Cartoonist Wally Fawkes – aka Trog – is hanging up is pen, but satire’s loss is music’s gain as he picks up his clarinet, writes Dan Carrier

HE once quit Humphrey Lyttleton’s jazz band to pursue his career as an artist: now Wally Fawkes, whose pen name Trog has graced millions of newspapers, has called time on a 62 year career at a draughtsman’s board to go back to playing his clarinet. Trog became Britain’s best known political cartoonist for publications such as Punch, The Observer, the Daily Mail and The Spectator. He lives in Dartmouth Park, and in June drew his last cartoon for the Sunday Telegraph. Failing eyesight has meant at 81, he has decided to call it a day: but while Trog’s retirement leaves a massive gap in the field of political cartoonists, satire’s loss is music’s gain.
“I will spend my time now searching for the perfect reed,” he quips.
Wally has always lived a double life. Being a virtuoso jazz musician as well as a talented artist meant he had two callings. He says: “To cartoonists, I was always the one who played jazz. To musicians, I was always the one who drew cartoons.”
But his music took a back seat from 1956 to the present day as he estab-lished himself as a brilliant artist whose pictures were laced with humour and insight.
Wally was born in Vancouver in 1924 and moved to the Kent town of Sidcup in the early 1930s.
He remembers always being interested in drawing – “I loved comics as a boy” – as was encouraged by his mother Mabel.
He recalls: “I was given a bottle of Indian ink and a pen aged ten, and I thought: Wow!”
When he was 14 he enrolled at Sidcup Art School – a course he left after 18 months, because he could not afford to stay on. The war had started and he got a job painting camouflage on factory roofs at the Woolwich docks. It was on the Luftwaffe’s list of targets.
He explains: “I finished work one Friday, came back on Monday and it had been flattened. It is the harshest criticism of my work I have faced.”
A bout of pleurisy – partly cured by his recently found hobby of playing the clarinet – deemed him unfit for active service, so his skills as an artist were used by the National Coal Commission tracing maps of coal seams.
And this position kick started his career. Wally entered an art competition for employees, and his study of a boxer waiting nervously before entering the ring won first prize. The judge was the Daily Mail cartoonist Leslie Illingworth, who spotted Wally’s potential and became his mentor.
Wally was 21 and Leslie got him a job first in a commercial arts studio on The Strand, and then later on the Mail. He joined the paper in 1945 on his 21st birthday.
In 1948, the Mail decided to bring out a daily cartoon strip. This decision was to make Trog and his furry creation Flook a household name. The moniker Trog came from the war: “We spent so much time in air raid shelters, I used to joke we in London had become troglodytes.” He was later to use the name for his jazz band.
Flook’s adventures with his friend Rufus became an overnight hit. At a reception soon after its launch, Lady Rothermere approached Trog and asked: “How is your lovely little furry thing?”
Trog replied: “Fine thank you. How is yours?”
“I quickly left,” he says. “It perhaps was not the best way to get on, but I couldn’t help myself.”
Such jokes were to become his trademark, and his ability to let his humour flow through his art meant his drawings graced publications like Private Eye and Punch, as well as the political pages of the Observer, the Spectator, and the New Statesman.
The Flook strip was the start of a series of collaborations between Trog and a number of talented writers. Compton Mackenzie, Humphrey Lyttleton and George Melly provided scripts and story ideas for Flook, as did Barry Took and Barry Norman.
And it meant Flook could not help but become satirical. Many characters were caricatures of real people. Flook had drifted away from being a strip aimed at children – his adventures were based on contemporary events.
For Trog, it gave him a grounding in an art that would come to the fore later on in his career.
Wally first drew political cartoons for the Spectator – Flook’s jokes had attracted editor Brian Inglis.
He and George Melly – whose ready wit provided a perfect foil for Trog’s draughtsmanship – were taken on and Trog became known for his biting political think pieces instead of Flook.
His politics are of the left – an anti-Marxist left based on people treating each other decently and reasonably. Such was his skill as an artist that the editors at the Daily Mail, who were aware his views may not fit comfortably with their readers, continued to employ him until David English called time on the strip.
“By then, it was a very different paper when I joined,” he recalls. “I stayed there from 1945 to 1985. It was still a Tory paper in the early days but it was much more free-thinking.
“Then David English came in, and he did not think I was respectful to Margaret Thatcher, so he dropped the Flook strip. He was so protective towards her.
“When I left, I told him: at least my friends will speak to me again.”
After leaving the Mail, he had a spell at the Mirror under Robert Maxwell.
Wally recalls what an ogre Maxwell could be – and how the press baron would inadvertently set himself up as a figure of fun.
“I remember listening to him giving a colleague a dressing down. He barked: you’ve baked your cake, now you must sleep in it!” he recalls.
His last job was at the Sunday Telegraph, an experience he jokes as “like working deep behind enemy lines”.
He says: “From my point of view, I would attack Tony Blair because he is the leader of the Labour Party, and they liked me attacking him because he wasn’t the leader of the Conservatives.”
And he still hasn’t got out of the habit of thinking up a picture to suit the days news. The revelation that the Tube bombers visited Pakistan prompted his Trog hat to be put back on. He says: “I would have drawn a picture of them in Pakistan, and next to it one of Tony Blair being brainwashed in Camp David, Texas.”

• Flook Digs Jazz, a CD of Wally’s recordings, is available on Lake Records. Call 0190061556.