How should cartoonists respond to war?

Laughter has always been a coping mechanism for dealing with war. Some of this country’s most memorable cartoons have been born out of conflict. Think of Gillray’s ‘Plumb-Pudding in Danger’, Bairnsfather’s ‘Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it’ or Low’s ‘Very well, alone’ – they are the quintessential images that defined the Napoleonic, first and second world wars.

War didn’t stop cartoonists in the thick of the action from making light of their circumstances. Bruce Bairnsfather, a young officer who began sending jokes to the Bystander in 1915, was invalided out of Belgium suffering from shell-shock, but continued to draw. His work was initially dubbed ‘vulgar caricature’, but his depiction of Tommies cheerfully dealing with shelling and everyday problems on the front line – such as the absence of strawberry jam – resonated with soldiers. It became so popular on the Home Front that his character ‘Old Bill’, the walrus-moustachioed veteran, was turned into a stage show that reached Broadway.

In the second world war, Ronald Searle continued to draw gags while he was a prisoner of war in Changi jail, at the risk of beatings from his Japanese captors. He was imprisoned alongside the Australian cartoonist George Sprod, who, like Searle, went on to become a Punch stalwart.

These men may have had the moral authority to laugh at the horrors around them because they were on the front line, but the cartoonists back home didn’t believe wars were off limits either. In 1915, Punch’s Frank Reynolds responded to the Huns’ ‘Hymn of Hate’ (their attempt at a morale-boosting song) by drawing a Prussian family indulging in their daily ‘Morning Hate’ around the breakfast table. Even the pet dachshund is scowling at the thought of England.