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.”

A new book shows how John Smith never sacrificed his beliefs, unlike the man who followed him, argues Illtyd Harrington

STRONG men cried on hearing of the sudden death of John Smith. Others, less sentimental, proceeded eagerly, even before he was cold, to plot the succession. They scarcely hid their impatience.
It was May 12, 1994, and a wave of grief and sorrow swept across the country.
A good man had died after a second heart attack.
He readily admitted that he looked like a bank manager. “Barclays not Midlands if you please,” he used to quip.
Mark Stuart, a former aide to David Blunkett, sets out in his biography the details of Smith’s beliefs and attitude.
But in the main, he concentrates on his role post Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock as party leader of the Labour Party – a party which had suffered four general election defeats.