The British Cartoon Archive

The Fallen

Graves are not funny. Yet death is a feature of not only war but life, and thus as commentators and great cartoonists alike must be able to respond to the symbols loss generates as readily as they are able to for the comic. This section will explore those cartoons which skilfully negotiate this tricky terrain between respect and humour.

The suicide of Adolf Hitler on 30 April 1945 did not end the Second World War, but it did in essence end German National Socialism. The expansionist Lebensraum policy of Nazi Germany made Hitler Führer across much of mainland Europe. Now as Strube wryly points out, Hitler has made ‘his last territorial claim’ and indeed the last of his party.

US military support of South Korea against communist North Korea between June 1950 and July 1953 made the Korean War the first proxy war of the Cold War.

The conflict, though now eclipsed in memorial currency by the later war in Vietnam, was remembered in the United States for the brutality of combat young Americans faced. Memorials thus sprang up, the virtual memorial here combining the simplicity of cemeteries built after the First World War and the grandeur (in size if not elaboration) of the biblical cross.

Horner, working for the staunchly anti-dictatorial News Chronicle (London), attacks the smiling face of Syngman Rhee, the US-backed strongman President of South Korea. For Horner Rhee’s anti-communism was an excuse for aggression, and thus his duping of the US government into involvement has tainted the memory of those who died in alliance with his cause.

Graves are emotive spaces. This is not to say, however, that they are flat emotive spaces; spaces that provoke single, uniform responses.

Here remembrance and anger intersect, following Associated Press reports on 14 July 1957, that the bodies of 65 Commonwealth soldiers buried on the Greek island of Cos were to be moved to Rhodes due to the cancellation of a lease on a British military cemetery. The move was to make way for what was vaguely described as “building developments”, interpreted here with indignation by Musgrave-Wood as a desire to replace the graves with a public house.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Britain declaring war on Germany, Vicky chose this clean, unfussy design headed by a quote from the war poet Wilfred Owen. Owen’s pacifist prose continues thus: “...when each proud fighter brags | He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags”.

Within the context of the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, Owen’s words reveal a bitter irony – for while the Cold War may have marginalised wars for flags, it only replaced them with a conflict over political ideology.

Nelson

At the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801 Horatio Nelson 'turned a blind eye' by lifting his telescope to his patch in deliberate ignorance of Admiral Parker's signal to withdraw. This incident, and the subsequent memorialisation of Nelson, have since framed many a political satire. Two symbols have assumed particular prominence. One, relating to the above narrative, is explored in the series of cartoons below. The other, seen here, takes Nelson's Column (completed in 1843) as a visual referent.

Schrank assumes that a figure in naval attire perched atop a slim column requires little deciphering. Prime Minister John Major suffered a double blow in May 1996 – on 02 May his Conservative party suffered heavy defeats in local elections; and six days later a vote-rigging scandal emerged accusing Tory councillors in Westminster of having sold public housing at a loss in order to change the electoral demographics of the council. As this latter incident took place in 1990, under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, a beleaguered Major, offering seeds in an allusion to his staunch Thatcherite beliefs, is shat upon by a Thatcherite Crow (which has scared away the traditional pigeons). Notably the excrement visited upon the Thatcher-cum-Nelson atop the column is noticeably smaller.

As Jay Winter contends, however we might wish to believe otherwise, remembrance is political. When US President Ronald Reagan travelled to West Germany in Spring 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of VE Day his choice of locations to visit (and indeed those selected by his host Chancellor Helmut Kohl) were consciously political, chosen to foster reconciliation by establishing the events of World War Two as a shared tragedy (these one time combatants were now, of course, allies). The itinerary, however, included a visit to Kolmeshohe Cemetery at Bitburg, a site at which 49 members of the Waffen SS were buried. When this was leaked to the press a huge controversy ensued (interestingly Reagan’s chief of staff, Michael Denver, had failed to notice the names on the graves on a preparatory visit due to heavy snowfall). Despite protests from Jewish Americans, Reagan pressed on with the visit and joined Kohl on 5 May 1985 to lay wreaths at a wall of remembrance.

The visit was ‘saved’ by former Nazi Luftwaffe pilot and later NATO General Johannes Steinhoff, who in an impromptu act reached and shook the hand of his former belligerent General Matthew Ridgway, commander of the 82nd Airborne during World War Two. This, alongside a well pitched speech from the ever theatrical Reagan, gained the visit unexpected credit. Garland anticipates how Reagan was expected to emerge from the Bitburg, using the exhumation of Yorick in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to mock Reagan (who famously was a Hollywood actor before turning to politics). While Hamlet touchingly remembers the court jester he once knew, Reagan turns in horror from the Nazi before him (which, as a side note, is possibly a visual quotation to the Nazi villains in Steven Spielberg’s 1981 film Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the highest-grossing films of the decade).

Garland’s stark and brutal design copies from Francisco Goya’s print of the same name, part of a protest series entitled Los Desastres de la Guerre created between 1810 and 1820 in response to the Peninsular War of 1808-14. Replacing Goya’s men with UN soldiers, Garland’s image metamorphesises into a satirical cartoon, deriding the reluctance of the international community to intervene and thus attempt to stop what was now a mass genocide against Muslims by Bosnian Serbs.

Between 16 and 18 December 1998 the United States and the United Kingdom jointly enacted a bombing campaign on Iraqi facilities suspected to be manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Tensions between Iraq and the West had been increasing throughout 1998, particularly due to the obstruction of UN weapons inspectors by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in November 1998. US/UK air-strikes were threatened and called-off with regularity. Days after the 80th anniversary of the end of World War One, Brookes uses the iconic symbol of a Great War cemetery to caution world leaders on the folly of conflict. This visual device asks politicians to not ignore possible lessons the past can offer, notably when, as he writes, we have moved in just a few days ‘from two minutes silence to the three minute warning...’.

56 civilians, including 4 suicide bombers, were killed by terrorist attacks on the London transport system on Thursday, 7 July 2005.

Bell’s beautiful and serene design brilliantly captures the national mood.

The Poppy

The battles at Ypres during the Great War, on ‘Flanders Fields’, are immortalised in British (and to a less extent Commonwealthian) memory for the poppies which grew spontaneously on the graves of the hundreds of thousands on men who lost their lives in this locality.

From 1921 the Poppy has been the symbol of this loss; sold to raise money for the Royal British Legion and the Haig Fund. Few, as Strube foregrounds, should need reminding of the importance of observing Armistice Day ceremonies.

Between 1946 and 1995 state remembrance was held on the second Sunday of November (Remembrance Sunday) as opposed to 11 November (Armistice Day). Those occasions when both days coincided were cause for heightened ceremonial and, as Giles tells us, celebration. His jolly veterans drink, flirt and joke in 'remembrance' of their fallen colleagues. Their mockery of modern pretension recalls the British sitcom Dad’s Army, which though having finished in 1977, remained a feature of BBC television schedules throughout the 1980s.

The Poppy is not, however, without its politics. These two cartoons explore the tensions between traditional groups of poppy wearing veterans, and the white ‘peace’ poppy worn increasingly by pacifists.

Although the white poppy has been promoted and distributed by the Peace Pledge Union since 1934, on 28 October 1986 Robert Key, Conservative MP for Salisbury, raised the ‘issue’ in Prime Minister’s Questions, stating: "On Sunday week my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and other party leaders will represent us at the annual Cenotaph service. Does my right hon. Friend share my deep distaste at the proposals of the so-called peace movement to substitute white poppies for red poppies? This causes deep offence to the vast majority of people and, incidentally, reduces the income of the Royal British Legion". Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher responded thus: "I share my hon. Friend's deep distaste. The Cenotaph service is a national occasion. It brings help and comfort to all our citizens and, I am sure, will continue to do just that".

Key’s remarks may have been contemptuously misinformed, yet it was Thatcher’s sharing of his ‘deep distaste’ which provides the context to these cartoons.