BIOGRAPHY:Osbert Lancaster was the quintessential Englishman, and this book celebrates a charming cartoonist who 'added to the excitement of life' Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, by James Knox, Francis Lincoln, 224pp, £25
THE ENGLISH DELIGHT in nominating their "national treasures", the worthies who can do no wrong in the eyes of the public. A "Treasure" is named, and "Ah! Bless!" the public cries. The likes of Alan Bennett and Stephen Fry are up there on the plinth now, with Twiggy and Nigella, and a plethora of less-than-galactic luminaries.
A generation ago, Osbert Lancaster - pocket cartoonist, artist, dandy, writer and wit - joined his great friend John Betjeman in that pantheon which had "National Institutions" inscribed over its Corinthian portals and, for what it's worth, he was worth it.
His working day in later life - he died in 1986 at 78 - was typical of the man. In the mornings, he worked at home in London, robed in one of his large collection of exotic dressing gowns, collected on travels in the Middle East. This was time spent on freelance work such as book covers and illustration. At noon "he would dress and prepare to face the world".
Enter, or rather, exit the dandy. He left home - Eaton Square, where else? - "at lunch time, immaculately dressed, for one of his beloved London clubs, before making his way to Fleet Street" and the Daily Express, where he had drawn his first pocket cartoon on January 1st, 1939. He was still at it 40 years on.
An Express colleague described his entrance: "When Osbert arrived puffing and pottering through the long editorial passages, there came with him the echo of an earlier age . . . the dark suit, the flower in the lapel, the Edwardian moustaches a-quiver, eyes glinting with gleeful mischief. The usual atmosphere of contrived chaos surrounded him: 'not a taxi cab in sight between Park Lane and Piccadilly, I assure you . . . monstrous . . . monstrous.' Then, pencil in hand, he sat and went through the evening papers with infinite care, chuckling, clucking, sighing. At last, he began to draw."
His drawings are there in sizeable numbers in this book: a clatter of cartoons, sketches, caricatures of friends and literary London, travel, architecture, theatre, fashion - he had a wonderful eye for lissom ladies long of limb, and the era of miniskirts and hotpants - book jackets, jeux d'esprit and Christmas cards. The book is published to coincide with the exhibition of Lancaster's work at the Wallace Collection, which runs until January 11th, 2009.
LANCASTER WAS well-versed in the English traditions of illustration, which he first discovered at school through the work of William Thackeray, John Leech and Max Beerbohm, Charterhouse pupils all. "The English," Lancaster wrote, "are a nation of illustrators . . . for us 'art for art's sake', 'significant form' etc are far less potent and productive slogans than 'every picture tells a story'. All our best artists, or nearly all (Rowlandson, Hogarth and frequently Sickert) are raconteurs".
His architectural fancies are well worth thorough study. Betjeman had taken him on "church crawls" when they were at Oxford. He spent holidays in central Europe "sharing to the full the contemporary passion for the baroque". Then he joined the staff of the Architectural Review and began to lampoon the greed and philistinism of councils and developers who were responsible for the mutilation, both actual and threatened, under way in towns and cities across Britain.
He came up with some brilliant names for styles of housebuilding: Scottish Baronial, Greenery Yallery, Pont Street Dutch, Stockbrokers' Tudor among them. He would have had some pithy things to say about Dublin with the gunboat LE Philistine now moored on the Liffey, shelling the city, and about that tawdry tower of tarnished tinfoil in O'Connell Street, the Spike.
The Christmas cards well illustrate Lancaster's wit and charm, and they make an excellent partner to his contemporary Edward Ardizzone's Christmas offerings. One from 1963, and great fun, is of his most famous creation Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton, in centre stage in a pantomime production of The Fairy Dell, recumbent upon a hovering cloud, amidst an attendant throng of corps de ballet and portly fairies on wires. Flanking stagehands haul on ropes while hubby Willy dithers in the wings. A bottle of Bass stands on an upended hamper.
Another card is of a house in "Second Empire Renaissance" style, occupied by a lady of the Edwardian era: she sits amid aspidistras on the fourth floor at one end of a speaking tube. On the ground floor is her butler holding the mouthpiece of the tube to the warbling voices of a trio of carol-singers. The devil is in the detail.
The biography that bobs and weaves around the drawings is serviceable, if not particularly illuminating about the man. Osbert "added to the excitement of life" certainly, as his friends claimed, but his second wife, Anne, said: "He hated being asked about his private feelings, loved being asked about his work". Typical Englishman there, then.
• Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, by James Knox, Francis Lincoln, 224pp, £25
• Andy Barclay is an author and journalist