caricaturists. He swings a revolver around to make it look like a swastika one day, and tells a dog he must groom his moustache to look like his, the next. He loses sleep over his “fortress” being stormed in another, his crazed eyes glinting with nervous energy you best feel sorry for. He dusts up his old paintbrushes in another, confident of getting back his old job as a painter after the war (“Of course I’ve saved them – they’re bound by law to give me my old job back after the war.” Ronald Neibour, Daily Mail, January 15, 1945). In another, he develops the body of a Hercules, his Aryan arteries and veins running riot through his muscles. “I want all German blood to be pure,” he says. He then proceeds to sing the Nazi Hymn of Hate with all the passion of Maria Von Trapp, although his mouth looking like it is poised on the last note of “Hallelujah”. You could hate him if you like, but wouldn’t you just rather laugh?
Heckling Hitler is on at the Cartoon Museum in London till July 12.
