As the potent proprietor of the London Daily Express ("The Biggest Newspaper in the World"), and the London Evening Standard, small, twinkly William Maxwell Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook, makes it a rule to hire the best cartoonists and columnists money can buy and let them contradict and ridicule his editorial policies as much as they like. No Beaverbrook employe enjoys this unique privilege more than Cartoonist David Low of the Evening Standard. Last week there arrived in the U. S. copies of Low's Political Parade with Colonel Blimp,* which made most U. S. newspaper publishers stare with wonderment at Lord Beaverbrook's tolerance, most U. S. cartoonists twitch with envy at David Low's gall.
Colonel Blimp, red-faced, walrus-mustached, paunchy Tory (see cuts, p. 22), is Low's idea of Lord Beaverbrook's typical subscriber. Again & again Low shows Blimp, steaming in a Turkish bath, heartily agreeing with Lord Beaverbrook on policy, only to reduce that policy to an absurdity. Samples:
"Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right! A conference should be held at once for the U. S. A. to pay back the money Europe owes her."
"Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right!
We must give up the League of Nations until it promises to have nothing to do with foreigners."
"Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right! As soon as the League has declared peace on Abyssinia, peace will break out somewhere else."
Says Cartoonist Low in a foreword to his Political Parade collection: "I am unable to declare that 'the characters in this book are entirely fictitious. . . .' I am perfectly sure that Colonel Blimp exists, obstinately and ubiquitously. . . . He inclines to the status quo ante-almost-everything. . . . All social and political movements are plots to Blimp. Restlessness among the lower orders is always due to a plot hatched by a number of bearded persons ten thousand miles away. . . . I do not believe in the necessity of plots. No plot would be required to make Colonel Blimp uneasy if he were deprived of his dinner. . . ."
Last year Lord Beaverbrook remarked: "Let us shake the dust of quarrelsome Europe from our feet and turn to our kith and kin in the U. S." With this as a theme Cartoonist Low pictured his boss as a small puzzled pilgrim landing in the U. S. on the "new Mayflower." Before him stood a huge crowd, labeled "Swedish Americans," "Norwegian Americans," "Italian Americans," "Polish Americans," "Slovene Americans," "French Americans," "German Americans," "African Americans," "Magyar Americans." All wore tortoise-shell glasses.
Unique is Low's combination of wide political information, daring draughtsmanship and vivid satirical gift. To depict the collapse of the 1934 Disarmament Conference he shows a drooling crocodile, backed by tigers and wolves, telling a flock of sheep: "My friends, we have failed. We just couldn't control your warlike passions." To show the "Progress of Man, 1935 A. D." a Low hog faces a naked "Homo Sapiens" in a gas mask across a trough of "Nationalism Swill" and says: "They kill me to eat, but you, poor sap, they kill you just for your own good."