The peerless social satire of Pont of Punch

Eighty years ago this month, the cartoonist Graham Laidler — better known as Pont — died of polio. He contracted the disease while evacuating refugees from London in his car. He was only 32. In 1940, thousands of people were dying in the war, but Pont’s death was marked by an appreciation from J.B. Priestley in the Times, and an outpouring of grief in readers’ letters to the magazine with which he had become synonymous: Punch.

Pont, the son of a successful painter and decorator, originally trained as an architect. But after he caught TB, doctors advised him to abandon his work and travel to Austria to recover. There he started submitting cartoons to Punch. After many rejections, a drawing was finally accepted in 1932. In just eight years he rose from a first-time contributor to an established regular. He became the only artist offered a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to work exclusively for the magazine.