John Galsworthy once tried to shake David Low off with the sharp rebuke that he did not care for caricature. There was enough ugliness in the world and beauty should be encouraged. There may be abundant material for argument in such a remark, but the truth remains that caricature and cartoon have played, and will continue to play, a vigorous part in the affairs of men. In New Zealand they have achieved much in the discovery, analysis, selection, and preservation of the essentials of national growth: political, cultural, and ethical. Each in its way affords succeeding generations an opportunity to learn, as readily as anywhere else, what the greater part of fairly intelligent and instructed people were thinking and expecting from time to time; and, perhaps most interesting of all, this form of art enables the present to make out for itself, in the light of wider knowledge, how often the past thought and guessed wrong, and some of the reasons for it. If nothing else, it helps an appreciation of how hard it is to be right, which is not the least of the beginnings of wisdom in general and the understanding of history in particular.
The distinction between the cartoon and the caricature, though fairly understood by black and white artists, is at the best an uncertain quantity in the popular understanding. Loosely rendered, in the cartoon the idea comes first and the picture emerges from it; the caricature, on the other hand, is an exhibition of personality, perhaps a distorted or exaggerated portrait, without fixed rules and in no sense disciplined, except as regards the witty and the witless, the intelligent and the unintelligent. Caricature must be exaggerative and when applied to persons it must be personal and particular. But while caricature may be a portrait study and a cartoon merely a social or political opinion, in practice they can be made to blend admirably. An example is “A Health to Sir Winston”, drawn by Low on the occasion of Churchill's eightieth birthday.
New Zealand took to the two arts in a manner of fits and starts. In the earliest years of the colony the emphasis was on cartooning unadorned – the expression of ideas in conventional pictorial terms. The caricature of personality, generally speaking, was a later development. Black and white artists in New Zealand did not want for outlets for their energies when the country was still young. The provincial Punches, modelled on a Melbourne precedent that appeared in the 1850s with a very strong savour of the London variety, flourished in more or less degree for about three decades, from the sixties to the eighties. The newspapers at this stage were not very enthusiastic and the field was left largely to the local Punches, which, for all their common pattern and intention, were generally as different as chalk and cheese, by reason of the peculiarly “parish pump” nature of their approach to their subjects. Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury, and Otago all had their Punches, and similar publications had a brief vogue both in Hawke's Bay and in Taranaki. Standards were very mixed and, with a few singular exceptions, the portraits in the cartoons were little more than symbols, not necessarily bearing any likeness to the persons they stood for. In fact, identity was largely a matter of caption. The art of personal caricature had yet to emerge, and to some extent this was due to the fact that neither the cartoonists nor the readers in those days had the necessary personal acquaintance with the persons who were the subject-matter of many of the cartoons. But it was an age when the printed page exerted more influence than would be generally conceded now.
In their day, the black and white artists who filled the Punches may have been well enough known to their public, but it is surprising how few of them thought enough of posterity to sign their work. Perhaps they shunned the public gaze or failed to capture the imagination for more than brief periods; but whatever the reason it is possible to browse through whole numbers of these periodicals without finding more than two or three signed pieces. In the Wellington Punch Arthur L. Palethorpe was a prolific contributor of the general “every picture tells a story” school, and the bulk of the political efforts seemed to have been left to J. H. Wallis, an excellent draughtsman, but hardly a master of graphic caricature. In Auckland Frank Varley, a co-proprietor of the local Punch, used the initials “F. V.” freely, but very few of his other contributors emerged from a consistent anonymity. In Otago, where Punch survived longer than in most centres, James Brown had a wide popularity which was based on a subtle caricatural draughtsmanship allied to a sense of cartooning symbolism, mildly satirical. From the viewpoint of time, Brown has probably the first claim to be called the father of cartooning in New Zealand, for his work dates from the early fifties. Throughout the provincial era the general impression is of crude or “mannered” expression of character on the one hand and intricate patterns, undulating lines, and occasional penmanship of delicate beauty on the other.
The political cartoon as it is known today and the art of personal caricature had to await the turn of the century and the inspiration of a select group of young men. At the head of these was young David Low, of Christchurch, one of the greatest black and white artists of his time. But there were others such as Fred Hiscock (politics and the liquor question); Harry Rountree; the Auckland trio, George Finey, Unk White, and G. K. Townshend; R. W. Coulter (Christchurch); John Gilmour (Wellington); George Prain (Dunedin); Stuart Peterson (born in Melbourne); T. E. Glover (who came from London as a youth); F. Blomfield (“Blo” of the Auckland Observer); and Trevor Lloyd (of the Weekly News, Auckland).
It was ironical that such a sudden flowering of talent should occur at a time when the market for black and white drawing was extremely limited. Low as a youth was earning odd shillings, and some of his contemporaries were unable to find any sort of vehicle of expression at all. The inevitable happened. The Bulletin beckoned from across the Tasman. Low had already secured a footing there, and Finey, Townshend, and White were becoming known. Soon the trek began. David Low left in 1910 for Sydney after a brief period with the Spectator and the wavering Canterbury Times in Christchurch. Several others, of the best of their kind, having concluded an uneasy apprenticeship, went the same way, some of them, like Low, making Australia only a stepping stone to London. Harry Rountree found fame on Punch in London and George Finey went to outstanding success on Smith's Weekly and the Labour Daily, after a period with the New Zealand Herald in Auckland. Unk White, and with him G. K. Townshend, moved off to the Bulletin, Smith's Weekly, and Aussie, and Stuart Peterson left the Free Lance in Wellington for Sydney. John Gilmour, of New Zealand Truth and the New Zealand Times, went to London, and Tom Glover became cartoonist to the Sydney Sun, a position in which he was succeeded on his death by Stuart Peterson.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing contributions of the thirties to cartooning in New Zealand was the political publication Tomorrow, a strongly Socialist production, quick in opinion, often violent, but always consistent in its aims. Its content lent itself admirably to cartooning and caricature, but in the few years of its existence, from 1933 to 1939, its guiding genius, Andrew Kennaway Henderson, regarded its cartoons as his own particular demesne. This policy lent a peculiar distinction to the publication, since in all his black and white work Kennaway contrived to apply a form of draughtsmanship popular in the nineties to the problems and situations of the early thirties. Henderson, who signed his work Kennaway, died in 1960
In spite of the exodus of talent from the early years of this century, cartooning in New Zealand has developed steadily from the joke block and cartoon pure and simple of the provincial Punch days to the sophisticated modern style exemplified by the work of Gordon Minhinnick, of New Zealand Herald, Neville Lodge, of the Evening Post, and A. S. Paterson, for many years cartoonist for the Dominion. Today Minhinnick is the doyen of New Zealand black and white artists, and his cartoons are known from end to end of the Dominion. Permanently attached to the New Zealand Herald in Auckland, he has had much of his work syndicated, thus gaining the widest circulation. His strong points are strength of line and an irresistible humour. He is essentially the cartoonist, but at the same time he possesses the delightful detachment necessary for the practice of personal caricature. He has an immense fertility of ideas, and in the political field, despite a fierce opposition to socialism which is personal, he moves rapidly and fairly to the essence of his subject, and his explanatory texts display an economy of words which gives point to the whole of his humour.
Neville Lodge is also very much the cartoonist, with a strong leaning towards the joke block style and a restricted caricature type. But his ideas are admirably presented and they cover a deliciously wide field of topical allusion and humour. He has a less direct approach than Minhinnick and, if he scratches at all, it is never to draw blood. The bold line of his draughtsmanship is in keeping with the breadth of his humour.
A. S. Paterson, like Minhinnick, is an artist who could have reached a large public abroad, but there the similarity ceases. In his work for the Dominion he favoured the sequence of thumb-nail drawings to convey his ideas, but he possesses a broad versatility as well. His interpretation of Maori history and Maori legends was a thing of delicate outlines and informed understanding. He was born in Hawera in 1902 and has published several collections of his work. More recently, N. M. Colvin, Evening Post, Wellington, and W. E. Waite, Otago Daily Times, Dunedin, came rapidly to the fore in the post-war world as cartoonists of decided promise, their work showing both wit and talent. They have now moved on to London where they are unquestionably in the forefront of contemporary cartoonists.
While it is impracticable to make detailed reference to all the cartoonists and joke block artists who have made their mark in the past half century, it is essential that credit should be given to two New Zealand publications which, by providing remunerative rates and setting reasonable standards, greatly assisted black and white artists in this country after the exodus. These were the New Zealand edition of Aussie which appeared first in 1923 and lasted seven years, and the New Zealand Artists Annual, which under the editorship of Pat Lawlor, of Wellington, was in recent years one of the greatest influences of all. In it both professional and amateur artists were encouraged, and in the three years of its existence after 1929 it had the support and patronage of Low, Finey, White, Rountree, and others of the Dominion's expatriates whose names were by then things to be conjured with abroad. When the Annual failed, a victim of the depression in the thirties, it remained an invaluable record of the work of New Zealand cartoons and cartoonists.
The great pity is that, in the years that have followed, syndicated imported material with a strong American influence – the Strips and Comics – have to a large degree supplanted the daily cartoon. Some undoubtedly have a reader appeal, but with neither roots nor relevance as far as New Zealand is concerned they are an inadequate substitute for the locally produced article which is now almost rare.
by Ronald Jones, Journalist and Script Writer, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Wellington.