George Sprod

George Napier Sprod, cartoonist and writer: born Adelaide, South Australia 16 September 1919; married 1961 Francine Humphries (née Dessant, died 1981; one son; marriage dissolved); died Sydney, New South Wales 6 April 2003.

Though a gifted illustrator and writer, George Sprod was perhaps best known in Britain for the cartoons he produced for Punch in the 1950s and 1960s whose offbeat, sometimes dark humour captured so well the inherent absurdity of human life. He was greatly admired by the magazine's editor Malcolm Muggeridge, who once said, "I can't imagine anyone not liking Sprod's drawings."

George Napier Sprod was born in a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1919, the second of four children of Thomas Napier Sprod, a farmer, and Isabelle Knight. After attending Norwood High School in Adelaide, Sprod was sent to Urrbrae Agricultural High School with the intention that he become a farmer. However, despite his lack of any formal art training (though both his parents were amateur artists who specialised in drawing horses), he had set his mind on becoming a cartoonist from early boyhood.

Thus, when he reached the age of 19, after working as a farm-labourer, storeman and nurseryman, he left home in defiance of his family and set off by bicycle for Sydney, some 600 miles away. He sold his bike at Hay, midway to his goal, and bought a rail ticket the rest of the way. Once in Sydney he began submitting drawings to Smith's Weekly and other publications while supporting himself by taking on a variety of jobs including general dogsbody in a guest house and a Catholic school and as a street photographer.

When the Second World War broke out Sprod enlisted as a gunner in the 2/15th Field Regiment of the Australian Artillery, lying about his age since, at 20, he was a year younger than the legal age to join the army. He was later posted to Singapore but was taken prisoner when it fell to the Japanese in 1942.

He then spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war working on the Burma-Siam railway and in Changi jail, Singapore, where he met the British cartoonist and illustrator Ronald Searle. He later admitted that Changi changed his life as it was here that he began drawing in earnest to while away the hours. After producing his own illustrated journal, Smoke-Oh, to cheer up sick fellow POWs, he teamed up with Searle and others to publish a fortnightly prison magazine, The Exile. His experiences of this period were later recollected in a book, Bamboo Round My Shoulder (1982).

After the war Sprod returned to Australia and enrolled briefly in a government scheme to train as an opera singer before returning to drawing. His first success was to sell a story of his war experiences and some of his Changi cartoons to the Sydney Morning Herald. He was then taken on by Frank Packer's Consolidated Press as a creative artist at £13 a week, drawing illustrations and covers for Australian Women's Weekly magazine and occasional political cartoons for the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

In 1949 he moved to London, where he began freelancing joke drawings and illustrations to various publications, including the Daily Sketch, Sunday Express, Sunday Times, Truth, Sunday Dispatch and Lilliput. In 1953 he joined Ronald Searle and his fellow Australian Arthur Horner on the News Chronicle as front-page pocket cartoonist and shared an office with the paper's political cartoonist Vicky (Victor Weisz). At about this time he began his long association with Punch, for whom he also drew topical pocket cartoons and occasional colour covers.

Sprod illustrated a number of books by Punch writers such as Justin Richardson's Backroom Joys (1953), The House About a Man (1959) by the assistant editor Basil Boothroyd, and The Memoirs of Mavis (1960) by Helen Darrell. Others included a book of humorous anecdotes by the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, As I Seem to Remember (1962), and An Explosion of Limericks (1967) by Oscar Wilde's second son, Vyvyan Holland. In 1956 Sprod published the first collection of his own cartoons, Chips off a Shoulder, with an introduction by Malcolm Muggeridge. who singled out one drawing featuring a nudist colony group photograph as being "one of the most hilarious to appear in Punch under my editorship".

In 1961 Sprod married the daughter of a captain in the French merchant navy, Francine Humphries, whom he had met in Brighton, and they had a son. However, by 1968 the couple had separated and Sprod returned to Sydney in March the following year, settling in the King's Cross district which he was later to portray in a book, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross (1990). Here he continued to work as an illustrator, cartoonist, writer, book-reviewer, humorous poet and painter and also published his own collection of drawings of the city, Sprod's Views of Sydney (1981), and an autobiography, Life on a Square-Wheeled Bike (1983).

Primarily a black-and-white artist working in pen and Indian ink, Sprod had a bolder line and a less whimsical approach to drawing than such cartoonist contemporaries as Rowland Emett and Michael ffolkes, with whose "decorative" style his work has sometimes been compared. However, as with them, his humour often involved classical or Victorian allusions, and was characterised by "caryatids, urns, madness and the frenzy behind the cairngorm" (in the words of the Punch historian R.G.G. Price).

Sprod's drawings have been exhibited in London, New York, Sydney and Amsterdam and examples of his work are currently held in the collections of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings. Private collectors have included the Duke of Edinburgh and Sir John Gielgud.

Short, well-built and clean-shaven, and with a full head of brown hair in his youth (as well as a number of tattoos), George Sprod was a quiet but jovial man who always wore a slightly quizzical half-smile. A ready wit, he spoke with a strong Australian accent and in convivial company was prone to burst into song. A keen bookworm and never happier than with a pint of beer in his hand, he was also interested in statues, tombstones and other memorial architecture, and collected Wedgwood china.

Mark Bryant