Wally Fawkes (born Walter Ernest Pearsall) was born in Vancouver, Canada, on 21 June 1924. He immigrated to England with his mother and stepfather, printer Charles Fawkes, in 1931, following his mother's remarriage, and later become one of Britain's foremost political cartoonists, working under the pseudonym 'Trog' for more than 60 years, while also playing clarinet with Humphrey Lyttelton's band. Wally Fawkes died in London, England, on 1 March 2023.
Cartoonist and jazz clarinettist Wally Fawkes was born Walter Ernest Pearsall in Vancouver, Canada, on 21 June 1924, the son of railway clerk Douglas Pearsall and Mabel Ainsley. His parents' marriage ended while he was still a child, and in 1931 Mabel brought her children to Britain with her second husband, Charles Fawkes, a printer, whose surname the boy subsequently adopted. Settling in Sidcup, Kent, Fawkes developed an early passion for comics and left school in 1938, aged 14, on a scholarship to Sidcup Art School, though he had to leave after 18 months because of an inability to pay tuition fees. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he painted camouflage on factory roofs at Woolwich docks; the building was bombed soon afterwards, which he later called the harshest criticism his work had ever received (British Cartoon Archive). A bout of pleurisy kept him out of the armed forces, and in 1941 he traced coal-seam maps for the Coal Commission. There, in 1942, his talent was discovered through a workplace art competition judged by political cartoonist of the Daily Mail, Leslie Illingworth, who secured him a post at an advertising agency and then, in June 1945, a job at the paper itself, drawing decorative illustrations and column-breakers. From 1947, he attended weekly classes under the painter John Minton at Camberwell School of Art, where fellow students included the trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and the cartoonist Francis Wilford-Smith.
Fawkes worked under the pen name 'Trog', a nickname derived from wartime jokes about Londoners becoming 'troglodytes' through hours spent in air-raid shelters. First used for one of his early jazz bands, it soon became his professional signature. His cartooning style, initially shaped by Illingworth's tonal grisaille technique in gouache, later diversified into vivid colour caricature, most notably in his covers for Punch, produced with Bristol board, Higgins ink and a dip pen. Fawkes replaced Illingworth as political cartoonist for Punch in 1969, became the Daily Mail political cartoonist in 1970, and returnd to the Observer in 1971, later contributing to the Spectator, New Statesman, Private Eye, Today and the Sunday Telegraph. His most enduring creation, the strip 'Flook', which was conceived in 1948 and launched in 1949, ran in the Daily Mail for 35 years, latterly written by Compton Mackenzie, Lyttelton, George Melly and, from 1980, Fawkes himself, before transferring to the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror in 1984-85. Fawkes retired in 2005, aged 81, after 62 years as a professional cartoonist.
Admiring the American caricaturist David Levine, Fawkes became known for the precision of his likenesses. The illustrator Raymond Briggs observed that in his work 'his blacks seem to be blacker than black' (British Cartoon Archive). Fawkes, whom Dr Nick Hiley of the University of Kent has credited as the first modern cartoonist to depict the reigning monarch in caricature, saw a direct kinship between his two disciplines: 'what you do visually, you do aurally' (BBC News Magazine, 2005). 'Flook', which emulated the American strip 'Barnaby', reflected the transatlantic sensibility of a cartoonist who had himself crossed the ocean as a child. That dual inheritance also shaped his music; taking up the clarinet in the mid-1940s, he modelled his playing on Sidney Bechet's New Orleans style, becoming a member of the George Webb Dixielanders before joining Humphrey Lyttelton's band in 1948, helping to define the post-war British traditional jazz revival. In the early 1980s, Fawkes played clarinet weekly at a pub in Highgate, north London (Illustrated London News, 1 November 1983); by his retirement he was living in Dartmouth Park, London, and playing every Tuesday at the White Hart in Drury Lane (BBC News Magazine, 2005; Camden New Journal, 21 July 2005).
His honours included the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain's Cartoonist of the Year and Social and Political Cartoonist of the Year awards in 1982 (Shropshire Star, 2 April 1982). He received the Cartoon Art Trust's Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, an honorary doctorate from the University of Kent in 2001 and was named Political Cartoonist of the Year in 2004 (Irish News, 3 March 2023). His work has featured in the solo shows The Cartoons of Trog at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1980), Trog, Flook and Humph too! at the Cartoon Museum, London (2013), and the group exhibition The Cutting Edge at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (1992).
Fawkes married the journalist Sandra Boyce-Carmichael in 1949; they had four children before divorcing in 1964. The following year he married Susan Clifford, with whom he had two further children. Wally Fawkes died in London, England, on 1 March 2023, aged 98. In the UK public domain, his archive of original artwork is held by the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent, and his work is represented in the collection of the Cartoon Museum, London.
Michal Mel
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Wally Fawkes ]
Publications related to [Wally Fawkes ] in the Ben Uri Library