LOW TO BROADCAST

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23669, 29 November 1938, Page 10

LOW TO BROADCAST

WILL BE HEARD IN NEW ZEALAND DECEMBER 12 THE DATE <From Our Own Correspondent* (By Air Mail) LONDON, Nov. 7. David Low, the New Zealand cartoonist, famous for his brilliant work in the Evening Standard, is to broadcast to New Zealand on December 12 at 9.15 a.m., Greenwich M.T. It will be his first Empire broadcast s*ince 1934, when he spoke on his experiences in art. Low will be heard as a contributor to the series of talks "As I See It," which means that he will say what he thinks about a subject of his own choosing. It is a broadcast that should interest a wide audience, because, for once, people will have a chance of hearing a spoken, instead of a sketched, answer to a question that is asked in London every week, *' What does Low think about it? " It was a weekly newspaper in Christchurch that first published—and paid half-a-crown for—Low's work. To-day he is 47. He was born in Dunedin, and was 11 years old when the Christchurch weekly bought his cartoon. But that early triumph did not convince his parents that they had an artist in the family, and young David was trained for the Church.

The idea had been abandoned by the time he was 17, and he joined a weekly paper. His salary was £2 a week. Then followed .study at the Canterbury School of Art, work for various journals, a growing interest in politics, in the affairs of men and nations—and then, in 1919, a cable calling him to work in London for the evening daily, the Star. International fame came with his service there; in 1927, he joined the Evening Standard, and in its pages he has consolidated his unique eminence as a commentator on the world and its ways. The making of a cartoon means hard work. For Low, it includes the selec tion of subject (demanding close scrutiny of the day's news); hard thinking about the form of his interpretation of the chosen item, the preparation of his rough sketches the working out of proportions and checking of details (he devotes hours to getting his sketches of people and things "just right"), the final drawing. And all the time there is the struggle to keep the picture free from complications. He does all his work in a studio away from his home. It has no telephone and visitors are forbidden—even his wife and two daughters keep away.

He has little time for recreation. Such free hours as there are must be devoted to the essential business of " keeping in touch "—research, interviews, banquets, meetings. But when opportunity comes, he practises archery. Low has ensured the immortality of his name in a wav that very few have achieved—he has forced his way into the English dictionary, his representative being his delightful creation, the plump, Turkish-bathing "Colonel Blimp," now officially defined as "a figure caricaturing an extreme die-hard type of outlook."