W HEN Timothy Birdsall, the Spectator's politi- cal cartoonist and star
of That Was The Week, died of leukemia in June he was twenty-seven, and his career as a professional artist had lasted just five years.
timothy
In that time he published a phenomenal number of drawings of every sort. He also produced a vast amount of other work for his own private satisfaction which has not up to now been published.
He drew all sorts of things—his wife, '11 his two young sons, the streets around their home, various sinister animals and insects, his friends, his enemies. And he drew them in all sorts of ways—savagely, whimsi- cally, madly, tenderly—sometimes just to amuse the children.
Even in those five short .years his work went through an astonishing range of developinent. He was at Cambridge at the same time as Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, myself, and most of the other Cambridge 11 humorists, and like all the rest of Some of the characters he drew seem remarkably unpromising material for a cartoonist. One of the heroes of the strip7cartoon he did at Cambridge was a sea-ur- chin—though I think few sea- urchins can have had such expressive fea- tures. Later he became ob- sessed with beetles. The beetles knew perfectly well that they were lords of creation, but they were decent souls, and they did their best to treat inferior species such as human beings humanely (or rather beetley). Still later a huge ‘A pigeon settled .5' among the pages of his sketch-pad, towering over tiny, be-whiskered men they great height by enormous, calm, beautiful, naked women.
In these later sketch-books, too, the head of Sir Charles Snow re- curs, drawn over and over again with the felt pen in one superb swirling line — a pair of these heads ended up on the two Spectator
cover. sync Bamber Ga-sco7gne and I haN been going thiough Timothy's drawings to make a selection of them for a book. Here on this page are one or two of them as an interim instalment. bolising the cultures.
Michael Fray n
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