Those were the days Bud Neill: Yaffayat? Whityatyaffa?
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FOR the uninitiated, “Yaffayat? Whityatyaffa?” is the caption to one of Bud Neill’s best-known pocket cartoons in the Evening Times.
It captures in concise Glaswegian a question asked of an elegantly-dressed yachtsman by, in the words of the Evening Times, “a Glasgow keelie”: did he come one of the nearby yachts and, if so, which one? (In 1997 a Herald writer visiting Cephalonia was floored when a young local woman quoted the caption to him. Turns out she had not long hosted a party of Scots from a chartered yacht who had the slogan emblazoned across their crew sweatshirts).
Ayrshire-born Neill (main image) began writing for the Evening Times in January 1944. Ten years and some 3,000 cartoons later, he admitted he had been astonished when his first cartoon had appeared, and again when another one was published a couple of days later. “Come to think of it,” he wrote, “I have been living in an almost perpetual state of astonishment since then, and I shall probably be very astonished today again if there was anything of mine on Page Two” (There was).
He said one of his favourite cartoon situations featured two women chatting in a close-mouth or on a street corner: “These two beldames have appeared in the majority of my drawings, and it seems to be easier for me to have one auld buddy saying something pithy to another auld buddy than for me to delineate two males in similar conversation. Why this should be I do not know. Is there a psychiatrist in the house?”
In his 1958 book, Dancing In The Streets, Cliff Hanley said Neill “was the first evidence of new indigenous Glasgow humour since J.j.bell and Neil Munro. After the first jolt of incomprehension, Glaswegians started to tear open the Evening Times to gobble the latest Bud Neill titbit, as salty and esoteric and Glasgow as a black puddin’ supper.
“How do you explain the art of a man whose finest product was a squashed drawing of two shapeless things against the background of a square tenement with the caption, ‘Haw Jennifer! Ma kirby’s fell doon a stank!’?”
Hanley also observed the wifie of Neill’s cartoons was capable of rising “to the level of poetry when her inarticulate hunger for beauty drives her to sigh, ‘My, ah like rid herr. Rid herr’s rerr”.
Neill’s most famous character was Lobey Dosser, the sheriff of Calton Creek, in the wild west of Arizona. He debuted in 1949 and Glaswegians took him – and his two-legged horse, El Fideldo, and his arch-enemy, Rank Bajin – to their hearts.
The trio survived Bud’s death in 1970; at length, an idea to erect a Bud Neill memorial in Glasgow was enthusiastically promoted by the Herald Diary’s Tom Shields. After much planning and fundraising, the statue of Lobey, Rank and El Fideldo was unveiled in Woodlands Road in 1992, above.