Willie Rushton

Willie Rushton
Rushton at a charity cricket match, May 1976
Born	William George Rushton (1937-08-18)18 August 1937 Chelsea, London, England
Died	11 December 1996(1996-12-11) (aged 59) Kensington, London, England
Cause of death	Heart attack
Occupation	Comedian, satirist, cartoonist, writer
Years active	1963–1996
Spouse(s)	Arlene Dorgan (m. 1968)

William George Rushton (18 August 1937 – 11 December 1996) was an English cartoonist, satirist, comedian, actor and performer who co-founded the satirical magazine Private Eye.

Rushton was born 18 August 1937 in 3 Wilbraham Place, Chelsea, London, the only son of John and Veronica Rushton, and attended Shrewsbury School, where he was not academically successful but met his future Private Eye colleagues Richard Ingrams, Paul Foot and Christopher Booker. He also contributed to the satirical magazine The Wallopian, (a play on the school magazine name The Salopian) mocking school spirit, traditions and the masters. After school Rushton had to do his two years of national service in the army where he failed officer selection. He later commented "The Army is, God bless it, one of the funniest institutions on earth and also a sort of microcosm of the world. It's split almost perfectly into our class system. Through serving in the ranks I discovered the basic wit of my fellow man – whom basically, to tell the truth, I'd never met before." On leaving the army, he worked in a solicitor's office for a short period.

He was still in contact with his Shrewsbury friends, who had added John Wells to their number and were now running their own humour magazines at Oxford, Parsons Pleasure and Mesopotamia, to which Rushton made many contributions during his frequent visits. A cartoon of a giraffe in a bar saying "The high balls are on me" was not met with approval by everyone in the university administrative quarters. It was Rushton who suggested that Mesopotamia could continue after they left university. During his time as a clerk he had been sending his cartoons out to Punch but none had been accepted. After being knocked over by a bus he quit his clerking, determined not to waste another day.

After almost but not quite being accepted by Tribune (a Labour-supporting journal edited by Michael Foot, Paul's uncle), Rushton found a place at the Liberal News, which was also employing Christopher Booker as a journalist. From June 1960 until March 1961 he contributed a weekly strip, "Brimstone Belcher", following the exploits of the titular journo (a fore-runner of Private Eye's Lunchtime O'Booze), from bizarre skulduggery in the British colonies (where the squaddies holding back the politicised rabble bear a strong resemblance to privates Rushton and Ingrams), travelogues through the US, and the hazards of by-electioneering as the independent candidate for the constituency of Gumboot North. After the strip folded, Rushton still contributed a weekly political cartoon to the Liberal News until mid-1962.