Cartoonist of the century

Mark Bryant salutes Osbert Lancaster, satirist and gifted architectural artist

This article was originally published in the July 2026 edition of The Oldie magazine.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Sir Osbert Lancaster CBE (born in 1908), who died on 27th July 1986. His witty pocket cartoons, a book reviewer in The Times once said, "shine on the daily page like good deeds in a naughty world”.

As well as his topical drawings which ran in the Daily Express for nearly half a century — featuring Maudie, Countess of Littlehampton and her circle — he was a diplomat, illustrator, author, architectural historian, theatre designer and painter.

The son of a City businessman who was killed at the Battle of the Somme, he was born in Notting Hill, London. His grandfather, Sir William Lancaster, was deputy chairman of the Prudential Assurance Company and his mother, the flower painter Clare Bracebridge Manger, was a former pupil of G F Watts.

After Charterhouse (his headmaster pronounced him irretrievably gauche), he enrolled at the Byam Shaw School of Art for a year. He then studied English at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he contributed caricatures and humorous articles to Cherwell.

He left with a fourth-class degree and, after failing to qualify as a barrister, entered Oxford's Ruskin School of Art (1929-30). He then studied stage design under Vladimir Polunin (formerly Diaghilev's designer) at the Slade in London. There he met and married his first wife, Karen, daughter of Sir Austen Harris, vice-chairman of Lloyds Bank. They had a son and a daughter.

Next came a period working as a freelance illustrator, designing posters for London Transport and others, before he joined the staff of the Architectural Review (1934-39) whose assistant editor was John Betjeman, a university friend.

Osbert's spoof monthly guide to a fictional seaside resort later formed the basis for an illustrated book, Progress at Pelvis Bay (1936), followed by two more architectural satires, Pillar to Post (1938) — introducing terms such as ‘Stockbrokers' Tudor' and 'Pont Street Dutch' — and Homes Sweet Homes (1939).

In 1938, he began contributing to the Daily Express. The following year, John Rayner, its features editor, invited him to draw single-column cartoons on the European model. Lancaster called these pocket cartoons after the new pocket battleships which, though small, still packed a punch.

The first one appeared in Tom Driberg's William Hickey column on 1st January 1939. They later moved to the front page. He drew some 10,000 in all. During the war, he also sketched large political cartoons for the Sunday Express signed Bunbury', after the imaginary character in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

Lancaster was also employed by the Ministry of Information's overseas propaganda department and the Foreign Office's news department while working as art critic for The Observer.

Meanwhile, he continued to send cartoons to the Express. In the foreword to Signs of the Times (1961), he thanks HM Foreign Office, in whose time and on whose best cream-laid minute paper so many of the wartime drawings were made.' In 1944, he was sent to the British Embassy in Athens as press attaché.

After the war, he continued to draw cartoons (including caricatures for the Strand Magazine), painted murals and designed advertisements (including for Krug champagne.)

 In 1947, he was appointed Sydney Jones Lecturer in Art at Liverpool University. He worked with John Piper on designs for the Festival of Britain, 75 years ago. On Piper's recommendation, he designed his first stage set for Sadler's Wells. He later produced designs for Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House.

Lancaster wrote and illustrated three fictional histories of the Littlehampton family — The Saracen's Head 1948), Draynflete Revealed (1949) and The Littlehampton Bequest (1973), tied in to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

The star of Lancaster's cartoon world was Maudie Littlehampton. She has been compared with David Low's Colonel Blimp and Carl Giles's Grandma.

Maudie, her monocled husband, Willy, and their three children, headed a cast including Great-Aunt Edna, Father O'Bubblegum, Canon Fontwater, Mrs Frogmarch and Mrs Rajagojollibarmi.

Lancaster wrote two volumes of autobiography — All Done from Memory (1963) and With an Eye to the Future (1967) — and illustrated works by Nancy Mitford, Max Beerbohm, Saki, Anne Scott-James (his second wife, mother of the journalist Max Hastings by her first husband) and others.

A founder member of the British Cartoonists' Association in 1966, he was appointed CBE in 1953 and knighted in 1975. He retired in 1981 and died at his home in Chelsea five years later.

In 2008, to celebrate the centenary of his birth, an exhibition was held at the Wallace Collection. A blue plaque was erected at his birthplace in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, in 2015.

He was a gentle satirist. His Times obituary called him an 'urbane castigator of modern mores. It went on: 'Although he could be extremely sharp, Lancaster was never venomous.

"The most polite and unsplenetic of cartoonists, he was never a crusader, remaining always a witty, civilised critic with a profound understanding of the vagaries of human nature. 

©The Oldie