As ever, Knox writes very well, and he carries us briskly through all the Lancastrian vicissitudes up to the artist’s death in 1986 — though again I feel he misses a trick in covering Lancaster’s wartime service with the Foreign Office. For a time Lancaster was based at the Senate House of the University of London. Knox writes:
Osbert … cut a considerable dash during Britain’s darkest hour. Michael Bonavia, a senior official at the University of London, recalled that: ‘One night there was a particularly loud bang nearby and, getting up to investigate, I encountered in the corridor Osbert Lancaster — black moustache, eyebrows and all — gorgeous in a superb plum-coloured silk dressing-gown, looking exactly like the villain of some Victorian melodrama.’
Lovely stuff; but Knox leaves out the punchline with which Bonavia ends his anecdote in his 1990 memoir, London Before I Forget:
The same thought struck a ribald Press censor, who fell on his knees in front of this apparition crying, ‘Spare my daughter, Sir Jasper!’
I feel the salt is missing there, as in the old saying — not applicable to the bewhiskered Lancaster — ‘A kiss without a moustache is like an egg without salt’.
A baby born in the year Osbert Lancaster died, over 20 years ago, may now be at university; the time is ripe for an appraisal of his achievement. On which of his many talents will his fame rest? It could rest on the topicality of the pocket cartoons — his ironic, reactionary eye on the Swinging Sixties, for example. Some of his stage sets are still in use. But I think he will be best remembered for his satire, in both drawings and words, of the way British townscapes were spoilt (not quite ruined), first by doctrinaire modernism, then by the New Brutalism in architecture. If we hadn’t laughed with him, we’d have cried. q
The Wallace Collection exhibition of Osbert Lancaster’s work opens on 2 October.
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