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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

The answer is yes. James Knox’s book has rekindled all my delight in the man, his art and his wit. What a polymath he was: ‘pocket cartoonist’ in the Daily Express for almost 40 years; architectural pundit and parodist; theatre designer; travel writer; illustrator; diplomat; autobiographer; boulevardier. The old canard about cartoonists is that those who can draw are no good at jokes, and vice-versa. Lancaster excelled at both, creating in Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, an iconic figure to rank with Low’s Colonel Blimp and Giles’s Grandma. I was always told that Maudie was based on Patsy Jellicoe — who was a countess, the wife of the unfaithful second Earl Jellicoe, son of the first world war admiral. She certainly looked a lot like Maudie, and was as funny and engagingly scatty. But Knox convincingly suggests that in fact Maudie was based on Pru Wallace, an ex-actress and diplomat’s wife with whom Lancaster had a fling in the mid-1940s. The photograph of her in profile in this book shows a dead ringer for Maudie.

The book is linked to a centenary exhibition at the Wallace Collection (how that venue would have pleased Lancaster, the Laughing Cavalier of the 20th century). It is almost as lavishly illustrated as one could wish, with plenty of colour plates; the only absentee I would have liked to see included is Lancaster’s dust-jacket for a 1959 book by his friend Lord Kinross, about the Americans — The Innocents at Home. That was the year I went up to Oxford and first encountered American men, some of them intent on discussing ‘phlarzvy’ over the cornflakes at breakfast. On the Kinross wrapper Lancaster captures the two telltale characteristics of American males of the late Fifties: they had crew cuts, and the collars of their shirts were buttoned down. (The latter superfluity was later adopted by some British shirtmakers.)