UNOBTRUSIVE ICONOCLAST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 332, 2 November 1945, Page 6

UNOBTRUSIVE ICONOCLAST

DAVID LOW: "A Nuisance Dedicated to Sanity"

-~ on [)AVID LOW, the New Zealander who has become such a great cartoonist, is well known to most of us for his drawings. His voice is also fairly well known to some of.us, for he has spoken several times from the BBC (the most recent Occasion was on October 15). But here is a pen-p&rtrait of Low himself which

ji -™ay not be so tamiliar. It is

'by

TOM

DRIBERG

_M.P., and. was written for i}

"The Leader."

HE self-portrait which occurs im so many of Low’s cartoons " --a startled impish little wisp of a man, obviously "Bohe-mian"-is misleading physically if not spiritually. Low is distinguished in the flesh by a mature, even sedate, toughness, and is of ample build; his appearance and clothes tend to the "hearty" rather than the picturesque; he has a jutting chin arid a grizzled soldierly moustache. (His beard he shaved off a few years back because people were apt to recognise him by it, and — when the war started making, them interested in, poli-‘tics-to come up and talk to him. He disliked being "a marked man.’" Above all, he says, he’s "for privacy"). In his physiognomy only the eyes may ‘Suggest the artist; while the thin and rakishly curved lower lip suits the man who has maintained for more than 20 iyears his status as Britain’s most _ brildiant and, on occasion, most ruthless Radical cartoonist. y Miracle in Fleet Street The word "Radical" is scarcely necessary. A good cartoonist can hardly be a placid upholder of things as they are. He must have an agin’-the-government streak. This may be why Low’s cartoons during the war, when he has been broadly’ in support of the Government's war effort. have been less frequently

caustic than during the pre-war -years, when he bitterly ridiculed Ghamberlain and his policies and evolved his celebrated Colonel Blimp. Low’s contract with his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, is one of the most envied permanent miracles of Fleet Street. He is almost the only Left-winger who, has not "flaked away" from the Beaverbrook Press as the years have worn on,and political crises have become more intense. This may be partly due to Beaverbrook’s acumen, for Low is certainly the Evening Standard’s most substantial attraction; it must be partly due also to the toughness already remarked in Low. He draws as he likes to draw; by contract he is_ specifically exempted from drawing in accordance with his employer’s policy. (All through the Munich period his cartoons made nonsense of the views advocated in the ardently pro-Chamberlain editorials on the same page.) Conversely, the editor of the Standard has the right to exclude altogether any cartoon that may seem to clash overconvincingly with the paper’s policy; but this is a right that cannot well be exercised too often, since the customers expect theif ration of cartoons (four a week is the average). : £5 a Week Enough Doubtless Low’s contract is also lucrative. He must earn several thousands a

year. Probably he saves mogey. He has simple tastes. He likes a cigar-but a cheap one. He likes a cheap seat at the cinema. He could get along well enough on £5 a week. He has lived for a good many years in a comfortably middle-' sized house at Golders Green. His main exercise is in the garden there-a bit of "spadework" most mornings; he indicates proudly to visitors the "darned good tomatoes coming on.’ In the garage are two cars, both still laid up. Most of his neighbours must by now have got used to the unobtrusive iconoclast in their midst. Certainly no private life could be less flamboyant. Low has just celebrated his silver wedding; ("got married 25 years ago," he says,*"and lived happily ever after"). He has two daughters-

one a WAAF and an artist, one (politically minded) a B.Sc. and a Foreign Office researcher. So his. own aptitudes have been divided neatly between his offspring. & ; "Cracked About Drawing" It was just before he married, a quarter of a century ago, that David Low came to London from Australia. By the beginning of this century, comic art in England had become effete. Punch — once sharply controversial-had lost its sting. Satire had been blunted by commercial expediency. Cartooning was for amusement only:"there was no social urge behind it. But in Australia-far as it was from London and New York and obliged to produce its own newspaper entertainment and comment-conditions were in many respects more favourable to vigorous cartooning; and the precise opportunity for its development occurred in the foundation of the Sydney Bulletin. This was a highly political paper, and then (not now) strongly Radical; it was a focus of all the young talent and published every week four pages of cartoons and 20 or 30 smaller drawings. London made a fine plum-pudding for irreverent young Australians: so trained. Low was not an Australian, nor did he first learn his trade with the Bulletin. He was born at Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1891. The influence of his father, a chemist, may have inclined him early to public affairs; for his father was an omnivorous and inquiring reader, a Leftwing agnostic who veered (retaining his Leftism). towards Anglicanism, and indulged, over the head of the infant David, in agonised arguments on the nature of the Infinite. Both his father and his mother drew a little, casually, but David Low was "cracked" about drawing, he says. He "drew all day long," feverishly, "sooner than go out and biff a ball about with the boys." He was one of five children; (continued om next page)

(continued from previous page) ‘remote relatives, New Zealand ‘soldiers or airmen, turn up now and then to see him in London. The First Cartoon When he was 11 years old, two important things happened. His first cartoon was published, in a Liberal newspaper, the Christchurch Spectator; and his eldest brother died. The. cartoon attacked certain local authorities for failing to remove trees which were ob‘structing | traffic. Low feels that this _epitomised in advance his life’s work; certainly its: publication was an unmis‘takable pointer to that work, and: the ‘regular weekly publication of other ‘cartoons soon began. The death of his -brother- though of so uninfectious a ‘disease as appendicitis-alarmed ‘his par‘ents and. ‘they took Him away from ‘school, schooling not being compulsory -then in New Zealand. They went to live ‘on a'farm, and young David Low rode horses; climbed trees, and milked cows. Being an inquisitive boy, he was also drawn to study; history interested him, and he educated himself fairly thoroughly, reading Herodotus, Thucydides, ° and Caesar (in translation) for pleasure, as books. ;

His parents-who half-intended that he should be a clergyman-were dubious about an artistic career for him, feeling that there was no money in it. They can hardly have failed: to be proud of his precocity.. Besides his Spectator cartoons, he did police-court sketches and illustrations for pamphlets and magazines. Portraits of him surviving from those days show an eager, wise lad with big ears and the dark, heavy brows that are’ still his: a little like Fred Astaire. His most varied apprenticeship was with the Exhibition Sketcher (run by Fred Rayner, who is still alive, aged 85 or so), where he earned about £2 a week and developed an interest in portrait caricature; this became for him a separate and profound. art. He would draw the local grocer or magistrate or preacher --just as now he draws the local Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition. His thick, cursive signature has varied little with the years. When he was 20 he joined the Sydney Bulletin. He specialised in Federal politics. He concentrated on opposing the policies of W. M. Hughes; and it was his cartoons of Hughes in book form (The Billy Book) that brought him to

London in 1919. Shrewdly and ambitiously, he sent copies of the book to England, not only to editors but to men whose writings had impressed him — Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennet. Bennett mentioned the book in. a paragraph in the New Statesman. Henry Cadbury saw the paragraph and the book, and cable to Australia offering Low a job on the Star. He moved from the Star to the Standard in 1927. No Easy Way A fact which may astonish the reader. who glances at a cartoon is that Low doesn’t find drawing any easier now than he did 25 years ago, and that a cartoon may occupy him for as long as eight hours-‘"or as long as there is"from its conception to its final state. His cartoons are not "dashed off’: he does them, in the strict sense of the phrase, "the hard way. " He is "a glutton for difficulties," and rarely refuses an artistic challenge. If there is an easy and conventional way of representing a stock figure-Labour, or Peace, .or some poli-tician-he avoids it and experiments with a pose that is awkward. to draw. Therefore, though the customer is not usually aware why, the drawing is more alive to look at, Finally, he insists on good reproduction.

His brain functions slowly for. the first few hours of the morning. He does most of his serious thinking and cartoonplanning around 11 a.m. or noon-per-haps walking on Hampstead Heath. He usually draws in the afternoon at home (where there is a full-length mirror which he sometimes uses). He does not often now work at another studio that he has in Hampstead, which was" damaged in a raid: here he has, neatly filed, copies of almost everything he has published, back to his earliest days; on the wall are desultory whimsical head-line-cuttings: "Low Flying" and "Record Low is Expected." At the moment he is, like all cartoonists, busy digesting a good many new faces and figures; he says he finds Attlee’s eyes "expressionless." In-all the circumstances of his craft, Low is remarkably methodical and busi-ness-like; but when he draws, the "thinking part" of his brain goes out of action;’ and when he has finished drawing, a mood of relaxation sets in..So pedants are occasionally annoyed to find a word mis-spelt in one of his drawings or captions. (Artists are, in any case, notoriously erratic spellers.) Such a flaw is rahb aay Low’s spirit remains consistently resh, He once described himself as "a nuisance dedicated to sanity." It is not a bad vocation.