The British Cartoon Archive

The mushroom cloud is an iconic image of 20th century, a symbol of violence, fear, obliteration, tension and détente.

1) Green, Green Grass of Home

Green Line coaches started business on 09 July 1930, initially servicing a handful of towns within a 30 mile radius of Greater London. They quickly expanded, purchasing several independent coach companies in the home counties.

Lee here makes light of British concerns for the so-called 'Green Belt' around London, as the new travel opportunities allowed Londoners to bring a piece of the country back to the city, thus eroding the natural beauty found therein.

The 1951 Treaty of Paris established the European Coal and Steel Community, heralding a new wave of European supranationalism. A year later, debates surrounded expanding these principles to agriculture. Britain adopted a watching brief over proceedings, partly as a result of her focus on decolonisation and partly due to a lingering suspicion that such measures would circumvent her sovereignty. But the high population density of the British Isles also meant the pressures on British farming were somewhat different to those of her continental neighbours. Here Cummings palpably realises the particular fear of British farmers with regards to the expansion of urban space.

Here woodland animals (representative of the country population) voice disapproval at a Tory U-turn which allowed new homes to be built on previously protected Green Belt land.

"I told you all along that Green Belts were just a lot of eyewash!" says the squirrel, foregrounding a fear of Green Belt erosion still controversial today...

Indeed, New Labour, and in particular Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, immediately set about dismantling the Green Belt upon their election to office. In this instance, political narratives won over environmental concerns. Labour’s policy sought to introduce new housing to the Green Belt in the hope of introducing Labour inclined voting communities into this traditional Conservative heartland. Unsurprisingly the British ‘right’ responded with indignation. More surprising, perhaps, was their appeal to environmental concerns; though a cynical commentator might suggest that ecological rhetoric disguised a fear of new homes threatening booming house prices in the Home Counties...

Conservative policy in the preceding years, however, reveals tensions (and contradictions) within the rhetoric of the English right surrounding green spaces. The free market capitalist optimism of the early 1990s (discussed at greater length in the sections that follow) demanded Britain build, at the expense of her forests. Yet in spite of this housing boom, cuts to welfare budgets forced the lowest paid into hardship. Newman here draws on both these narratives, observing the irony of homelessness in an age of home building through the lens of deforestation and the destruction of animal habit.

Alongside the Green Belt, the National Trust (est. 1894) is a prominent symbol of green grass and countryside. Waite here explores the pressures placed upon the Trust, and hence the countryside, by governments expansive motorway building plan. Between December 1958 and November 1968 a remarkable 606 miles of motorway had been opened in the UK, including significant sections of the M1 and M3.

Today the National Trust continues to play a key role in conserving the English countryside, having under Tony Blair's Labour government (1997 – 2007) been granted a strong voice in environmental policy. Notably the National Trust manages 700 miles (nearly 10%) of the English coastline, thus ensuring the public and ecology-centric character of these spaces.

Many years prior to these debates, W. K. Haselden explored the loss of green spaces through the civic environment. In a series of prints published between 1917 and 1931 Haselden mourned the loss of trees from urban spaces. For Haselden there is an evident decline in aesthetic appreciation of the natural picturesque. The achievements of nature (noble, tall, strong trees) are replaced with the achievements of man (noble, tall, strong statues). He observes a slippery slope, where the replacement of one tree – one of the 'greatest charms' of a park – leads inevitability to them being gradually considered a nuisance to modern, civilised order. Parks, he shows, are considered places to be improved upon by man. Disrespect for parks is then Haselden's chief concern. But he also invokes biblical plagues, by suggesting that, in abandoning a once proud (romantic) appreciation of nature and natural spaces, Englishmen and women are exposing them to the less civil aspects of nature.

There is then an evident contradiction within Haselden's rhetoric. Nature is here not nature in all its forms, but (as mentioned above) in the sense of the 'natural picturesque', where nature is (re)created with reference to what is envisioned as most aesthetically pleasing by man (think the follies the Victorian built). Nonetheless, Haselden represents an early environmentalist voice within British cartooning, illustrating that ecological disaster is not merely a product of wilful destruction but often manifest indifference.

“The main outline might be put thus. On the surface of the earth at the present time two groups - man and the insects - may be counted as the only animals which are definitely on the increase. It is a neck and neck race between them for the mastery of the world.” This account from entomologist A. H. Crook could indeed outline the nature of Haselden’s lampooning in this cartoon. Consisting of two mirror images, Haselden plays on the irony that human advancement was the cause for insect populations in England, and indeed all over the developed world, to dramatically spike in the form of ‘outbreaks’. Hazeldon thus depicts the idyllic life before human advancement - a life of youthful love, childish glee, and much civilised tea drinking - as the epitome of English domestic life, accentuated by garish Austenian overtones. The only insect to be seen is the tormented butterfly chased, with little adult concern, by an aristocratic child.

In the second scene, depicting an imagined future, the once anguished insectoids have gotten their just deserts - they now dominate the entire garden scene to the extent that the tiny dots resembling swarms of flies are indiscernible from the outlines of the objects and garden features of the above image. It is as if the garden itself is now just a mass swarm of bugs, with human life nowhere to be seen except for the vague outline of the once majestic manor house (it is interesting to note the change in drawing technique by Haselden here from clear, organised, refined lines to the erratic, chaotic and suffocating clusters of dots in depiction of the delineation between light and shade). A spider hangs menacingly in the exact spot where the Austenian lady illustrative of the clear Austenian undertones once sat, calling to mind the traditional English nursery rhyme ‘Little Miss Muffet’. Indeed, like Little Miss Muffet the lady is frightened away by, not only one spider, but an entire throng of them.

Thus the Arcadian ‘garden of England’ is now dilapidated, overrun with the menace of insects. The once immaculately kept lawn is now overgrown, in adherence to the requirements of its new inhabitants. Such as the garden was once an Englishman’s paradise, now by virtue of complacent neglect is it possessed by the other ‘master’ of the new advanced world - the dreaded insect."

Annotation by Emily Jane Roe, University of Kent, Canterbury:

2) Consumerism

Environmental historians have long theorised that over-consumption portends ecological disaster. George W Bush's belief that economic growth was dependant on US citizens performing a national duty of spending on commodities, demonstrated how individual/local/national interests can seem irreconcilable with global exigencies. The cartoons in this section detail the growth and critique of these ideologies.

Workers queue outside a Labour Exchange, the 70s equivalent of the Jobcentre. Sporting dark suits and glum expressions, their postures exhibit permanence; a sense that the line rarely moves.

This is hardly surprising. Since winning power from Labour's Harold Wilson in the 1970 General Election, Conservative PM Edward Heath had overseen a disastrous period of economy activity. His chosen Chancellor of the Exchequer, Iain McLeod, died just a month after the June election, and economic policy under his successor, Anthony Barber, lacked clarity and purpose. Having pledged full employment in their manifesto, the Conservatives saw unemployment double to just over 1 million by the start of 1972.

The solution to this, as free-market orientated Heath claimed, was to spend. And this spending would not come from the public purse, but was to be encouraged upon individuals. A vigorous consumer orientated free-market was to be the panacea.

Fawkes' identification of the obvious flaw in this logic (that without jobs people could not spend) demonstrates the inequalities of free-market economics. Moreover, by encouraging spending Heath's government made consumption seem more 'natural' than frugality and saving. This mentality of frivolous use has, as we have seen in the following decades, had a disastrous impact upon ecological equilibrium.