Frank Dickens

Frank William Huline-Dickens (9 December 1931 – 8 July 2016) was a British cartoonist, best known for his strip "Bristow", which ran for 51 years in the Evening Standard and was syndicated internationally. According to Guinness World Records, "Bristow" was the longest running daily cartoon strip by a single author. Dickens received eight awards for "Strip Cartoonist of the Year" from the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain.

Born in Hornsey, London, the son of a painter and decorator, Dickens left school at the age of 16, and began working for his father. He then took a job as a buying clerk in an engineering firm for three months, before in 1946 deciding to pursue an ambition to become a champion racing cyclist. Legend has it that he moved to Paris after his National Service but failed to make a living at cycling, so he tried to make money by selling cycling cartoons to French magazines, including L'Équipe and Paris Match. The part about moving to France is, however, untrue, though much repeated. A self-taught artist, he had his first cartoon published in a British national newspaper, the Sunday Express on 30 September 1959. Work in the Evening Standard, Daily Sketch and Daily Mirror followed, and in December 1960 he began a three-month period at the Sunday Times, where he took his strip "Oddbod". One of the characters in that strip was developed into the bowler-hatted Bristow. The Bristow strip first appeared in regional papers, before being taken up by the Evening Standard on 6 March 1962.

In 1971 Bristow was produced on stage at the ICA, London, starring Freddie Jones, and in 1999 Dickens himself adapted it as a six-part series for BBC Radio 4, featuring Michael Williams, Rodney Bewes and Dora Bryan. Anne Karpf observed in The Guardian: "From cartoon strip to radio series is no longer a large leap, although Frank Dickens's Bristow, about an idle paper-pusher in a large firm, scarcely invites the kind of Superman cartoon radio techniques that have become so familiar. Yet the first in this new Radio 4 series cleverly managed to sound simultaneously knowing and naïf."

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