For a man who’s been dead for nearly 40 years, the cartoonist Sir David Low
is thriving. Earlier this year, he had two exhibitions running simultaneously in
London. The first, in Westminster Hall, was opened by the Speaker of the
House of Commons, deep in the heart of the political establishment within the
purlieus of the Palace of Westminster. The second, up the road at the bottom
of Haymarket, was a smaller affair, held on the mezzanine floor of New
Zealand House. As Low was a New Zealander, the land of his birth is
naturally jealous of his reputation, although he left the place in his early
twenties and never went back. Anyway, apart from the cartoons themselves,
the exhibition included, in a box, Low’s hands.
At first sight I’d rather hoped that this was a Jeremy Bentham style exercise in
auto-iconography - that these really were Low’s hands, lovingly preserved like an
Egyptian pharaoh or the eyeballs of a Victorian murderer, as a voodoo
talisman harnessing the shamanistic power of his cartooning mitts. Rather
disappointingly, they’re made of wax, and once hung from the sleeves of
Low’s waxwork, displayed in Madame Tussauds in the 1930s. Still, the very
fact that they bothered to sculpt his hands at all (rather than, say, using a spare
pair of Bonar Law’s after the rest of that statesman had been melted down)
suggests the importance his hands were seen to have as a cultural artefact. And
Low clearly appreciated the gesture, having a bit of a thing about waxworks.
In a 1935 documentary film "BBC: The Voice of Britain", Low is filmed
giving a radio talk, during which he says "Politicians are merely waxworks;
it’s the cartoonist who brings them to life", and he even drew himself drawing
his own waxwork at Madame Tussauds, which appears to be in the act of
drawing him. And, significantly, his first cartoon for Beaverbrook’s Evening
Standard, published on 10th October 1927, was of the opening day of "Low’s
Waxworks", with the figure of Low himself dusting down Lloyd George
dressed as "The Political Fanny Ward", Churchill dressed as Napoleon and
Ramsay MacDonald, in court dress, labelled "The celebrated Conservative
leader (in actual clothes worn at the Tragedy)", while a tiny, grinning
Beaverbrook, either a punter or a dummy, is glimpsed in the background.
Most of the contemporary political resonances are now lost on us, but we get
the general point. Low was setting up his stall.
What he was doing, right at the start of his twenty-year long stint at the
Standard, was baldly restating the fundamental principles of the political
cartoon, which had been laid down a century and a half earlier by the great
caricaturist James Gillray. Using some kind of ancient sympathetic magic - as
it involves doing damage at a distance with a sharp instrument we might as
well call it voodoo - the political cartoonist transforms real people into
caricatured, and thereby controlled, depictions of themselves and then makes
them act out a narrative of his own invention. Thus the waxworks come alive,
but remain sufficiently waxen to allow the needles to be driven in.
One waxwork Low repeatedly brought to life was his own. During his fifty
year career Low drew something like 12000 cartoons, over 800 of them
featuring himself. Of the nearly 200 or so he produced in his first year on the
Standard, almost a quarter depict the cartoonist in some way or other. In his
first week, out of four cartoons, three feature Low (one as a dog, interestingly
enough), and two are about his role as a cartoonist. At the end of the week
which had started with him dusting down his "waxworks", there is the
extraordinary cartoon "The Hard Lot of a Cartoonist", in which Low lays out
his relationship with his proprietor. In the opening "frame", the gnomic figure
of Lord Beaverbrook tells Low "your cartoons are giving great offence to my
friends. I must ask you to reconsider your view of Lord Birkenhead, Mr
Churchill and the rest. After all, you are on the ‘Evening Standard’ now, and,
remember, our motto is ‘kindness first’." The second frame shows a highly
stylised group portrait of Baldwin, Birkenhead and Churchill in statesmanlike
pose, until Low’s conscience intervenes and makes him rub it out and do it
again, this time showing the whole Tory crew at the Motor Show driving a
ludicrous car designed for travelling in circles.
It’s obvious what Low was up to, setting out the parameters of his editorial
freedom, as licenced (up to a point, Lord Copper) by Beaverbrook. The terms
of his contract with the Standard gave him total freedom in choice of subject
and execution, but with an ultimate editorial veto, as we’ll see later. But Low
wasn’t just marking his territory in "The Hard Lot of a Cartoonist". Lord
Birkenhead, rechristened "Lord Burstinghead" by Low, was incensed by his
treatment at Low’s hands, later immortalised in wax. As he wrote to his friend
Beaverbrook, "As to your filthy little cartoonists, I care nothing about him
now. But I know about modern caricature and I never had cause for grievance
until you, a friend, allowed a filthy little Socialist to present me daily as a
crapulous and corpulent buffoon." That kind of thing can only delight a
cartoonist: it shows that the voodoo’s working. It worked on Baldwin too,
who, on being shown a Low cartoon, spluttered, "Now Low is a genius, but I
cannot bear Low: he is evil and malicious."
Many politicians, however, recognised the rules of the game: that while the
cartoonist can try to work his voodoo magic, he or she is really nothing more
than a court jester; at the end of the day the King, after all, remains the King.
Put another way, the politicians pretend they don’t mind, while the cartoonists
pretend we matter. That said, Churchill and Beaverbrook were huge fans. But
Low had another, highly unlikely fan. In 1930 a friend of Low’s visited
Germany and met Hitler, who sang his praises. It transpired that the future
fuhrer misread Low’s attacks on democratic politicians as an attack on
democracy itself, but nonetheless Low sent Hitler the original artwork of a
cartoon, with the hand written dedication "from one artist to another".
That relationship, of course, soon soured. After a weekend at Goering’s
hunting lodge in the mid-1930s, Lord Halifax told Beaverbrook that Low’s
representations of the Nazi leadership (as "bloody fools", as Low described it)
was seriously undermining good Anglo-German relations, and Low was told
to cool it. A cheap gag in one of his full page cartoons, "Low’s Topical
Budget", run in the Standard on Saturdays, in which Hitler is bitten by a dog
("Stop Press: the dog goes mad") was spiked by the editor. Low responded
with "Muzzler", a composite dictator combining Hitler and Mussolini. It was a
pretty obvious joke, and again Low was marking out his journalistic territory.
Moreover, Low’s attitude earned him the ultimate, if deadly, accolade from
his victims of being placed on the Gestapo Death list.
Low’s ragging of the Nazis (which, in the end, did nothing to stop them from
conquering most of Europe and murdering millions of its inhabitants), along
with his contrarian stance compared to that of his proprietor, are what he’s
mostly remembered for today. He also created some enduring cartoon
archetypes (like Colonel Blimp and the TUC carthorse, although most people
don’t remember Churchill, and later Lord Hailsham, as Mr Micawber, or his
Eskimo correspondents Onandonandon and Upandupandup, or, indeed, his
cartoon pup Mussolini, one of his most frequently used cartoon tropes) and
produced about half a dozen cartoons which, like Gillray’s "The Plumb
Pudding in Danger" or Tenniel’s "Dropping the Pilot", have entered our visual
language.
Does that, then, earn him the encomium offered in the title of the Westminster
Hall exhibition, "The Greatest Cartoonist of the Twentieth Century"? It really
depends on what you think the purpose of a newspaper cartoon is, how long
you think its effectiveness lasts and in what sphere it’s meant to exert that
influence. The sphere where Low’s influence is most obvious is among his
successors among newspaper cartoonists. Nearly all of us, at some time or
other, have pinched an image from Low: speaking personally, I’ve used
"Rendezvous", which showed Hitler and Stalin greeting each other over the
corpse of Poland at the beginning of the Second World War and which Low
described as his "bitterest cartoon", to depict Blair meeting Thatcher at No 10
just after the 1997 Election, over the corpse of John Major, and Nato greeting
Milosevic over the corpse of Kosovo. Likewise, most cartoonists will, as a
matter of course, use the TUC carthorse without a second’s thought (although
Colonel Blimp seems to have died with his creator). The reason we do this is
simple: as part of the visual language, these images are common currency, and
will be recognised by the readers, as will their point. Bluntly, it’s visual
shorthand, which was why Low created the carthorse, Blimp and his other cast
of characters in the first place.
But it’s worth remembering why he, and all other cartoonists, use these tricks.
They are merely tools to assist the job in hand, which is to provide a daily
commentary on the news which, being visual, is "read" and sublimated
quickly and in a very primitive psychological way. Having "read" it, the
reader then moves on, and maybe remembers the cartoon, and maybe doesn’t.
The savage response to cartoons (like Birkenhead’s, or Hitler’s) is in large
part because of their primitive, almost elementally savage, nature. Voodoo
indeed. But the main point is that newspaper cartoons, Low’s no less than
anyone else’s, are produced as an immediate commentary, and are as
ephemeral as almost all other newspaper journalism. The power of some of
them to linger in the collective memory is very much a by-product.
So, out of 12000 cartoons, apart from among obsessives and archivists, Low is
luckier than most to have as many as half a dozen remembered from his 50
year long career. Of course, it’s a mistake to judge the success of anyone’s
career purely according to the criteria of Posterity. As Groucho Marx said,
"What the Hell’s Posterity ever done for me?" So how "great" was Low in his
lifetime, and what criteria should we use to make that judgement?
In a way, Low set out to be the architect of his own "greatness". His counter-
intuitive contract with Beaverbrook helped considerably in this, but it should
be remembered that this was Beaverbrook’s mischievous gift, and in a way
reflects better on the proprietor than on the cartoonist. Similarly, Low worked
for the Evening Standard, which then had the smallest circulation of London’s
three evening newspapers, but, as the paper of choice in London’s clubland,
was read by Low’s powerful and influential targets (just as, 120 years earlier,
Gillray’s clientele at Mrs Humphrey’s print shop in St. James’ were his targets
in the establishment, who got the joke and enjoyed the recognition). He was
also widely syndicated, thus nurturing a world-wide audience. He was also, of
course, right about Hitler, but was hardly a lone voice. Indeed, his contrarian
position did, if anything, reinforce the impression that he was a lone voice,
and then just one who was shouting rude jokes in the wilderness.
Low was at his best when performing the role of Court Jester to Beaverbrook;
his pre-war cartoons are both funnier and more effective than the stuff he did
once he’d left the Standard and gone to his natural political home, first on the
Daily Herald and then at the Manchester Guardian. By then Low appeared to
be believing the rest of the world’s opinion of him which he’d been so careful
to cultivate. The tone is far less mischievous and far more pompous, with Low
strongly identifying himself as a "sane voice in an insane world". It’s reported
that, by this time, he was getting grander and grander: at an Oxbridge High
Table dinner, there were embarrassing scenes as he vied for prominence as the
senior guest of honour over a visiting elder statesman, and at the Manchester
Guardian, the arrangements for the paper’s coverage of the party conference
season centred around the arrangements for Low’s attendance. In 1962 he
accepted the knighthood he’d turned down in the 1930s.
And now there he is, back in the heart of the Establishment in Westminster
Hall, although without his hands. I don’t know whether the rest of Low’s
waxwork is propped up in a basement in Madame Tussauds, or has long since
been melted down to sculpt Billy Fury and, later, Boy George. As I said
above, what we do know is that he constantly played Pygmalion with himself
by bringing his waxwork to life in his own cartoons, but it’s worth noticing
how he did it. Vicky, his contemporary and successor at the Standard, was
also fond of placing himself in his cartoons, but more often than not as the butt
of his own jokes. Low was seldom if ever the fall guy, and when he was he
was the stooge to his own conscience. Otherwise, he drew himself as the
passive audience for Colonel Blimp’s idiocies in the steam room, or as
Diogenes in his barrel (holding a candle and looking for an honest man), or,
most frequently, as an observer of the lunacies of the political world and, by
inference, a stand-in for Everyman.
There’s no harm in Low’s self-identification with Commonsense, and without
question he was a very great cartoonist, whose greatest influence has not been
in the way he drew but in why he drew: that you can make deadly serious
points by making people laugh. But in essence he was merely reasserting the
cartoonist’s right savagely to mock, first established in the form we recognise
today by Gillray, but which had lapsed during the dark, deferential Victorian
years in between. That was probably enough in itself, although it’s also worth
pointing out that if (and it’s quite a small if) Low was the greatest cartoonist
of the twentieth century, it was largely because he kept on telling us so.