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Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster

A laughing cavalier

James Knox
Frances Lincoln, 224pp, £15,

Bevis Hillier

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox

It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley.

What started me off were Leigh Fermor’s variations on William Blake’s couplet:

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.

Leigh Fermor’s first conceit made me cackle:

Blackbirds fluttering from a pie
Cause four-and-twenty cheers on high.

His next:

When a pig wanders from its pound
The angels call for drinks all round.

He goes on to record angels’ delight over emancipated bed bugs, moles, moths, rodents, weevils and death-watch beetles. By the end I was, to sustain the cliché, a gibbering wreck. Osbert Lancaster’s humour was rather like that — sending up the over-the-top, pricking the pretentious. Blake’s indignation, though justified, was that little bit soupy.

At the age of 11, in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain, I was taken to Pineapple Poll, the ballet designed by Lancaster, and to the Battersea Pleasure Gardens, designed by him and John Piper. I quoted him copiously in my 1968 book on Art Deco. (Thanking me for a copy, he wrote: ‘Now I shall be able to hold my head high alongside Pevsner.’) I reviewed Richard Boston’s biography of him for this magazine. I wrote the entry for him for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. And this year I was asked to write a piece on ‘The Osbert Lancaster I knew’ for Cornerstone, the magazine of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. In the article I mentioned his Queen Mother-like partiality for gin and Dubonnet, and the stentorian sniff with which he punctuated his witty sentences, ‘like a small boy draining a milk shake through a straw at Fortnum’s’. Rousseau, on his deathbed, is said to have told a priest: ‘Go away — I have nothing left to confess.’ Would I have anything left to say about Osbert Lancaster?