Stephen Roth

About

Stephen Roth was born in Czechoslovakia in 1911. In 1931 he moved to Prague where he drew sports cartoons, joke illustrations and portraits for various papers and magazines, signing his work 'Stephen'. In 1935 he became Political Cartoonist on the anti-Nazi weekly Demokraticky Stred edited by Dr H. Ripka - later head of the Czechoslovak Propaganda Department in London during the Second World War. Forced to leave Czechoslovakia in 1938, he went to Poland, then Sweden before arriving in London only days before war broke out in September 1939.

By 1941 Roth was contributing political cartoons to the Ministry of Information, Central European Observer and the Free Norwegian newspaper Norsk Tidend. His popular series "Acid Drops" began to appear in the Sunday Pictorial in 1942. He also contributed to the Star, Lilliput, Daily Mirror, Central Press, Courier, Daily Mail (sports cartoons) and others, and the Czech premier Jan Masaryk wrote a Foreword to his book My Patience is Exhausted (1944). In 1961 Roth began contributing two series of portrait cartoons - "The Face is Familiar" and "Man in the City" - to the London Evening News.

Roth died in London on 4 February 1967.

• Mark Bryant Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000), p.192.
• William D. Rubinstein, Michael Jolles, Hilary L. Rubinstein (eds) The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011), p.821, “Roth, Stephen.”