The Press: Bulls’ Eyes for Grandma

“Son of a Newmarket racing family. Keeps horses himself. Breeds pigs. Born while parents were staying within one mile of Bow Bells, making him officially a cockney*. . . Calls all policemen and editors ‘Sir.’ Avoids all children under the age of 30.”

Thus pale, frail, one-eyed Carl Giles, 36, famed cartoonist for Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express (circ. 4,222,000) describes himself in a book of his cartoons just published by the Express. But most Fleet-Streeters—and Express readers—would describe Giles more simply as, next to David Low, the best cartoonist in Britain. Even Americans, often baffled by British humor, think Giles is funny, and his cartoons now appear in 22 Canadian and eight U.S. newspapers.

Rare Boys. Giles likes to say that the only art training he ever got was in scrawling naughty words on automobiles in the London working-class suburb of Islington, where he grew up. (His “racing family” refers to his father’s occupation as a jockey.) At 14, he got a job sharpening pencils and carrying tea to movie-cartoon animators in Alexander Korda’s film company, got his bosses to let him trace some of the smaller details in the thousands of drawings that go to make up a sequence. He taught himself drawing so well that in 1937 Reynolds News gave him a job as a cartoonist. His work caught the eye of the Beaver, who took him over in 1943. Overnight, Giles won a huge following in wartime Britain, notably American soldiers, who liked his good-humored pot shots at their habits. At a time when Americans were monopolizing London taxis, Giles cartooned an American plane which had just crashed into a German house. Its crew, standing a few feet away, was shouting: “Taxi!” Another showed G.I.s hauling away Big Ben’s clock on an Army truck while a grinning cockney remarked: “Rare boys for souvenirs, these Americans.” Two years ago, on his first visit to the U.S., Giles took playful pokes at everything from reservation Indians to U.S. bad manners. (“The guy is nuts. Says thank you!”) He also has fun with Americans abroad (see cut).

A Proper Importance. Although Giles now makes enough money to indulge his passion for cars (he lost the sight of his right eye in a motor accident) and to live on a prosperous farm in Suffolk, he has not forgotten his working-class origins. Londoners like best his stock characters, such as cockneys, hard-boiled moppets (one proudly reported that he had not only spotted spring’s first cuckoo, but shot it with his air rifle) and the Giles “family.” This includes beefy, solid Dad and Mum, a scrawny pig-tailed schoolgirl, two older homely sisters, a horrid, runty little boy and stumpy, grumpy Grandma who smells of camphorated oil and dotes on “bulls’ eyes” (a peppermint candy).

His ugly working-class characters combine good nature, impudence and long-suffering patience with a proper English sense of a citizen’s importance. Example: a squat cockney in a cap, a runny-nosed brat dangling from his shoulder, strides past a cluster of bristling generals to inspect a parade-dress line of soldiers. Giles’s caption: “His argument is that as a taxpayer he has as much right to inspect things as anybody else.”

* By definition, anyone born within the sound of the bells of Bow Church.