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| Cartoonist who took a sardonic
look at Hom Sap |
David Austin |
DAVID Austin, who died on November 19 aged 70, was a prolific
and highly inventive cartoonist.
He drew for a wide range of newspapers and magazines over a 40-year
career. Since 1990 he had drawn regular daily cartoons for The Guardian
and for 35 years entertained readers of Private Eye magazine with
his strip, Hom Sap.
His final cartoon appeared in Private Eye last week, David having
dictated the dialogue for it over the phone from his bed at the
Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.
Born in Buckingham in 1935, the son of a shoe manufacturer, he attended
school in Southend and did his national service in the RAF where,
as he proudly stated, he never went up in a plane.
After studying chemistry at Leicester University, he worked for
Shell as a chemical analyst (his experience here stood him in good
stead when he began contributing to New Scientist magazine).
Teaching jobs followed, first at a primary school in Battersea and
then at William Tyndale School in Islington. It was here in 1974,
during the strikes and divisions over new teaching methods, that
David found his sympathies severely torn.
Characteristically, he saw more than one side to the problem, and
so resigned and took up cartooning full time. His Hom Sap strip
was already under way and David, along with Michael Heath, soon
began to enliven the pages of The Spectator magazine with the sardonic
gags which drew on his huge well of literary, artistic and historical
knowledge.
I began working with him in 1981 when we rented a first floor in
Windmill Street, off Tottenham Court Road. These premises, we subsequently
discovered, had been the headquarters of the Club Autonomie, a collection
of anarchists responsible for the 1894 Greenwich Park bombings.
Our immediate predecessors had been The Ugly Agency, an outfit which
supplied models with “interesting faces” for TV and advertising.
In the first few years, we often inadvertently offended unannounced
visitors, who we wrongly assumed must be looking for work as models.
By this time, David was working regularly for New Scientist and,
in 1986, became the daily cartoonist for Eddie Shah’s Today
newspaper.
Following a brief stint at The Daily Telegraph, he was snapped up
by The Guardian, where he worked until his death. He contributed
to a dazzling array of other publications, including Radio Times,
Time Out and Broadcast.
He was voted Pocket Cartoonist of the Year in 2003 and, recently,
his collection of cartoons, What Do You Think Of The 20th Century
So Far?, was published by Guardian Books.
It was a huge privilege to share a studio with David. Cartoonist
Nick Newman joined us in 1989 and TV writer Richard Stoneman a few
years later. It was an ideal set up. We could withdraw into our
thoughts if necessary or bounce ideas off each other in more collaborative
moods.
Life often imitated cartoons through David’s intervention.
One morning, he arrived to find a dead mouse on the office floor.
David promptly drew a chalk ring around it in the manner of a police
murder investigation – a cartoon in 3-D.
He loved to draw. David always took a sketch book on holiday and
communicated with friends through personalised hand-drawn postcards.
He loved to spend hours producing illustrated stories and diaries
for his grandchildren.
Friends who gathered at the Art Club, following his funeral last
Saturday were astonished to see a trestle table piled high with
these beautifully drawn “dispatches from grandad”.
He is survived by his wife, Janet; a son and daughter from his first
marriage to Rita; and a daughter by his second marriage to Marsha;
and four grandchildren. He will be sorely missed by all his friends
and family and by all those who laughed and loved at his cartoons.
KIPPER WILLIAMS
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