Wally Fawkes
| Wally Fawkes | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Walter Ernest Fawkes 21 June 1924 Vancouver, Canada |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for |
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Walter Ernest "Wally" Fawkes (born 21 June 1924 in Vancouver, Canada) is a British-Canadian jazz clarinetist and a satirical cartoonist. As a cartoonist, he generally worked under the name of 'Trog' until failing eyesight forced him to retire from cartooning in 2005 at the age of 81 to concentrate solely on his clarinet playing.
Fawkes was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1924, but left with his family for a new life in Britain in 1931. Enthused by comic books from a young age, Fawkes left school at the age of fourteen to take up a scholarship to study at Sidcup Art School. After 18 months he was forced to leave art school due to financial restraints. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Fawkes was first employed painting camouflage onto factory roofs in an attempt to hide them from enemy bombing. A bout of pleurisy made Fawkes ineligible for service and he was instead employed by the Coal Commission working on maps of coal seams. In 1942 he entered an art competition that was adjudicated by the Daily Mail's chief cartoonist Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, who found him work with the Clement Davies advertising agency. In 1945 Illingworth had found Fawkes work at the Daily Mail drawing column-breaks and decorative illustrations.
It was during the war years that Fawkes began playing in jazz bands. He once joked that due to the amount of time spent in underground air-raid shelters that people living in London were becoming troglodytes, and he took up this name for one of his early jazz bands Wally Fawkes and the Troglodytes. After the group disbanded Fawkes adopted 'Trog' as his pen-name. In 1947 Fawkes took a weekly course at the Camberwell School of Art in London where fellow students included Humphrey Lyttelton and Francis Wilford-Smith. Fawkes had been a member of George Webb's Dixielanders, a semi-professional revivalist jazz band that featured Lyttelton on trumpet, since 1944. When Lyttelton left the Dixielanders in January 1948 to form his own jazz band, Fawkes went with him and stayed with the band until 1956, by which time it had evolved from "revivalism" into "mainstream". Not that Fawkes minded that: his own bands from then on could be broadly described as "mainstream". He has re-united with Lyttelton periodically ever since, and, though highly talented on his instrument, remains (in the best sense of the term) an "amateur". He has never lost his admiration for the playing of Sidney Bechet (with whom he recorded, as part of Lyttelton's band, in 1949); but he has always been his own man on the clarinet, and not just a Bechet clone. He played with George Melly and John Chilton in the Feetwarmers band in the early 1970s
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