Ward's Book of Days.
Pages of interesting anniversaries.
What happened on this day in history.
JULY 10th
On this day in history in 1917, was born Reg Smythe.
Smythe
was a cartoonist, who created Andy Capp, the beer-drinking, indolent,
dole-scrounging pigeon-fancier, who with his cartoon wife, Flo, set a bad
example to the British working class.
Reginald
Smyth, he became Smythe when he took up cartooning, was born on 10th
July 1917 at Hartlepool, the son of Richard Smyth, a shipyard worker, and
Florrie, née Pearce. His parents became the basis for Andy Capp and his
long-suffering wife, Flo. He was educated at Galley's Field School,
Hartlepool, leaving at 14 to take up a job as an errand boy, a post which he
held for only a few months, before joining his father on unemployment benefit.
When
war broke out in 1939, Smythe signed on with the Northumberland Fusiliers,
where he served with distinction, seeing active service in North Africa. He
remained in the army for a short time after the war, becoming involved in
entertaining the troops. Here he discovered that he had an artistic talent for
designing posters for theatrical productions.
After
leaving the army, Smythe became a postal clerk, married a woman called Vera,
and settled down to a life of boredom and respectability, enlivened only by
amateur dramatics, for which he produced the posters as well as playing minor
roles. His work attracted the attention of a literary agent who encouraged him
to write cartoons for which, at the time, there was a ready market. He produced cartoons for
Speedway World inventing motor racing characters including Sid Sprocket, a daredevil speed fanatic.
He soon
landed a job on the Daily Mirror, creating sketches for the Laughter at Work series. In 1957, the Mirror, asked employees for suggestions to boost their flagging
Northern readership. On a visit to his parents in Hartlepool, he conceived the
idea of his celebrated creation, Andy Capp.
Capp was a beer-drinker, who lived off the dole, and spent his days in the pub or the snooker hall, and lived off credit and never paid the rent. He was supported by his long suffering wife, Flo, who put up with his sloth, subsidised his alcohol and tobacco addiction, never complained about his ubiquitous pigeons and went out to work to sustain him in his prolific habits. He was distinguished as a northerner by his flat cap, which he wore even in bed, and the industrial setting to the drawings, with unwholesome public houses and terraced houses, visited weekly by a rent-collector, an assiduous individual, whose ability to collect from Capp did not deter him from continuing the effort.
Andy Capp’s popularity was instantaneous and enduring. He first appeared in the Mirror’s northern edition in 1957, and from 1960 appeared 7 days a week in Mirror publications, continuously until Smythe’s death in 1998. Despite his northern attributes, he became popular throughout the world and was translated into 13 languages.
Smythe then abandoned his other cartoon characters. He made a comfortable living with Andy Capp, and returned to Hartlepool, where he was known to enjoy beer and cigarettes, but not with the extreme capacity as his outrageous creation. At the age of 70, he died on 13th June 1998, after a brief illness, and left a year’s worth of cartoons for posthumous publication.
©2006 Ward’s Book of Days