Cartoonists: The Statesman

He was deceptively mild-looking, with a tidy black mustache, a trilby hat and a walking cane. Humility warmed his wide brown eyes. He liked to think of himself as a kind man, and to say that he could forgive the world its sins because they were more stupid than wicked. But though forgiveness came easy, David Low, who died last week at 72, could not bring himself to overlook either stupidity or wickedness. For 60 years he attacked them both with brilliant and unparalleled ferocity. His weapon was the cartoonist’s brush.

When New Zealander Low came to London after the first World War, he found the art of newspaper cartooning still mired in Victorian politeness, with no more bite to it than a cup of cambric tea. “It was thought scandalous to hold statesmen up to ridicule,” said Low, and he proceeded to do just that for the London Evening Star, scandalizing statesmen, his editor and the United Kingdom. “Ah well,” he said to early protesters. “I am a nuisance dedicated to sanity.”

See No Abyssinia. He was indeed a nuisance, even to the men who hired his skill. From Lord Beaverbrook, for whom he went to work in 1927, Low exacted the promise that he could draw whatever he chose. That choice was rarely to the proprietor’s Tory tastes; Low’s brushwork punctured the Conservative Party, the Beaver’s dreams of British Empire, and the Beaver himself. Low once depicted his boss as a witch on a broomstick, preaching “politics for child minds.” When Beaverbrook urged his staff to go light on Mussolini’s rape of Abyssinia, Low impudently drew three monkeys in the Beaver’s likeness and attached the caption, “See No Abyssinia, Hear No Abyssinia, Speak No Abyssinia.”

As war clouds picked up in the 1930s, Low’s views assaulted the conscience of all England. He created the character of Colonel Blimp, a florid beefeater with a walrus mustache who symbolized British complacency in the teeth of the 20th century’s storms. From a Turkish bath, the colonel sprayed his nonsense at a mute companion who looked suspiciously like Cartoonist Low. “Gad, sir,” said the colonel, “Hitler is right. The only way to teach people self-respect is to treat ’em like the curs they are.” Japan was right, too, in the Blimpian Olympus: Keeping the white man out of the black man’s country is the yellow man’s burden.”

The rudest Low blows fell on the men who were conspiring to turn the world red with blood. Even as Chamberlain’s umbrella went to Munich, Low’s famous “Rendezvous” showed Hitler and Stalin tipping their hats to each other. Low’s cartoons so infuriated der Führer that he sent off official protests to London.

Fire from the Belly. In Britain’s finest hour, Low spurred the nation on. “All behind you, Winston,” read the caption beneath one famous wartime cartoon, showing the Prime Minister at the head of a troop of resolute Britons, rolling up sleeves against the dirty job ahead. This must have pleased Churchill mightily; in other times, he had been one of Low’s particular targets. “You can’t bridle the wild ass of the desert,” said Churchill after one painful portrait, “still less prohibit its natural heehaw.”

With victory, Low seemed to run out of targets. “The war stole the fire from his belly,” said a friend, but it may have been only increasing age. Colonel Blimp vanished into immortality, and many of Low’s best cartoons went into British museums. The old brilliance flashed occasionally, as when Low summed up the nuclear age with an ogre presenting to an innocent baby a new plaything: the atomic bomb. But the light was fitful. Low left Beaverbrook for the Laborite Daily Herald; then he left the Herald for the Manchester Guardian. “One should move along every few years,” he said by way of explanation. He wrote several reminiscent books, was honored with knighthood in 1962.

Last April, before entering West London Hospital, the “statesman of cartoonists” produced a vague and cluttered drawing for the Guardian. It proved to be David Low’s last cartoon.