Fancy Footwork: The Sporting Metaphor in New Zealand Political Cartoons

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 45, 1 January 2013, Page 59

Fancy Footwork: The Sporting Metaphor in New Zealand Political Cartoons

IAN F. GRANT

The principal purpose of political or editorial cartoonists - and the best do it in exemplary fashion - is to make an often complex point or insightful observation as incisively as possible. Sir John Marshall, former New Zealand prime minister, described a good cartoon as 'instant enlightenment'. 1 Consequently, symbols, stereotypes and metaphors are very much the cartoonist's stock-in-trade. Symbols like the British lion and Britannia, Uncle Sam, the US stock market's bulls and bears, and our very own kiwi are instantly recognisable. Earlier, the moa and a rather ethereal Zealandia symbolised New Zealand; it was cartoonist Trevor Lloyd, also a prominent natural history artist, who popularised the kiwi symbol before and during the First World War. New Zealand cartoonists also developed stereotypes that, over time, clearly showed the move away from more egalitarian roots. In early cartoons the worker was a cheerful, sleeves-rolled-up sort of chap, and the capitalist a podgy, top-hatted, bejewelled 'Mr Fat'. But by 1951, the year of the lengthy waterfront dispute, the worker was, to the mild-mannered Gordon Minhinnick and his cartooning colleagues, a menacing, snarling thug.

The metaphor is possibly the most important weapon in the cartoonist's armoury. As Elisabeth El Refaie has written, a visual metaphor in a political cartoon is 'sometimes able to convey a complex message in a much more immediate and condensed fashion than language'. 2 Very simply, metaphors draw likenesses between objects, ideas or events. They are associations of ideas. Tried and true metaphors are an instant and universally understood shorthand. Cartoonists have a stockpile of such metaphors at their disposal. Some are specific to a cartoon's subject or situation. One welldocumented example is the portrayal in cartoons of Richard Nixon as Pinocchio during his years as US president. Pinocchio, the wooden puppet with a very long nose, told lies which made his nose grow longer; Nixon's long nose was a

particular feature of cartoons; he had a 'wooden' personality and was seen as a 'tricky' politician with scant regard for the truth. 3

David Low, New Zealand's greatest cartoonist, used sporting metaphors to good effect and warned about the overuse of old chestnuts. He wrote about the 'cartoonese' of some of his colleagues, who used 'traditional symbols and wellworn analogies, expressed in familiar cliches of draughtsmanship - the passage of events appearing to them as a sequence of visions of precipices marked "Crisis", of octopuses marked "Protection", of Prime Ministers walking on tight-ropes marked "Majority", and that kind of thing'. 4

The linked reasons sporting metaphors work so well, particularly during the last 60 or so years, are because of the immense popularity of sport, its universality, and the way it transcends class and locality. Sport has so much in common with politics.

Nicholas Garland, the long-time London Daily Telegraph cartoonist who spent his teenage years in New Zealand, says: 'There are innumerable situations that lend themselves to the use of sporting metaphors because politicians are forever confronting and competing with each other'. 5 George Orwell saw sport as 'an unfailing cause of ill will'. 6 Sport is invariably a contest, one individual or team striving to defeat the other. It is often aggressive and violent, it has tension and excitement, it arouses passion. These are all characteristics shared with politics at the local, national and international level. Both are about winning - often at any cost.

Although a sporting metaphor was used in an English cartoon as early as 1769, with a depiction of the Brentford election as a horse race, 7 the famous British caricaturists of the eighteenth century, like Hogarth, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, were more concerned with social issues than with politics. It was James Gilray, later that century, who regularly produced the first pointedly political cartoon prints.

Political cartooning was given greater permanence when Punch first appeared in 1841. The London Charivari 's cartoons were soon sprinkling occasional sporting metaphors among the then more popular literary allusions, analogies and stereotypes. Although early American cartoonists routinely produced pallid copies of their trans-Atlantic contemporaries, they were, nevertheless, early adopters of sporting metaphors.

While nothing has previously been written about the use of metaphor in New Zealand cartoons, sporting or otherwise, there is a considerable literature relating to their use in United States election campaigns over a lengthy period until the present day. It was the Americans who began talking about candidates 'running' for office - this replacing the traditional English 'standing' for election. As historians Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan have written: 'About as predictable

as the cartoonists' puns were the sports motifs that they dusted off every fourth year. Any Presidential election from 1832 to 1864 was sure to be presented as a horse or foot race, a boxing match, a game of brag (an early version of poker), pool or bagatelle, a cock fight, hunting, fishing, a bull fight, or (by 1860) a baseball game'. 7

The first political cartoons in New Zealand were in slim copycat Punch magazines. Look through the New Zealand Punch magazines, which had short but colourful lives for several decades from the 1860 s, and the cartoons draw heavily on classical or literary allusions with more than a nod to Greek myths, Milton's poetry and Shakespeare's plays. British cartoonists, the models for many New Zealand colleagues, persevered with the more literary metaphors well into the twentieth century, particularly in the broadsheet 'qualities'. Today, and for some decades back, such metaphors have probably produced more glazed incomprehension than 'instant enlightenment'.

In New Zealand and elsewhere sporting metaphors assumed increasing importance in political cartoons in the decades following the Second World War. There is a strong link between the language of politics, particularly as practised by journalists, and the use of sporting metaphors in cartoons. Since the early 19605, in tandem with the explosive growth of television, journalists have increasingly used sporting terms and language in their reporting and analysis of political events. In part, of course, this is because democratic political systems are strongly focused on the competition for power among opposing 'teams' with different philosophies and programmes. The language of many sports fits perfectly with the confrontational, win-lose rhythms of the political process. The attraction of sports metaphors is also because television's 'manufactured' sporting extravaganzas, geared to build audiences and advertising revenue, now cover the globe. With the exponential growth in the number of armchair spectators there has developed an almost universal understanding of sporting analogies. This can be observed most clearly in the media coverage of, and cartoons about, election campaigns.

It is instructive to look at the sports most often used as metaphors for events and personalities on the political stage. High levels of confrontation and the win-lose equation are clearly critical, and individual versus team sports are more appropriate in different political situations. Interestingly, the widespread use of language from a particular sport in journalism, and in cartoons, is not necessarily a reflection of its current popularity. In 2008, prominent American journalist Frank Mankiewicz wrote: 'Boxing is a sport hated and shunned by almost half the population, reduced to scant notice in the sports pages, and yet it remains by far the source of more idioms and catch phrases in our language than any other sport'. 8 Mankiewicz had counted at least 50 boxing expressions regularly used in political reports. Expressions so commonly used few readers would stop to think of their origins include 'knocked down but not counted out', 'on the ropes', 'taking off the gloves', 'saved by the bell', 'counter-punch', 'leading with the chin', 'haymaker', 'fancy footwork', and 'low blows'. Most of these have their visual equivalents in political cartoons, and there is some evidence to suggest that boxing wins over other sporting metaphors in political cartoons as well.

International cartoon research centres and libraries like the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent in England have catalogued 7,023 cartoons with sporting themes; in 4,895 of them the sport is boxing. Soccer (2,009) and cricket (1,140) trail well behind. 9 The New Zealand Cartoon Archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington contains a large number of cartoons which use sporting metaphors to make political points, although among those digitised to date, boxing is predictably less popular among cartoonists than rugby. Nevertheless, boxing has featured in this country's political cartoons from the 1870 s - and continues to do so. One of the earliest examples, featuring Sir George Grey, appeared in 1882.

The boxing metaphor is particularly suited to cartoons that pit political personalities against one another. From the early days of political cartooning in New Zealand there was a strong emphasis on party leaders who personified policies and political philosophies, particularly during election campaigns. For example, Jack Gilmour had a hulking Thomas MacKenzie seemingly dominating a diminutive William Massey in 1912. 1 °ln 1919 Trevor Lloyd's much more robust Massey was too much for Sir Joseph Ward to handle." Gordon Minhinnick, during his long career at the New Zealand Herald, had Michael Savage knocking out National's Adam Hamilton in 1938 12 and Robert Muldoon engaged in some vigorous shadow boxing prior to the 1972 election. 13 More recently Bob Brockie,

Anthony Ellison, Malcolm Evans, Trace Hodgson, Jim Hubbard, Nevil Lodge, Tom Scott, Ashley Smith, Garrick Tremain, Malcolm Walker and Murray Webb have all used boxing metaphors in different ways.

More than most sports, boxing has stressed muscular masculinity, again in line with the male domination of politics. But between 1997 and 2001 two women, Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark, were, in turn, prime minister and leader of the opposition: it was a Western world first and, clearly, boxing was not a metaphorical option. Tom Scott found an effective substitute - mud wrestling.

Not surprisingly, the more aggressive team sports predominate in sporting metaphors. Football in its several guises is popular. Rugby is the clear favourite in New Zealand, as is soccer - after boxing - in Britain and among African cartoonists. In North America ice hockey and gridiron provide a suitable degree of violent confrontation to provide the necessary metaphoric ingredients for cartoonists. The Listener's Chris Slane writes: 'Physical action in sport is useful when I want to visualise some political manoeuvre in a dramatic visual way. Games like rugby are good for showing opponents and other team members. Violent action is more fun to draw than a quiet chat between grey-suited men in an office'. 14 Most important, of course, is that cartoonists use sports familiar to their readers.

Nicholas Garland wryly observes: That might rule out lacrosse for instance or that weird form of polo played on horseback by certain tribes in, I think Afghanistan, in which the internationally known small wooden polo ball is replaced by the severed head of a goat'. 15

Although very different from other sports, horse-racing, with its history back to the earliest days of European settlement in New Zealand, has contributed a number of commonly used expressions to political journalism - 'neck-to-neck', 'every post a winning post', 'odds on favourite', 'the home straight', 'back in the saddle', 'jockeying for position' - which have translated into effective visual metaphors for cartoonists as well.

Major sporting events - particularly the Olympics - bring a flurry of associated sporting metaphors to the political cartoons of the time. As Alan Moir, Sydney Morning Herald's principal cartoonist and expatriate New Zealander notes: 'Recently I've used the Tour de France and the sprinkled tacks to ridicule the Opposition Leader, and the Olympics always feature when they're on, providing endless satirical variations, especially crunch events that feature the USA, Russia and/or China'. The advantages of using sport is that the metaphor is usually very visual', he says. The image is usually easily expressed and understood, especially if it is following a particular happening like, for example, an Olympics relay baton drop'. 16

Rugby, though, is New Zealand's undisputed sporting metaphor champion.

The game tied most closely to the national psyche, rugby has other distinct advantages beyond the almost universal understanding of its basic rules. It provides the necessary levels of sometimes violent confrontation - among both individuals and teams - and an array of competitive situations that work much more effectively visually than they do in written political commentary. While a few expressions like 'kicking for touch' have found their way into political reportage, the rugby field has given cartoonists a particularly rich source of visual metaphors. These have included such graphic possibilities as: 'scoring under the posts', 'taking the high ball', 'missing the tackle', 'crash tackle', 'winning the lineout', 'the yellow card', 'high tackle', 'dropped pass', 'diving for the line', 'forced out in the corner', 'feeding the scrum', 'the front row', 'the tight five', 'kicking a goal', 'coming off the bench' and 'dotting the ball down'.

Apart from the surfeit of cartoons purely and simply about rugby that few New Zealand political cartoonists can resist, particularly during World Cup and Bledisloe Cup clashes, there is a sub-category of rugby metaphor cartoons relating to race. These have ranged from Neil Lonsdale's 1969 cartoon with Eruera Tirikatene trying to pass the 'racial issue' ball to a reluctant Walter Nash; 17 to

Ben Couch, in Bob Brockie's 1981 cartoon, booting the apartheid ball in the opposite direction from his National colleagues; 18 or Trace Hodgson's 1985 cartoon of All Blacks 'rucking' over the top of South African blacks. 19 Ironically perhaps, these cartoons, and many more in the same vein, reflect the game's long and inextricably entwined role in the controversy about keeping politics out of sport.

Predictably, rugby metaphors have been popular in New Zealand election campaign cartoons, and even used to simplify the complexities of the international political scene. For example, in his 1933 cartoon Trevor Lloyd has a rugby team featuring Mussolini, Hitler, De Valera and Franco racing down the field with a ball labelled 'Fascism' towards a sole 'Democracy' player defending the score line. 20

Although metaphors, particularly using sport and warfare analogies, have a long cartoon history, it is possible that they are now used less frequently in New Zealand. One reason may be the more prominent role women are playing in politics. Mabel Howard was the country's first woman minister in 1947, followed by Hilda Ross in 1954. There was only one woman in Cabinet until 1984, but since then numbers have increased. The sports women play are less confrontational and lack the universal popularity of the masculine sports which have dovetailed so conveniently with the political arena. Although netball is increasingly robust and women now play rugby and occasionally square off in the boxing ring, New Zealand cartoonists have tended to ignore these metaphorical opportunities in their political cartooning.

However, this does not seem to have inhibited cartoonists in the United States. As Joan Conners writes: The competitive nature of the campaign, the horserace, is a frequent image of Obama and Clinton in 2008 presidential primary cartoons'. 21 And other observers have noted: The language of war and sports, two of the most traditionally masculine domains in American society, is so prevalent in our political discourse that it is even used by those who wish to increase women's political involvement'. 22

Malcolm Evans, who has cartooned for a number of this country's leading newspapers, also suggests the metaphor may have lost some of its gloss. The use of metaphor generally seems to have been more common among the cartoonists I grew up with - Minhinnick and later Lonsdale', he notes. 'But with the move away from the comparative gentility of those days, today's political cartoons seem, to me at least, to be more gritty and to reflect a cutting irony and acid wit, a trend probably pioneered here by Tom Scott and Trace Hodgson'. 23

It may also be a matter of pride for cartoonists. A last word from Evans: The use of metaphor has probably tended to become more and more a "strategy of last resort" - where you go when a deadline is looming and nothing better has emerged from the swamp of your musings. Put simply, metaphor is easy'. 24

ENDNOTES 1 John Marshall, Memoirs, Vol 1 (Auckland; Sydney: Collins, 1983-89), p. 129. 2 E. El Refaie, 'Understanding Visual Metaphor: The Example of Newspaper Cartoons'. Visual Communication 2, no. 1 (2003): 75-95. 3 Bernard Grofman, 'Richard Nixon as Pinocchio, Richard 11, and Santa Claus: The Use of Allusion in Political Satire' Journal of Politics 51, no. 1 (February 1989): 165-73. 4 David Low, 'Foreword on the Art of Caricature', in Modern Caricaturists, ed. by H. R. Westwood (London: Lovat Dickson, 1932), p. xi.

5 Nicholas Garland, email correspondence, 7 July 2012. 6 George Orwell, 'The Sporting Spirit', Tribune, December 1945. 7 Stephen Hess & Milton Kaplin, The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 77. 8 Frank Mankiewicz, 'Boxing Metaphors: Fancy Footwork?', Huffington Post, 13 March 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-mankiewicz/boxing-metaphors-fancy-fo_b_9l47s.html. Accessed 3 January 2013. 9 British Cartoon Archive, http://www.cartoons.ac.uk. Accessed 14 September 2012. 10 Reproduced in lan Grant, The Unauthorized Version: A Cartoon History of New Zealand (Auckland: Cassell, 1980), p. 85.

11 Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL) ref. A-315-2-186. 12 ATL ref. A-311-1-015. 13 ATL ref. E-549-q-13-247. 14 Chris Slane, email correspondence, 27 August 2012. 15 Nicholas Garland, email correspondence, 7 July 2012. 16 Alan Moir, email correspondence, 24 July 2012. 17 Reproduced in Grant, The Unauthorized Version, p. 194. 18 National Business Review, 22 June 1981, p. 6. 19 ATL ref. A-317-3-026. 20 ATL ref. B-115-035.

21 Joan L. Conners, 'Barack Versus Hillary: Race, Gender, and Political Cartoon Imagery at the 2008 Presidential Primaries'. American Behavioral Scientist 54 (2010): 298-312. 22 Susan J. Carroll & Richard L. Fox (eds), Gender and Elections: Shaping the Future of American Politics (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 3. 23 Malcolm Evans, email correspondence, 8 July, 2012. 24 Ibid.