Our humorous illustrations correspondent Angus Young draws our attention to yet another little-known but highly-influential figure.
The ridiculously-talented Hull-based Gareth Sleightholme (aka Hesir) is probably the city’s best-known current comic book illustrator. His inky fingers are behind three recent Maritime Tales comic books produced as part of the Hull Maritime project as well as his own popular sci-fi comics However, we’re sure Gareth will concede he’s still got some way to go to match the prodigious output of Ern Shaw.
Born in Bean Street in Hull in 1891, Ern spent a lifetime creating colourful cartoon characters and bringing smiles to generations of readers until his death in 1986. His first artistic success came at the age of 12 when he received a prize of five shillings as the winner of a drawing competition organised by the Hull Times newspaper after submitting a sketch of the newly-completed Guildhall.
However, a boyhood ambition to become a train driver ended shortly after leaving school when he spent a week in a railway shed cleaning engines. Returning home every night covered in grease and oil prompted a re-think and he spent the next seven years working in a draper’s shop in Hessle Road. At the same time, young Ern enrolled in a correspondence course in drawing with the Press Art School in London to learn the techniques from professional artists. It would be the only formal artistic training he ever received.
When the First World War began in 1914 he joined the Royal Medical Corps and would later illustrate a regular magazine produced by a military hospital in Reading where he was based. Some of his drawings of operations being performed there were published in the medical journal The Lancet. After the war he initially worked as an illustrator in London before returning to Hull where he started to make a living by drawing and submitting cartoons to local and regional newspapers.
Over the following decades he produced thousands of drawings and developed a speciality in capturing the funny side of life at the city’s three professional sports clubs – Hull City, Hull FC and Hull KR. Many new players felt they had not ‘arrived’ until Ern had featured them in one of his cartoons. A press box regular, his artwork also regularly featured in match day programmes.
Away from sport, he created long-running cartoon strips for several national magazines featuring animal characters and came up with his own family of mischievous pixies called Tiny, Mac, Toodles, Mick and Twanky known as Dingbats who appeared in annuals, colouring books and games. His first Dingbats annual published in the 1950s sold over 100,000 copies.
Other illustrated comic books included The Daily Deeds of Sammy the Scout and The Jolly Gnomes Annual while, keen to pass on his knowledge as a cartoonist, he also wrote an instructional book called How To Become A Successful Cartoonist, A Guide To Aspiring Artists with a foreword supplied by Percy Bradshaw, his old friend and principal of the Press Art School.
Ern’s incredible output extended to puzzles, card and magic games, jigsaws, greeting cards, board games and advertising but it wasn’t until 1967 at the age of 76 that he staged his first solo exhibition – at the Darby and Joan Hall in Cottingham.
In 1974 he appeared on the TV game show Quick On The Draw hosted by Bob Monkhouse and a year later was invited as a guest of honour to the Walt Disney Studios in Los Angeles where he was given a special behind-the-scenes tour. “I had always admired Walt Disney’s work. Well, they don’t come much better or bigger than that,” he said after returning home.
By then, he was officially acknowledged as the country’s oldest working cartoonist and was made an honorary life member of the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain.
He died aged 95 having worked as a freelance cartoonist for over 70 years. In that time, it’s estimated around 25,000 of his cartoons were published in newspapers and magazines. A posthumous exhibition of his work was staged in Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery in 2010, titled “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” – a phrase borrowed from Percy Bradshaw’s foreword in Ern’s own 1946 book giving tips and advice to aspiring cartoonists.