From time to time I go back and look at old Osbert Lancaster pocket cartoons. Lancaster was nothing if not prolific. He effectively invented the pocket cartoon in 1939 when he started drawing for the Daily Express (then a quality newspaper) for whom he drew some 10,000 cartoons — one a day, 6 days a week — over a period of 40 years. This was in addition to writing and/or illustrating many books and working as a stage designer.

Every few years from the early 1940s to the 1970s Lancaster published a selection of 60 or so recent cartoons in small pocket-sized volume. I’m lucky to have been able to collect most of them as they are still available at reasonable prices on the second-hand market.

Lancaster drew a pocket cartoon for the Daily Express every day, and as with Matt (currently in the Daily Telegraph) or the late lamented Calman (in The Times), each pocket cartoon had to be topical. Many insert a rapier to the heart of some current news story; indeed some are so sharp and pithy that you couldn’t publish them in these politically correct times. But what always surprises me is how topical many of Lancaster’s 50 year old cartoons remain. Here is a good example from Lancaster’s collection Tableaux Vivants published in 1955. Sadly the early volumes do not give the specific dates of each cartoon (the later volumes do), but this must have been originally published in the Daily Express some time in 1954 or 1955.

Could one publish this today. Yes, despite some howls of protest, it’s sufficiently anonymous and subtle one probably could. But whether one could get away with calling an Indian lady cartoon character Mrs Rajagojollibarmi I somewhat doubt. And although Lancaster was himself from the upper classes and built his cartoons around the fictional Earl of Littlehampton (Willie) and his wife Maudie Littlehampton, there are many cartoons of the lower orders as well.

Two of the other things I love so much about Lancaster’s cartoons are his ability to pick brilliant names and his attention to detail. For example he invents, inter alia, a chauffeur called Saddlesoap, a waiter (at a gentleman’s club) called Mousehole, an accountant called Whipsnade and peers (many agéd) called Stonehenge, Basingstoke and, of course, Littlehampton. He was also an inveterate observer of people, and had an esepcially keen eye for the heights (and depths) of ladies fashion. So he gets the details deliciously right every time. Here are just two examples:

Delightful!