Group page (full view): Cartoonists and the Royal Family, 1953-2003 - The British Cartoon Archive

Group page

You are here:

Group page (full view): Cartoonists and the Royal Family, 1953-2003

Search and browse

Buying and using

Contact and visit

Cartoonists and the Royal Family, 1953-2003

Created by NHiley on April 1, 2009, 2:23 pm. Report this group | FAQ

This group of cartoons shows the changing representation of Queen Elizabeth II and the Royal family, in the fifty years after her coronation in 1953.

During the first decade of the Queen’s reign, newspaper cartoonists maintained the deference and respect that had been shown to British royalty since the late nineteenth century. Readers would protest if her face was shown in a newspaper cartoon, and Stanley Franklin, who became the Daily Mirror political cartoonist in 1959, acknowledged that “in my first few years on the Mirror you drew only the back view of the Queen.” There were, however, no reservations about drawing her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, and he came to feature in many cartoons.

Contemporaries looked in amazement at the way Royalty had been caricatured a hundred and fifty years earlier, and believed that the difference arose from the character of the present Queen and her family. “The art of impaling Royalty with a political cartoon is lost today,” wrote the journalist Tom Cullen in 1969, “possibly because present-day Royalty lead such exemplary lives that there is nothing visible into which the cartoonist can sink his harpoon.”

A major catalyst for change was the Queen herself, who followed her Press Secretary’s advice and allowed the BBC to film her private life. The resulting two-hour documentary “The Royal Family” was shown in 1969, and was watched by a vast audience of 31 million. For cartoonists the Queen and her family were now fair game, and their deference quickly disappeared. Within twenty years they were treating the Queen as just another public figure whose life was open to comment and ridicule.

Group options: