Osbert Lancaster

Osbert Lancaster was born in Notting Hill, London, on 4 August 1908. His father was Robert Lancaster, a businessman, and his mother was the flower painter Clare Bracebridge Manger, who had exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. Lancaster’s father was killed in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. He was educated at St Ronan’s Preparatory School, Worthing, before going to Charterhouse, Surrey – where the headmaster considered him ‘irretrievably gauche.’ In 1925, aged seventeen, Lancaster left to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art. In 1926 he went to read English at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary and friend of Stephen Spender, Randolph Churchill, John Betjeman and James Lees-Milne. Lees-Milne recalled him as in the social set led by Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College: ‘Bowra’s influence over Osbert was marked, to the extent that he adopted the guru’s booming voice, explosive emphasis of certain words and phrases, and habit in conversation of regaling his audiences with rehearsed witticisms and gossip.’ While a student Lancaster contributed caricatures and humorous articles to Cherwell, and from 1929 to 1930 studied art at Oxford’s Ruskin School. Lancaster left Oxford in 1930 with a fourth-class degree. He began reading for the Bar, but from 1931 to 1932 also studied stage design at the Slade under Vladimir Polunin – formerly Diaghilev’s designer. He then failed all his legal exams, but in 1933 married his first wife Karen, daughter of Sir Austen Harris, Vice-Chairman of Lloyds Bank. He subsequently worked as a freelance illustrator, designing posters for London Transport and others, but in 1934, with Betjeman’s help, became an assistant editor on the Architectural Review. In 1936 Lancaster wrote and illustrated the book Progress at Pelvis Bay, the first of many satires on architecture and social mores. In 1937 he was also art critic for the short-lived magazine Night & Day. In 1938 Lancaster joined Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. ‘He was a bastard’, Lancaster later recalled of his proprietor, ‘but by God he knew his journalism.’ The Daily Express Features Editor, John Rayner, commissioned Lancaster to produce single-column cartoons, in the style of Continental newspapers. He began drawing them for Tom Driberg’s ‘William Hickey’ gossip column, being paid only for those that were used. Rayner coined the name ‘Pocket Cartoon’ for this new feature, in reference to the German ‘pocket battleships’ then in the news. The first appeared on 1 January 1939, and Driberg, who had known Lancaster at Oxford, was quite happy with them: ‘They had the additional merit’, he noted laconically, ‘of relieving me of about three inches of writing space.’ Lancaster’s pocket cartoons were a success, and were later transferred to the front page. He always went into the Daily Express office to draw his cartoon, on a sheet of Daily Express notepaper folded in half. James Cameron, who joined the Daily Express in 1939 as a sub-editor, recalled that Lancaster seemed to do no preparation for his cartoons: ‘he used to come in in the afternoon, and he’d sit down…take up his piece of notepaper, and fold it over, and then ponder, and he gave the impression that not an idea had come into his head until he was there.’ By six in the evening the cartoon was finished, ready for approval by the editor. When he had approved it, photostats would be wired to the Daily Express printing offices in Manchester and Glasgow. Lancaster also drew large political cartoons for the Sunday Express, signed ‘Bunbury’ in reference to the imaginary character in Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest. After the outbreak of war in 1939 he also worked for a time at the Ministry of Information News Department, before moving to the Foreign Office News Department in 1940. From 1942 to 1944 he was also art critic for the Observer. Then, from 1944 to 1946, he was attached to the British Embassy in Athens as Press Attache. Back at the Daily Express Ja