Hitler wanted him arrested.
Mussolini banned him.
Lord Beaverbrook paid him a fortune to disagree with him.
And four mornings a week, the man responsible walked into a little studio at 13A Heath Street, Hampstead, sharpened his pencil and began work.
His name was David Low. Sir David Low eventually. New Zealander, self-taught artist, political troublemaker and, in his day, the most famous newspaper cartoonist in the world.
Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. David here.
Today we’re going to pay a call at that Hampstead studio.
Because this is one of those addresses you can walk straight past without realising that, inside, a single sheet of paper could make prime ministers wince, dictators rage and newspaper readers laugh out loud.
David Low’s weapon was ridicule.
And he knew exactly where to aim it.
He was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1891. His father was a businessman whose fortunes rose and fell. The family moved to Christchurch, where young David’s formal education came to an abrupt end when he was eleven.
His eldest brother had died of peritonitis. David’s parents decided that too much studying had weakened him. They weren’t going to take the same risk with another son.
So they took David out of school.
Not every future knight of the realm can say his education was curtailed because learning was considered medically dangerous.
He was taught at home instead. He read voraciously, argued with his father and devoured British comics. He studied the cartoons in Punch and copied them line by line. His particular hero was Phil May.
“Once having discovered May,” Low said, “I never let him go.”
By the age of eleven, Low had already sold a drawing to a British comic called the Big Budget. A Christchurch political weekly began accepting his cartoons. Before long, he was producing commercial illustrations and sketching defendants in the police courts for the sensational New Zealand Truth.
He made one attempt at a respectable commercial education.
He failed the course.
Art college didn’t do much for him either.
His real education came from looking, copying, drawing and drawing again.
That matters, because Low later became exasperated by all the talk about an artist’s natural gift.
“There is too much talk about the gift for drawing,” he said. “It is a capacity for work that gets you there.”
Behind those apparently effortless lines lay a painstaking pencil drawing. Only then did the brush and ink go down. The fluency was real, but it had been worked for.
Low sent copies of his cartoons to editors in Australia. That persistence paid off. In 1911, the Sydney Bulletin suddenly offered him a six-month contract.
The Bulletin was known as “the bushman’s bible”. It was irreverent, influential and extremely good at spotting talent.
It had spotted Low.
His great Australian gift arrived in the unmistakable shape of Billy Hughes, the country’s prime minister.
Hughes was short, volcanic, dominating and equipped with a magnificent nose. In other words, he was heaven-sent to a caricaturist.
Low drew Hughes.
Hughes became furious.
Low drew him again.
The resulting rows made news, sold papers and made Low famous.
His cartoons were considered so important that he was exempted from wartime conscription on the grounds of “national importance”.
His collection, The Billy Book, sold 60,000 copies. Australia’s population was only about five million.
Low had discovered the secret that would power his career.
Don’t merely draw the news.
Become part of it.
In 1919, London came calling.
He arrived with his mother, his sister and his brother in tow. That’s not so much emigrating as moving the family headquarters.
The promised job proved slightly disappointing. He had expected the Daily News. He found himself working for the less prestigious Evening Star.
But Low fought for space and freedom, and began doing to Lloyd George what he had done to Billy Hughes.
He turned politicians into instantly recognisable creatures.
To represent the Conservative and Liberal halves of Lloyd George’s coalition, he invented a two-headed donkey.
He created Joan Bull, a flapperish younger relative of John Bull.
And, most famously, he created Colonel Blimp.
Blimp was pompous, choleric, reactionary and usually to be found in a Turkish bath, wrapped in a towel and pronouncing furiously upon the state of the nation.
“Gad, sir!”
Colonel Blimp became more than a cartoon character. He became a type. The word “Blimp” entered the language.
Even today, call somebody a Colonel Blimp and we know the man. Red-faced, thunderous, absurdly certain and approximately thirty years behind the times.
In 1927, Lord Beaverbrook finally lured Low to the Evening Standard.
It was an extraordinary marriage.
Beaverbrook was rich, powerful, politically right-wing and deeply involved in his newspapers.
Low was independent, left-liberal and temperamentally incapable of being anybody’s mouthpiece.
But the two men understood one another. Both were colonial outsiders who had made it in Britain. Both were showmen. Both liked publicity.
And Beaverbrook paid extremely well.
Low’s contract guaranteed him complete freedom in choosing and treating his subjects.
Well, nearly complete freedom.
Beaverbrook couldn’t order Low to draw something. But he wasn’t obliged to publish everything Low drew. Over the years, at least forty cartoons were withheld. Others were modified.
Still, the public story was irresistible. The great newspaper proprietor employed Britain’s most celebrated cartoonist and allowed him to disagree.
That arrangement faced its supreme test in the 1930s.
Beaverbrook favoured appeasement of the European dictators.
Low most emphatically did not.
And here the cartoonist stepped onto the world stage.
More than almost anyone else, Low created the Hitler we still see in the mind’s eye.
The strut.
The diagonal forelock.
The toothbrush moustache.
The puffed-up vanity.
The combination of menace and ridiculousness.
Low understood that dictators wanted to appear magnificent, historic and terrifying.
So he made them look silly.
His principal weapon, he said, was “the criticism of the grin”.
He believed there was more stupidity than wickedness in the world. And because the person was the symbol of the idea, he attacked bad ideas by drawing the people who embodied them.
Neville Chamberlain became inseparable from his umbrella. Eventually Low could draw the umbrella itself, give its handle Chamberlain’s face and the reader knew immediately who it was.
That was what Low called “the tab of identity”. The tiny visual clue that told you everything.
Hitler and Mussolini became “Hit and Muss”.
When diplomatic complaints made that inconvenient, Low merged them into a single dictator called Muzzler.
Nazi Germany banned the Evening Standard.
Fascist Italy followed suit.
And when the Nazis prepared a list of people to be arrested after their successful invasion of Britain, David Low’s name was on it.
Think about that.
An army. An air force. Tanks. Bombs. Blackshirts. Stormtroopers. The Gestapo.
And one man in a Hampstead studio with a pencil.
The Nazis understood his power perfectly.
Low could certainly draw menace. His blackshirts and serried ranks of goose-stepping stormtroopers are frightening. But there was something intrinsically gentle in his line. His lions and tigers might snarl, but you could imagine taking one home as a toy.
That contrast made the darkness darker.
After Dunkirk and the fall of France, Low produced one of the defining British images of the Second World War.
A British soldier stands alone on a rocky outcrop, the stormy sea raging around him. Overhead, the Luftwaffe approaches. He raises a defiant fist.
Beneath the picture, three words:
“Very Well, Alone!”
It captured the summer of 1940. Defiance, danger, isolation and bloody-minded determination, distilled into a single image.
That was Low’s genius.
He could reduce a complicated political moment to its essence.
Journalists envied him for it.
At the Evening Standard in the 1930s, he produced four cartoons a week. Between 1934 and 1940, he also drew a full-page Saturday survey of the week’s news.
And he did much of that work here in Hampstead, at 13A Heath Street.
He lived within walking distance. A courier came to collect the finished cartoon and carry it into the newspaper.
Imagine that journey.
Out of the studio.
Down Heath Street.
Into central London.
Onto the presses.
Into hundreds of thousands of hands.
And then, perhaps, onto a dictator’s breakfast table.
Low left the Evening Standard in 1949. The foreign enemy had been defeated, the great age of the anti-appeasement cartoon had ended and his space in the paper was being cut.
A move to the Labour-supporting Daily Herald proved uncomfortable.
Some readers complained that Low had become a Labour cartoonist.
Others complained that he hadn’t.
That probably means he was doing his job.
In 1953, he moved to the Manchester Guardian, the newspaper that had long been his natural political home.
He was welcomed with delight.
And paid more than its editor.
He continued drawing until shortly before his death in 1963.
By then he had been knighted. He had published books, lectured, broadcast, exhibited and become internationally celebrated. His cartoons had sold by the hundreds of thousands. His style had been imitated around the world.
But his lasting achievement is simpler.
He made pomposity visible.
He showed us the vanity inside power.
He proved that a few strokes of ink could strip away the uniforms, the flags, the speeches and the self-importance.
David Low called caricature “all-in portraiture”.
Not merely what a person looked like.
What that person was.
And that’s what makes the address in Heath Street so extraordinary.
No cabinet meetings were held there. No treaties were signed. No troops were commanded.
Just a man at a drawing board, working and reworking his apparently effortless lines.
But Hitler wanted that man arrested.
Which tells you nearly everything you need to know about the power of a cartoon.
You’ve been listening to the London Calling podcast. It comes to you from London Walks, the world’s oldest urban walking tour company.
The little studio at 13A Heath Street often features on my Hampstead walk.
Maybe come and see it one Sunday morning.
Come and stand outside the place where David Low sharpened his pencil, opened the morning papers and prepared to make the most dangerous men in Europe look ridiculous.
See you tomorrow.