Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the better ’ole

Press, 21 October 1983, Page 22

Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the better ’ole

By

ROSEMARY BRITTEN

“Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” With these words two unhappy soldiers, sitting out a Somme barrage in a shell hole, created a long-lived catchphrase and brought fame to a young cartoonist, Captain Bruce Bairnsfather.

When the First World War broke out, Bruce Baimsfather was 26 years old. He had already served for a time in the regular army (Royal Warwickshire Regiment) and studied at an art school before deciding neither was likely to provide him with a career. He joined a

firm of electrical engineers as their representative, and travelled widely. On the outbreak of war he rejoined his regiment and sailed for France in November, 1914. Plunged into the filthy wet trenches of a Flanders turnip field, with German trenches only 100 yards away, he took some little time to see the funny side of the tragedy of war. After the strange, unofficial, never-to-be-repeated truce of Christmas Day, 1914, he, with some others, moved into a shattered

farmhouse just behind the front line. In the comparatiwe comfort of its bullet-perforated walls and dirty, straw-covered floor, Bruce Bairnsfather began to draw again.

His first sketches, on scraps of paper, were quickly taken back to the trenches by delighted friends. He turned his attention to the walls of the cottage. Before long charcoal murals, “jokes,” he said, “at the expense of our miserable surroundings,” appeared.

“There was a large circular gash, made by a spent bullet I fancy, on one of the walls, and by making it appear as though this mark was the centre point of a large explosion, I gave apparent velocity to the figure of a German, which I drew above.”

The idea for a cartoon which he thought might be publishable came when the house was under heavy fire. A near miss blew “a fair-sized duck pond in the road.” Nearly everyone said: “Where did that one go to?” Something about the intent, staring faces, looking through the battered doorway, struck him as pathetically amusing.

The resulting drawing was sent off to the “Bystander,” a weekly magazine he found among a collection of old papers from England. Some months later he was surprised to receive a note of acceptance and a cheque.

Bairnsfather had found his market and, before long, his Old Bill, worldly-wise and mustachioed like a walrus, and Private Blobs, with a perpetual air of wondering innocence, Bert and Alf, and the rest, were appearing regularly. Not slow to recognise a money- ' spinner, the editor of the “Bystander” had a volume of “Fragments from France,” 48 pages of cartoons, out by the end of 1915. This was followed by six more shilling volumes. Those that have survived reading and rereading would be collectors’ items now.

Mr Sam Brown, of Birdwood Avenue, has the first two, family heirlooms brought out from England with him years ago. Mr Brown also has a book, “Bullets and Billets,” in which Bairnsfather outlines his first year or so at war,

and explains the beginning of the cartoons.

“I never went about looking for ideas for drawings,” he writes. “The whole business of the war seemed to come before me in a series of pictures. Jokes used to stick out of all the horrible discomfort, something like the points of a harrow would stick into you if you slept on it.”

Popular at home, the cartoons were received even more apprecia-

tively in the trenches — the weary soldiers saw themselves and all their frightful experiences reflected in more cheerful colours.

Quickly, the “Bystander” brought out more expensive, de luxe editions of “Fragments” with prints suitable for framing. They added coloured reproductions (at one shilling and threepence each) and sets of postcards, six cards for eightpence.

The style of the cartoons is

instantly recognisable. The everpresent reality of death is ignored — no bodies hang on Bairnsfather’s barbed wire — and language stronger than “blinkin’” is indicated by a dash. German soldiers are better fed and less intelligent than the Tommies, and they wear little round hats with, Bairnsfather says, “two trouser buttons in front.”

Bairnsfather soldiers slosh about in water-filled trenches, watch their sandbag parapet .blown away for the umpteenth time, and live on dry biscuits (“Chuck us the biscuits, Bill. The fire wants mendin’ ’’) and plum-and-apple jam. “When the ’ell will it be strawberry?” wonders Bill, gloomily studying the newly opened tin.

Bairnsfather soldiers use their swords to make toast over smokey fire-buckets, and sometimes as racks for drying their socks. Occasionally they dream of women, fullbosomed and slim-waisted, but more often of shells that crash through the walls at night.

Bairnsfather soldiers are fed-up to the eyebrows with the whole inexplicable mess, but they see it through with a kind of humorous cynicism.

Up to the waist in a flooded trench while the rain pours down, Bill reads a letter from his wife. “Poor old Maggie!” he comments. “She seems to be ’avin’ it dreadful wet at ’ome.” In another picture a young recruit gasps at an enormous shell hole in a brick wall, “Who made that ’ole?” The battle-weary soldier clamps his teeth on his pipe. “Mice,” he says.

As his skill became known, Baimsfather had requests from fellow officers for four or five drawings at a time. When he was not out with his machine gun section he spent his time drawing, and many of his scenes decorated the walls of divisional headquarters. His sketching, he says, “broke out like a rash.”

The flow halted at the end of 1915 when he was blown up by a shell, and invalided home to an English hospital. Not seriously damaged, he returned to the front and served in France until the end of 1916 when he joined the Intelli-

gence Department of the War Office as an officer-cartoonist — and was sent to various fronts. After the war, Bairnsfather continued to draw. He married in 1921, and in the years between the wars divided his time between England and America. He published cartoons in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, lectured, appeared in music halls, and wrote plays and sketches for revues. The Second World War set him to drawing war cartoons again, and the humour he was able to find in the blitz must have helped some

Londoners through that time. In 1942, he was appointed official cartoonist to the United States Army in Europe.

These drawings lack the appeal and the survival power of the early ones. Perhaps his uniquely British sense of humour did not translate so well to the United States Army of the 19405; perhaps he needed a “Bystander” to promote and exploit his work.

He returned to England, and died at Worcester in 1959, at the age of