Clive Uptton

Clive Uptton, cartoonist, illustrator and painter: born London 12 March 1911; twice married; died London 11 February 2006.

Clive Uptton was the last of a generation of political cartoonists working for national daily newspapers in Fleet Street during the Second World War. A contemporary of David Low, Vicky, Giles, Zec, Strube, Whitelaw and Illingworth, Uptton was the political cartoonist on the Daily Sketch and Sunday Graphic between 1940 and 1942. He later worked for the Ministry of Information producing propaganda drawings and paintings and after the war became a successful illustrator, poster artist and painter.

He was born in Highbury, London, in 1911, the son of Clive Upton, a touch-up artist for Swain's engravers who later worked for the Daily Mail. Educated at Brentwood Grammar School, Essex, Clive junior left at the age of 16 to study at the Southend Art School and then at the Central School of Art in London, but turned professional before completing his studies. (He later also studied at Heatherley's.)

Some of his earliest paid work was as an illustrator for the Strand Magazine (notably of stories by Margery Allingham and Valentine Williams). However, he also contributed regularly to Good Housekeeping, Woman's Illustrated (including stories by Barbara Cartland), Tit-Bits, Tatler, Radio Times, Look & Learn, Sphere (including covers), John Bull (including covers) and others. To avoid confusion with another illustrator called Upton, he added an extra "t" to his surname in the 1930s.

For the Owen Aves and later Clement Danes press agencies in London, Clive Uptton produced advertisements for GEC, Johnnie Walker whisky, Mars, Bovril, Guinness, Horlicks, Kelloggs and Nestlé, and worked on the "Beer is Best" campaign. He designed book jackets and drew illustrations for UK and US publishers, and was sent by the Colonial Office to Ghana to produce instructional booklets about how to grow better cocoa beans.

When the Daily Mail's political cartoonist Poy (Percy Fearon) retired in 1938, Uptton applied for the job, but was told he did not have sufficient experience (his friend Leslie Illingworth was taken on instead). Despite this, two years later he became political cartoonist on the Daily Sketch and Sunday Graphic and later worked for the Ministry of Information and National Savings Committee producing propaganda cartoons, drawings and paintings. He also served in the Home Guard.

Perhaps Uptton's best-known wartime work was his large and prophetic D-Day landings drawing, "This is the Year" (originally commissioned by ICI) and "We Kneel Only to Thee" (published in the Sunday Graphic), showing a kneeling soldier in church - both of which were widely reproduced as posters.

Uptton later won prizes for his posters in the National Outdoor Advertising Awards in 1958 and 1959. He continued to work as a landscape and portrait painter (commissions included portraits of Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden) and as a book illustrator (notably for Warner Press) until 1987, when his eyesight began to fail.

Uptton was a left-handed artist, but wrote with his right hand. As well as his pen, brush and ink drawings, he liked to work in oils, watercolours and acrylics. For his cartoons, he worked on an angled drawing-board and produced three or four pencil roughs on cartridge paper, one of which would then be chosen by the editor and drawn up in ink. Though no collection of his work was published, a number of his wartime drawings were republished by the Daily Sketch as large (12¹/2 x 10¹/2in) prints on stout card and sold to readers at 6d each. Examples of his work are held in the collections of the Imperial War Museum, the London Press Club, the National Archives at Kew and the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at the University of Kent.

Tall, thin and fit (he enjoyed playing golf and darts, and regularly used an exercise bike until well into his nineties), Clive Uptton was a modest man, with a keen sense of humour. He was a pipe-smoker in his youth, enjoyed a glass of whisky and was fond of dogs. A former committee member of the Chelsea Arts Club, he was also a member of the Savage Club and the London Sketch Club (where a silhouette of him by Harry Riley can be seen in the club's frieze of celebrated artists).

Mark Bryant