I can remember how delighted I was when I met H.M. Bateman. I was in my twenties and he was 80. I visited him in Devon, where he had retired but was still waging a wild campaign against the taxman. He had set up a studio in a small garden, among the lawnmowers, bamboo canes, string, forks, spades and weedkillers. Every drawing he showed me was a taxman with a nose like a drain screw. It was obviously troubling him and he would certainly not take kindly to self-assessment. I drew him and he drew me.
Believe me, it is an odd compulsion. We nailed each other as best we could. The degree of excellence in the results of this pictorial jousting was worthwhile. He was kind to me and I have a decent drawing of me by him on pink paper. Never mind what he got from me.
Hogarth, although his true ambition lay in establishing his reputation as a 'serious painter', is generally accepted as the father of British visual satire. James Gilray carried the tradition into the nineteenth century, making it more bitingly political.
Gilray learnt to engrave from a legitimate banknote printer but, even more impatient than Hogarth, he chose etching as his short cut to achieve those urgent, contagious images and speech balloons - 'to be read rather than savoured'. Eventually, he threw himself out of a window above his shop; the acid he used to etch his plates had rotted his brain. But he had established a stage-set format and a spontaneity to suit the modern cartoon.
Punch magazine grew out of the evolution of the new printing and its crossover into the graphic arts. The reluctance at that time of the exponents of 'fine arts' to soil their fingers in the vulgar world of the printed page resulted, I believe, in the demise of truly powerful cartoon imagery as the century progressed. The Victorian caricaturists favoured the domestic scene, so the reality of poverty, social injustice and deceit was masked by the molasses of public respectability and Empire building.
It was sometime around here that art and the cartoon went their separate ways. Oblivious to the cataclysmic rumblings shaking all of the arts as our world rolled into the twentieth century, the cartoon maker somehow become a distinct and bone-fide class of worker. Cartoon making was now a bastard graft and an integral part of a whole, fast, new industry. Journalism as we know it was born and speed was its driver. Editorial control became supreme and the cartoonist settled down to fulfil his obligations as a cog in a wheel, his task to hold and delight readers - or starve. That is how the cards were stacked and, to some extent, still are.
'One Hundred Cartoonists of the Century' offers us an opportunity to examine how the cartoonists - from Fougasse to Scarfe - who were born into that environment managed to work within it and to subvert it. And an opportunity to look at which qualities - and shortcomings - they have inherited from those who gone before. Of those represented, some stand out as cartoonists I admired as I grew up.
I was first aware of Sidney Strube who worked for the Daily Express . I kept an annual of his work for so many years it gradually unbound itself but I continued to pore over the dismembered pages and wonder at the clarity of expression in so few lines. His John Citizen was someone I could believe in and trust. He represented the ordinary stalwart who wasn't going to be pushed around by Hitler. 'The world is black and white, pal, and you are making my mother nervous trying to knit her fears away as we huddle in an Anderson shelter waiting for your bombs to stop dropping.' Strube was going to sort him out in a cartoon as though that was where reality lay.
Giles held me in his thrall and his annuals were in my stocking every Christmas because my Dad liked him too. It was all the hilarious throwaway details that made the whole cartoon so necessary. My first published work in the Manchester Evening Chronicle was a Giles in all but name.
In Punch, Fougasse intrigued me for his economy of line, a deliberate personal whim which influenced many later cartoonists to dare the same - to leave more out than they put in. His real name was Kenneth Bird. A Fougasse was a landmine which he stepped on during the First World War and so he changed his name.
Max Beerbohm I remember from that time as the strange exotic aesthete who didn't really belong then. He was coming from another world with Aubrey Beardsley. I puzzled long and hard over Paul Crum's two rhinos in a waterhole who keep thinking it's Tuesday. I couldn't figure out why it made me laugh and still does.
David Low was my bête noir. Something turned me off him as the voice of authority. He was what the political cartoon was supposed to look like and others thought so too. Therefore, it was official. I admired his work fearfully but he was just too good and at the same time too bad to follow in the footsteps of Gilray. He was the insider playing the maverick, hand-in-glove with Lord Beaverbrook. I was introduced to him when I was hardly 21 and he laughed at my attempts to grow a beard, so perhaps it's personal!
I adored Leslie Illingworth. When I asked to meet him he said YES! When I asked for his advice he said 'Get the sack!', so I did and I haven't had a proper job since. I'll never forget his eyebrows.
Ronald Searle is special, the quintessential artist-cartoonist who managed superbly to bridge that chasm between the 'real artists' and popular art. It is his draughtsmanship and harrowing imagination based on his wartime experiences which distinguish him as perhaps the embodiment of the very best of British cartoonists of the twentieth century.
One Hundred Cartoonists of the Century is at the British Cartoon Centre, Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, London WC1 until 12 April
