Osbert Lancaster

Sir Osbert Lancaster, CBE (4 August 1908 – 27 July 1986) was an English cartoonist, author, art critic and stage designer, best known to the public at large for his cartoons published in the Daily Express. Interested in art and architectural history and an activist for conservation, much of his work parodied British history and trends in the arts.

Lancaster was born in London, and educated at St Ronan's School, and then at Charterhouse and Lincoln College, Oxford. At Oxford he became friends with John Betjeman and drew cartoons for the university magazine Cherwell. 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 the Slade School of Art in London.

Lancaster initially worked alongside 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 single-panel, single-column topical 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 Lancaster drew some 10,000 cartoons over a period of 40 years.

During World War II, Lancaster worked in press censorship, 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 Lancaster 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.

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