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Treasures of our Memorial Library Cartoon Characters to Cherish Cartoon characters and their subjects often have a strictly limited appeal in terms of years, months or even weeks. Like hackneyed jokes, their messages may be very transient. Outstanding exceptions to this dictum are the cartoons of Bruce Charles Bairnsfather, who was best known for his drawings of three Cockney characters, "Old Bill, Alf and Bert". This trio were old soldiers of the line in World War One. Their humour was of a dour, down-to-earth type, but for decades it delighted the British public, both civilian and military. In the midst of the horrors of war, with its fears, its sorrows and its deprivations, Bairnsfather's characters brought momentary relief and wry smiles to millions. Bainsfather, the son of a soldier, was born in India in 1888 and died in 1959. Before the "War To End All Wars" he served a brief spell in the British Army, then left for a short period in an Art course. But in August 1914, he enlisted again. Soon he was serving in the trenches in France. Despite the manifold dangers and miseries of this milieu, Bairnsfather's sense of humour continued strong. He sketched the first of his "Old Bill" cartoons while actually in the trenches, and impulsively offered it to "The Bystander" of London, an upper-class weekly. Soon he was wounded and sent to hospital at Boulogne. While a patient there, he saw his cartoon reproduced in "The Bystander". Thus began a fertile field of humorous drawings, with pithy comments, which soon endeared the artist to the suffering British public. They appeared under the title, "Fragments From France". Soon, Bairnsfather was appointed a commissioned staff artist, and was posted successively to various fronts and officially encouraged to publicize his winsome characters. They quickly became, as one observer commented, "a craze". At l/6d' for a copy of "Fragments", the British public eagerly awaited each new issue, which offered about three dozen cartoons per copy. In the fourth edition of "Fragments From France", the editorial reads in part as follows: "Just as, umpty years ago, people used to look forward with an almost greedy anxiety to the day when the next monthly part of the "Pickwick Papers" was due to appear, so now they worried the bookstall newsvendors to know when the next volume of "Fragments" would be ready." That long-suffering trio, Old Bill, Alf and Bert, became as immortal through Bairnsfather's pencil as those other "Soldiers Three" had been through Rudyard Kipling's pen. In December 1916, Bairnsfather was attached to the Intelligence Department of the War Office and for the rest of the war continued his considerable contributions in supporting the sorely tried morale of British civilians and Service personnel. After the Armistice, he drew for a number of publications in England and the U.S.A., "but did not maintain his earlier popularity". During WW2, he served as an official cartoonist with the U.S. Army in Europe. (Continued on page 4)