Osbert Lancaster
Sir Osbert Lancaster (August 4, 1908, London - July 27,1986, Chelsea) was a cartoonist, author, art critic and stage designer, best known to the public at large for his cartoons published in the Daily Express.
He was educated at Charterhouse and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he became friends with John Betjeman, drew cartoons for the university magazine Cherwell, and developed his trademark upper-class persona. He graduated with a fourth-class degree in English after an extra year beyond the normal three years of study. Intending a career in law, he failed his bar exams and instead entered Slade School of Art.
He initially worked wth Betjeman at the Architectural Review. In 1936 he published Progress at Pelvis Bay, the first of his many books of social and architectural satire.
In 1939 he became cartoonist at the Daily Express, where he pioneered the Pocket Cartoon, a topical single-panel single-column drawing appearing on the front page, since imitated in several British newspapers. In these he sympathetically mocked the British upper classes, personified by his characters William (8th Earl of Littlehampton, formerly Viscount Draynflete) and his wife Maudie. During his Express career he drew some 10,000 cartoons over a period of 40 years.
In World War II he worked for the press censorship bureau, then in Greece as a Foreign Office press attaché. During the war years, his cartoons provided comic relief from the privations of rationing and bombing raids. After the war he published Classical Landscape with Figures (1947), The Saracen's Head (1948) and Drayneflete Revealed (1949), the last dealing with the Littlehamptons' architectural and artistic inheritances. Along with The Littlehampton Bequest (1973, foreword by Sir Roy Strong), it provided a humorous and satirical, but very well-informed, survey of architectural and aesthetic trends in British and European history.
In 1951 he worked with John Piper on designs for the Festival of Britain, folllowed by stage design work for opera, ballet and threatre including productions at Sadler's Wells and Glyndebourne, among them Frederick Ashton's production of La Fille mal gardée.
Lancaster himself was firmly from the British upper middle classes - as his autobiographies All Done From Memory (1963) and With an Eye to the Future (1967), and all his books illustrated by himself, make clear. In later life, it was observed that he affected a caricatured persona similar to those depicted in his drawings. His attitude to the British aristocracy was therefore tinged by envy; so it was only appropriate when he was granted a knighthood in 1975 - the only cartoonist to date (2006) to have received such an honour.
He was the illustrator of many other books including Noblesse Oblige (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1973, edited by Nancy Mitford, and the Parkinson's law series written by C. Northcote Parkinson.
He was married twice: to Karen Elizabeth Harris (d. 1964); and in 1967 to the journalist Ann Scott-James. His grandson (also named Osbert Lancaster) is an executive director of the Centre for Human Ecology, an independent think-tank.
Apart from his knighthood, his honours include a
He was fondly summarised in his Times obituary: "The most polite and unsplenetic of cartoonists, he was never a crusader, remaining always a witty, civilized critic with a profound understanding of the vagaries of human nature".[1]
He is buried at West Winch, Norfolk.
References
- Bevis Hillier, "Lancaster, Sir Osbert (1908–1986)", rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 17 July 2007
- ^ Obituary of Sir Osbert Lancaster, The Times, London, July 29, 1986
Selected publications
- Drayneflete Revealed (1949) - a humorous history of British architecture, tracing the development of 'Draynflete' over the centuries.
- Here of All Places
- Façades and Faces (London, John Murray, 1950)
- Sailing to Byzantium: an architectural companion (London, John Murray, 1969)
- All Done from Memory (1963) and With an Eye to the Future (1973), autobiography.
External links
- Osbert Lancaster, British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent
- Biography, American Ballet Theatre
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