English WW1

This album contains postcards showing cartoons and images from the WW1 period and earlier (both comic/satirical and propaganda) by other artists/publishers, including Bamforth & Co., D G Buxton (1884-1951), E T W Dennis (1847-1923), Ernest Ibbetson (1877-1959), Reg Carter (1886-1949), Fred Spurgin (1882-1966) and others.

Bamforth & Company of Holmfirth, Yorkshire, England, was a prolific producer of specialty postcards between 1900 and 1920 (see Bamforth & Co).  One of their most popular lines of cards was the Song Cards of the First World War. Over 600 sets were mass produced using verses of popular songs and featuring live models.

Arthur Butcher (1889-1956) - Illustrator born in Streatham, London the son of a florist. During World War I he served as a sapper and drew many images, often of nurses and wounded soldiers as well as some glamour cards often in an art-deco style, that were reproduced as postcards.

D G Buxton (1884-1951) - Dudley Graham Buxton was born on 27th November 1884 in Upper Holloway, Islington, London.  It is not clear when his first professional postcard designs were published, but an early example is a set of cards for the Rapid Photo Printing Company published in 1909. These were a series of monochrome cartoons featuring the Edwardian fad for rollerskating rinks, under the heading "The Sensations of a Learner”.

By 1913 Buxton was producing full-colour cartoons for postcard publishers Inter-Art, A V N Jones & Co and J Beagles & Co. With the outbreak of war in 1914 postcards looked to morale-boosting pictures and Buxton provided illustrations ranging from propaganda to cute kids mirroring contemporary issues.  However, his best work remained the depiction of comic characters in recognisable situations. He died in 1951 at Richmond on Thames.

E T W Dennis (1847-1923) - Edward Thomas West Dennis was a Quaker who owned the Mercury weekly newspaper in Scarborough. His company produced the first picture postcard in England in 1894 (of North Bay Scarborough, the first with the explicit heading “post card”). The firm’s “Dainty Series” ran from about 1902 – 1910.

Ernest Ibbetson (1877-1959) - Ibbetson was a military artist who captured the essence of the British Army in both ceremonial and active service.

Douglas Tempest (1887-1954) - Tempest began work designing comic images for Bamforth & Co in 1912, including military-related social comment cartoons like these and continued to produce cards for Bamforth until his death in 1954.

Reg Carter (1886-1949) - Reginald Arthur Lay Carter, known as Reg, had a studio built at the bottom of his garden before WW1 and started publishing his best-known postcard series “The Southwold Railway Cartoons” ’.  During WW1 he produced many more postcards gently lampooning army life.

Fred Spurgin (1882-1966) - Poster designer Frederick Spurgin was born Izydor Spurgin the son of a watch and jewellery repairer in Latvia, Primorsky then part of Russia.  He was a prolific British postcard illustrator of the First World War period.