DAVID LOW’S OWN STORY OF HIS LIFE

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28154, 18 December 1956, Page 10

DAVID LOW’S OWN STORY OF HIS LIFE

Boyhood Days In Dunedin And Christchurch “THERE WERE NO ARTISTS ON MY FAMILY TREE” [“Low’s Autobiography" has been published by Michael Joseph, Ltd. The series of articles of which this is the first is published by permission of the “Manchester Guardian." Copyright is reserved.} (1) There were no artists on my family tree. Great-grandfather Low was a blacksmith in Fifeshire. Grandfather Low was a marine engineer. He uprooted his family of five, including my father-to-be, from Carnoustie and sailed the lot of them off to the new settlement at Dunedin in the 1860’s. Grandfather Low, according to his daguerreotype, had a sad face and dreamy eyes behind his forest of dark beard. My father had a similar eye. So have I. Great-grandmother Heenan (on my mother’s side) had arrived in Dunedin some years earlier from a village near Dublin. The Heenans, judging from their daguerreotypes, were an angry-looking lot of people, with their whiskers and riding-boots and tight little mouths. That is where I get my mouth from.

If at the beginning of the present century Dunedin were Scottish, Christchurch was definitely English. It was as though the God-fearing settlers, struck on their arrival fifty years before by the charm of the green plains laced with a gently flowing river and edged with comfortable hills, had said, “Lovely! So different! The very place for an English cathedral town.’’ The motion was evidently carried unanimously, so they went to work. They built a massive Gothic cathedral, laid down a sensible street system, naming all the streets after English cathedrals, and just so that there should not be any mistake they called it Christchurch.

Life was not all butter, cheese, and Canterbury lamb. Christchurch had a window on the world. We had two morning newspapers, two evenings, all built on the lines of the London “Times,” well served with foreign cables and local reports, two heavyweight weeklies for the farmers, with half-tone picture supplements; and a social - political - gossip weekly that printed cartoons. For a population of one hundred thousand that was not so bad. We had a respectable seat of learning in Canterbury College, an adequate public library, and a conservative but well-attended school of art. My eldest brother died and in consequence of this I was withdrawn from school. My brother’s death was clearly caused by peritonitis, but our parents felt that his vitality had been weakened beforehand by over-study. Desperate with grief, they determined not to make the same mistake with their remaining children. Our formal education at the boys’ high school was suspended indefinitely, while we built up our health running wild in the long grass at Riversleigh. I was aged 11. For a space of five years I had a healthy time, partly helping with the horses, cows, pigs, and chickens, partly following my own hook. I had. time to devote to the occupations I liked most, drawing, reading, or just sitting up a tree or in a dry ditch thinking. These were formative years, when the young normally go to school to absorb not merely learning but the postulates of citizenship and the canons of behaviour in civilised society. I missed all this, and was left without the modifications of “team spirit,” outside the freemasonry of old boys. In such circumstances, orthodoxy was certainly not to be taken for granted. My natural curiosity, left to itself, led me rather to a questioning approach to accepted standards, and a reluctance to facile conformity which sometimes amounted to mutiny. A brash small boy who when the band played “God Save the King” demanded to know “Why? What’s He done,” or who declined to cheer the British Empire without knowing more about it, could be a dreadful pill to worthy citizens who deemed uncatechetical acceptance of the social rules a virtue.

Improvement in drawing, now my absorbing purpose, depended upon my own self-criticism and private effort, there being nobody about to share my interest, so I naturally valued my own concepts of success and failure above those of outsiders who could not know my aims. And it was but a step from there to being more concerned with the satisfaction of my own personal standards than with those of others in matters of honour, self-respect, and conduct, too. As the twig bent, so grew the tree. I do not remember when my interest in drawing began; but probably it was given direction by the halfpenny comics “Chips,” “Comic Cuts,” “Larks,” “Funny Cuts,” “The Big Budget.” I got to know Tom Browne’s “Weary Willie and Tired Tim,” Yorrick’s “Airy A'f and Bouncing Billy,” Fred Bennett’s burlesqued “Oliver Twist,” and the “Josser” of Oliver Veal, that creator of a queer race of people who wore their mouths open under their left ears. To me these were the British comic artists of the time. Was I wrong? I have an uneasy feeling that if at 60 I had to debate the point with myself at eight, I might have difficulty in proving that the elect of the tasteful few were more fitly representative than these mass entertainers of the unsophisticated millions. It is always difficult to explain artistic values to the uninitiated, even the superiority of quality to quantity; especially so when, as in this case, the achievement of quantity obviously demanded a quality of its own. All very well to scorn, but it is no easier to catch the eye of the primitive mass audience with comic pictures than it is to catch its ear on the modern radio —and that is saying something. A pile of old copies of “Punch” I found in the back room of a fatherly second-hand bookseller introduced me to the treasure of Charles Keene. Linley Sambourne, Randolph Caldecott, and Dana Gibson came as further re-

velations. The more I pored over the intricate technical quality of these artists, the more difficult did drawing appear. How impossible that one could evfer become an artist! But then I came on Phil May, who combined quality with apparent facility. I nearly fell into the pitfall of supposing his facility was real and not studied to accord with the spontaneity of his humour. Fortunately I was reading Ruskin at the time, which balanced my judgment. However, once having discovered Phil May I never let him go. At this point something happened. One day I opened my “Big Budget” to find one of my own three-picture strips printed—printed in microscopic size, but printed. Victory! I leaped in the air. Joys, like sorrows, never come singly. Shortly afterwards my entry for a monthly drawing competition run by an Australian magazine won and was printed. And a very little later I ventured my first cartoon on public affairs to the local satiricalpolitical weekly, the “Spectator,” and

it went in. This run of triumphs was very encouraging. I repaired and whitewashed a redundant fowlhouse and moved to new and larger premises. The net receipts from my three successes were: (a) nothing; (b) five shillings; and (c) two shillings and sixpence, but the important gain was that I now had openings. Alas a mountain of labour moved the “Big Budget” to only one more small mouse, a tiny illustrated joke (nothing). On the other hand. I took such care to hit that Australian magazine competition on the button month by month that I came to regard their five-shil-ling prize almost as fixed income. Best of all, the proprietor of the “Spectator,” feeling, no doubt, that at the price it would be good business to have at hand a potential reserve cartoonist for his paper, decided to try me at illustrating two jokes per week for two shillings and sixpence each. With the first ten shillings I had a friendly printer produce for me a box of personal cards, saying:— D. A. C. Low, Black-and-White Artist. (To be continued)