From Gin Lane to Downing Street:An Overview Of Satirical Cartoons.

"His poisoned pencil in his poisoned hand" 

Martin Rowson has been called sick, deranged, and offensive by The Daily Mail and has been told he's personally responsible for food banks for drawing a cartoon of Jeremy Corbyn in a vaguely Russian looking hat in another. He gets it from both sides, though far more from the Tories, so he's alright by me.

His talk, the first London Fortean Society one at The Bell in Whitechapel for well over two years, turned out to be absolutely brilliant too - but don't expect me to recount it to you in full here. It was simply too dense, too involved. I scratched away making notes but constructing them into as eloquent and powerful as narrative as Rowson managed will not be possible I'm afraid.

I've generally been far more a fan of satirical columnists like Marina Hyde and John Crace than the satirical cartoons of Rowson and his Guardian colleague Steve Bell but he managed to convince me they can, quite often, be effective in shifting the public perception of influential figures. Scurrilous Satire:Political Cartoons Past and Present began at a fairly unlikely location. The Hogarth Roundabout on the A4 and the A316 in Chiswick.

Named, of course, after the 18c painter William Hogarth who lived nearby. Hogarth wasn't the first to paint satire or caricature (ancient French cave art shows a rhino with ludicrously exaggerated horns) but he is the one most current political cartoonists cite as the motherlode. Rowson was not at The Bell to dispute that.

Hogarth got up the noses of the establishment (at least until he became part of it) and so did, nearly a century later, James Gillray, who famously drew the prominent Whig politician Charles James Fox, with the head of a fox. Rowson's belief, and I don't argue with him, is that he has carried on this rich tradition by mocking the high and mighty and those who affect to be our betters.

Alistair Campbell and Jeremy Paxman caricatures appeared to show this (Campbell was, apparently, most displeased) and Rowson took a diversion into themes of sympathetic magic and stealing of the soul before somehow managing to draw in everyone from the Marquess of Rockingham to Bugs Bunny.

Via Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Werner Herzog, Henry Fielding, William and Mary, Goofy, Charles II, James II, WH Auden, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, St Christopher (but with a dog's head), Operation Barbarossa, and the shit of a hippopotamus. Not forgetting the once celebrated, but closed since 2018, Greek Street Hungarian restaurant The Gay Hussar.

Try the goulash. It's great! The boom in early satirical cartoons came at the end of he 17th century. Sedition was once so feared that the state made it a crime, and a crime that came with the punishment of either having one's removed or, even more extremely, being hung, drawn, and quartered. But in 1695 this law seemingly just lapsed and nobody got round to reinstating it.

This led to the rise of artists like Hogarth and Gillray and writers like Jonathan Swift. Images of leading politicians vomiting and defecating became widely available. You could laugh at Robert Walpole having his arse kissed and look away in horror as Gulliver, on his travels, receives a Lilliputian enema.

Just as you can enjoy now, if you should so wish, Rowson's paintings of Peter Oborne as a turd or Boris Johnson surrounded by shit and puke in an image Rowson based on Botticelli's Venus. Rowson's no fan of Johnson. In the pub after the talk he told me of his absolute disgust at a man he personally knows and considers to be a "narcissistic sociopath" worthy of comparison to Erdogan and Xi Jinping (the man who banned Winnie the Pooh from China because people said the two of them looked alike).

I've never been (lightly) told off for being too nice about Boris Johnson before! Not since my mate Neill castigated me for enjoying his Have I Got News For You performance many years ago anyway. But that's the thing with these cartoonists. They don't just want to make you laugh. They want to be agents for good. They want to help you see the light.

You can see that right back in 1751 with Hogarth's Gin Lane series in which he warned about the dangers of gin (and suggested beer was the answer!). This, and other series' like A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, and Marriage A-la-Mode, made Hogarth so popular that he was eventually co-opted by the establishment and his former admirers turned against him.

 

He ended up broke and his last image, The Bathos (below), shows what an unfitting end to his life it was. But his work lives on in the likes of Rowson and many others. In a talk that was both interesting and, in places, very funny, Rowson managed to show us how "sharing the shit inside our heads with other people" can be both art and political and I thought, humbly, that that's what I at least try to do with these blogs.

Thanks to Ian, Jade, Tim, Paula, and David VB for joining me for drinks downstairs in The Bell after the talk and thanks to Martin Rowson. Not just for joining us and continuing to tell funny stories but for all the great work over the years. Not least that evening's talk.