Steve Bell walks with the zombies
To celebrate the publication of If…Stands Up, the award-winning former Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell writes about his first encounters with Margaret Thatcher and other horrors.
I’ve long believed in the importance of reportage in cartooning. There is always a story to be found and told, and some of us do it with pictures. You work out a way of telling the story as you draw, and in a daily strip you build characters in real time. Margaret Thatcher was my first real challenge. I started trying to draw her long before the ‘If…’ strip began in 1981. My first attempt was in a magazine called Broadside in Birmingham in 1978. Broadside was a kind of ‘What’s On’ with added lefty politics (or should that be the other way around?), and I had been peddling my talents as a cartoonist there since we arrived in Birmingham in the mid-seventies. I was an art teacher desperate to get out of teaching, and I hankered to be a cartoonist, to the extent of throwing in my job as number two in the Colouring-In department at Aston Manor school, just downwind of the Ansells brewery and the HP sauce works, and signing on for the six months unemployment benefit, to which I was entitled after my year’s hard graft at Aston Manor.
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I distilled the experience of my year as a teacher into a four-page strip in Committed Comics commissioned by Hunt Emerson at the Arts Lab Press in Brum and called ‘The Legend of Bigfoot’. Meanwhile I was working on an idea for a children’s book about a train that could travel through time. ‘Bigfoot’ was published, and I was paid thirty pounds, but the time-travelling train ran out of steam and ground to a halt. I seemed to thrive on the shorter formats, which was the way my career headed.
My first strip for Broadside was called ‘Maxwell the Mutant’ and was about an ordinary Midlands bloke who mutated every time he drank a pint of mild. He mutated into a punk rocker, a Rasta and, in the Silver Jubilee year of 1977, into Her Majesty the Queen, which really impressed Maxwell’s nemesis, the Leader of Birmingham City Council, Neville Worthyboss. It was modestly successful, in the sense that they kept publishing it, but I never earnt a penny from it, so I decided to get my teeth into Thatcher, who by 1979 was about to become Britain’s first female Prime Minister. The format I chose was a spoof of ‘Crossroads’, a popular TV soap opera with terrible acting and cardboard sets, made and set deep in the Midlands. The strip was every bit as bad as the original soap, but with none of its redeeming qualities of artlessness and wobbly scenery. The caricatures were fairly dismal as well, though my Geoffrey Howe showed promise.
By now, after a great deal of legwork, I had managed to secure some paid cartoon work, firstly writing and drawing regular comic pages for an IPC children’s comic called Whoopee about a bionic boy who, in the manner of Steve Austin, the Billion Dollar Man, had been rebuilt, but badly, as ‘Dick Doobie the Back to Front Man’. I also wrote a letter to Social Work Today, the only locally Birmingham-based magazine I could find, offering my services. I seem to remember using the phrase, ‘you wouldn’t believe how cheap good cartoons and illustrations can be!’ It worked and, as my wife Heather was by now a fully qualified social worker, I knew everything I needed to know about the profession. It was mainly illustration work, but I hankered to do comics for a more grown-up audience. There was ‘Gilbert Gauche Joins the Movement’ and ‘The Adventures of Lord God Almighty’ which ran in the Leveller, ‘The Vicar: Man with a Language Problem’ in Duck Soup and ‘Bella the Lucky Housewife Goes on Holiday’ for the Arts Lab Press again, but none of it paid anything.
My first real lucky break was in June 1979, at the dawn of the Thatcher era, when Time Out, which in those far-off days had a hefty lefty news section edited by Duncan Campbell. He asked me to do a strip, which turned into an allegory of a farm of put-upon animals run by Thatcher and her team, and rapidly became known as ‘Maggie’s Farm’. My caricature of her had not yet gestated, though to be scrupulously fair, Thatcher’s own self-image still had a way to go. There was definitely something around the eyes, but I couldn’t make out what exactly. Her voice was delib-er-ate-ly slo-wing and lowering. Her hair was darkening and becoming more rigid. I went to the Tory conference in Brighton in 1980 and witnessed the ‘lady’s not for turning’ speech, which I distilled into ‘I Walked with The Zombies’.
Within a year Heather and I had escaped both Birmingham and social work and moved to Brighton ourselves, though not necessarily to be closer to the Tories. Penguin were doing a book of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, the Clash asked me to illustrate some of their lyrics on a printed insert in their new album ‘Sandinista’, and Heather had just given birth to our first son, William. Then I got a call from the Guardian. It seemed that they were looking for someone to do a daily strip. They took me on to do a month’s trial, four weeks of six strips, and over that summer, as we prepared to move south, after much trial and error, I came up with the idea for the ‘If…’ strip. It started with Kipling’s famous poem of the same name (Thatcher allegedly kept a volume by her bedside) but instead of Kipling’s deathless imperialist couplets (‘If you can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run/ The earth is yours, and everything that’s in it/And, which is more, you’ll be a man, my son.’) I substituted: ‘If… God was a Social Democrat” and ‘If… Stockbrokers were made of rubber’, and so on.
As it turned out, none of the month’s trial ever got published. They were a kind of insurance policy that was never needed, but the strip got under way in November 1981. It actually found its feet six months later, during the Falklands war, and the ‘If…’ strip never looked back. I found my way through the rigours of doing something for the paper every day (except Sundays) though actually it was dispatched in weekly batches, via British Rail’s Red Star service every Thursday morning for publication the following Monday.
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I found my way around the libel laws and pushed the boundaries of taste and decency, while managing to establish that subediting a cartoon strip is not the same as normal subediting, as it involves forging the author’s handwriting. This was after an egregious episode when the wording of a strip was changed without consulting me, and the whole intended meaning of the strip was upended. It was about former Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen of the SDP. The Editor complained that I had ‘traduced his views’, which was a bit thick, bearing in mind that they had totally traduced my strip without telling me. Peter Preston subsequently wrote to say that I did actually have a point, and that henceforth any changes to the wording would be agreed, as far as humanly possible. This set a very important precedent that lasted almost, but not quite, up to the present.
The simple fact was that, to do the insane amounts of work that I produced for the paper (six, then eight, then ten cartoons a week for a while) was only possible if they trusted me to get on with it, and I trusted them to back me up when necessary. And so it continued for pretty well all the forty-two years that I worked for them.
If… Stands Up is the twentieth and almost certainly the final compilation of a series of strips that began with The If… Chronicles back in 1983, and the book is so called for the simple reason that it does stand up, as a real-time record (albeit occasionally insane) of a particular period in British and world politics. I wouldn’t have got away with it in any other medium than the comic strip, and in no other paper than the Guardian, as it used to be.
Steve Bell has drawn, mainly for the Guardian, for over forty years. He is best known for the daily strip ‘If…’ and has won countless awards. Bell lives and continues to draw in Brighton.
