David Low’s Home

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 461, 17 September 1928, Page 12

David Low’s Home

Early Life of Cartoonist MOTHER TELLS STORY Interesting facts about the early life of David Low, the famous New Zealand cartoonist, are told in an article written by his mother, Mrs. Caroline Low, for the “Evening Standard,” London. She writes: He was our third son, and born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in one of the oldest houses of the town, built by my father in the very early days, of oaken timber brought out from England. Later we moved to Christchurch, shortly after which my eldest son died, and we were advised to remove the remaining two from school to “run wild’’ for a time. So these two boys spent their boyhood in a roomy, rambling old house, built, like so many of the pioneers* homes, in the shape of a horseshoe, and surrounded by a large garden and fields. COWS AND CHICKENS Life there with cows, ponies, chickens dnd dogs was very free and simple and our three boys and one girl had a childhood as untrammelled by rule and regulation as it is possible to imagine. I had myself been a sufferer from an over-strict home life. So I determined when I married that my home would never have a rule of any kind. Without doubt I believe that determination helped David to develop in his own

way that talent with which he has been gifted—his gift for caricature. All through his childhood drawing was his chief occupation, and he chose for his studio, strangest of strange places—the fowlhouse. He was never so happy and contented as when, after driving the fowls out, he could settle down in undisputed possession and work away quietly for hours with paper and pencil. . . . SOLD SKETCHES AT 11

More and more frequently his cartoons were published and when he was only 11, “The Spectator,” a Christchurch weekly, agreed to take two a week regularly. That was his first contract with a newspaper. Looking back on those Christchurch days now, I see a “terrible boy,” utterly careless of his appearance, with a merry, smiling face, which was half the time dirty unless I washed it myself, so keen on those sketches he had to get that nothing else mattered. . . . The difficulty now was for David to find time for his lessons. He was receiving a regular salary of £2 a week from “The Spectator,” besides which he had so many outside commissions to fulfil that his education really did suffer. By the time he was 15, however, he managed to work up to matriculation standard, and passed that examination in all subjects except mathematics, and, irony of fate, the very thing in which he expected least to fail, namely, drawing.

Just as this time he was offered an engagement on the “Canterbury Times,” at that time one of the most important papers in the Dominion. He accepted, and so died all idea of a university career, and with it my dream of his becoming a celebrated divine. • • * If his career has been remarkable it is not nearly so remarkable as the fact that his art has never cost us a penny, and that he has never had to fight for recognition. It has always come to him unsought.