Newspaper Days - the beginnings of a love of Art.

I wasn’t always an artist, nor a cartoonist. But it was as a lowly office clerk that I was introduced to various art styles of legendary painters. Putnam, or ‘Put’ as we called my colleague, was a mentor, without possibly realizing it in those early days at the Sunday Dispatch newspaper.


The Sunday Dispatch was the Sunday edition (with a then-circulation in excess of 2 million) of the London Daily Mail. It was a paper owned by the Rothermere family that continues to this day as an ‘institution’. The Mail’s 1.2 million circulation) has always battled with the Daily Express (now just over 600,000 circulation) which was once owned by the Beaverbrook family.

As circulation clerks our job meant being in attendance alternate Saturday nights ready with brush and paint (printer’s ink) to dash off ‘screamer’ headlines on posters.

There was plenty of time as the evening dragged on, waiting for the ‘call to arms’  to discuss love, life and everything in between. The subject on Put’s mind often was art and during those discussions he pointed out to me that we were copying the Chinese style of painting by taking a loaded brush and creating our works of art as the brush discharged its contents.  

‘Bamboo’ my first attempt at ‘Chinese’

We weren’t required to create illustrations; but we did paint ‘pictures in words.’ Mainly the headline would be simple and brash to tempt the readers to buy the paper. ‘Fire’, ‘Murder’, ‘Scandal’ were often the teaser.  Sometimes the posters were pre-printed when the newspaper wished to promote a serial. In fact the Sunday Dispatch was notable for first serializing Forever Amber – considered ‘very saucy’ for its time. And whenever a flagging circulation needed to be revitalized, the paper would revert to The Royals’. And there was invariably a story to tell. Nothing salacious, it didn’t need to be - the proprietors knew their audience enjoyed reading about the Royal family.

On occasions the posters were pre-printed for an upcoming event and the most ironic of which was The CHURCHILL IS DEAD printing in readiness for the great man’s demise.  Ironic because Winston Churchill’s journalist son Randolph wrote for the Sunday Express – the rival paper – and made detrimental comments including that the Sunday Dispatch didn’t look like the Sunday version of the Daily Mail. The proprietors took umbrage at that and chose to change the format as well as the editor. Unfortunately it didn’t work. While the CHURCHILL IS DEAD posters were stored away for a future occasion after ‘Winnie’ recovered from his illness, the Dispatch finally succumbed to failing circulation and expired in 1961. I had moved to greener pastures – the green belt in fact and would return to London years later as did the paper which eventually resurfaced as The Mail on Sunday in 1982.

But it was in that newspaper environment that I learnt to copy in the style of Chinese paintings with printer’s ink via a felt tip on the end of a piece of wood.

  Miss Great Britain Contest.

I see I experimented using the back of the then current promotion! The Miss Great Britain national beauty contest staged by the Dispatch in conjunction with Morecambe and Heysham Council. The grand first prize for that first heat was the princely sum of 7 guineas ( $12) – and a basket of fruit.

The subject that I painted on the reverse side would resurface later in my new job. Check that out in my next Blog. See you then……to be continued