Nick Newman

The peerless social satire of Pont of Punch

Partiality for open fires

Eighty years ago this month, the cartoonist Graham Laidler — better known as Pont — died of polio. He contracted the disease while evacuating refugees from London in his car. He was only 32. In 1940, thousands of people were dying in the war, but Pont’s death was marked by an appreciation from J.B. Priestley in the Times, and an outpouring of grief in readers’ letters to the magazine with which he had become synonymous: Punch.

Pont, the son of a successful painter and decorator, originally trained as an architect. But after he caught TB, doctors advised him to abandon his work and travel to Austria to recover. There he started submitting cartoons to Punch. After many rejections, a drawing was finally accepted in 1932. In just eight years he rose from a first-time contributor to an established regular. He became the only artist offered a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ to work exclusively for the magazine. ‘Pont of Punch’ was born.

Pont was one of the all-time greats. He was an unparalleled social satirist — famous for encapsulating the quirks of human nature in his two series, The British Character and Popular Misconceptions. The former depicted tableaux crammed with detail and incident, like silent comedies. ‘The British Character. Love of keeping calm’ features the dining room of an ocean liner, with all the passengers eating dinner, oblivious to the fact that the room is listing and there is water up to the tablecloths. ‘A disinclination to sparkle’ shows a line of glum dinner guests, each perfectly observed in their lack of loquaciousness. In ‘A tendency to leave the washing up till later’, a kitchen is piled up with weeks’ worth of dirty dishes.

Popular Misconceptions allowed him to be more surreal. ‘Life in the flat above’ caricatures a family thumping up and down with a cart full of pots and pans.

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