Drawing on experience
THE NEC Antiques for Everyone fair runs from April 5-8 and readers will receive two tickets for the price of one (£16 including parking) on production of a copy of this newspaper. inscription found on the underside of some Bairnsfather ware which reads: “Made by the girls of Staffordshire during the winter of 1917 when the boys were in the trenches fighting for liberty and civilisation.” Examples are prized today. A small vase with the “Debris Of War” border. Old Bill appears on the reverse looking cynically at the army issue tin of plum and apple economy jam, with the inscription “When the ‘ell is it going to be strawberry”.
Captain (Charles) Bruce Bairnsfather (1888-1959) was born in India into a military family. He arrived in England in 1895 to be educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho! and then at Stratford-upon-Avon.
He failed entrance exams to Sandhurst and Woolwich Academies but still intent on a military career, he joined the Cheshire Regiment, only to resign in 1907 to become an artist. He studied under the illustrator John Hassall, who ran the New Art School and School of Poster Design in Kensington.
Artistic success continued to evade him, however, and he found work first as an electrical engineer, a job that took him to the Old Memorial Theatre, Stratford, where he met the novelist Marie Corelli.
Corelli introduced him to Thomas Lipton, the millionaire Glasgow merchant, who employed him to draw advertising sketches for his famous Lipton Tea. Further commissions followed for Player’s Cigarettes, Keene’s Mustard and Beecham’s Pills.
On the outbreak of the Great War, Bairnsfather joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and served with a machine gun unit in France until 1915, when he was hospitalised with shell shock and hearing damage sustained during the fighting at Ypres.
He was subsequently posted to the 34th Division HQ on Salisbury Plain, where he further developed his humorous series for the Bystander.
Many of his cartoons were collected in his first book Fragments From France, published in 1914 and the autobiographical Bullets & Billets (1916). The undoubted star was Old Bill, whom Bairnsfather described in the latter publication as “Discovered in the Alluvial Deposits of Southern Flanders. Feeds Almost Exclusively on Jam and Water Biscuits. Hobby: Filling Sandbags, on Dark and Rainy Nights”.
Despite objections to Bairnsfather’s “vulgar caricature” in some quarters, his drawings proved hugely popular with the troops and gave a massive sales boost to the Bystander, which ran a weekly series of his cartoons from 1915. His success in raising morale led to his promotion to captain and a War Office appointment to draw for other Allied forces.
Old Bill continued to appear in new cartoons during the Second World War, but no work was forthcoming from the War Office. Instead, Bairnsfather became the official cartoonist to the American forces in Europe, his drawings appearing in the US magazines Stars and Stripes and Yank. He lived at Clun, near allied airbases in Shropshire, and is said to have painted some of the cartoon art on the nose cones of American bombers.
However, his art was very much of its time. His obituary in The Times described him as being “fortunate in possessing a talent which suited almost to the point of genius one particular moment and one particular set of circumstances; and he was unfortunate in that he was never able to adapt, at all happily, his talent to new times and new circumstances”.
Old Bill commemorative pottery is widely collected but quite hard to find. As it was produced as utility ware for the home, most pieces were eventually broken or lost, and it is difficult to find pieces that are still in good condition.
However, The Pottery Gazette also made a rather prophetic observation, commenting that “though people are likely to purchase these various articles for the ostensible purpose for which they were fabricated, it is almost inevitable that most people will want to put by pieces of this ware as a reminder to their children and children’s children of the most stressful period in the world’s history”.