David Austin

Self-taught cartoonist admired throughout Fleet Street

David Austin was one of the most successful pocket and strip cartoonists of his generation. As well as working for the Mail on Sunday, Daily Telegraph, New Scientist and Spectator, he produced a daily front-page drawing for The Guardian for 15 years and his comic strip "Hom Sap", set in Ancient Rome, ran in Private Eye for 35 years.

Martin David Austin was born in 1935 in Lavendon, near Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, the elder of two children of Jack Austin, the part-owner of a shoe factory, and his wife Toni. He had a younger sister, Judy. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Rochford, near Southend-on-Sea, Essex, and David was educated at Southend High School for Boys. He later studied Chemistry at Leicester University and spent his National Service in the RAF as a quartermaster, stationed in Britain.

His first job was as an industrial chemist, working for Esso's Fawley oil refinery on Southampton Water. However, he disliked the work and resigned in 1966 to study as a teacher at Reading University. In 1969, he moved to London and took up a teaching post at the John Milton Primary School, Battersea, and then at the controversial William Tyndale School in Islington.

David Austin's first drawings were published in a caravan trade magazine at around this time and in 1970, while still a teacher, he began to draw the very successful "Hom Sap" strip which ran in Private Eye for 35 years until his death.

Disliking the radical political situation at the William Tyndale School, he resigned in 1974 and became a full-time cartoonist in 1976. In 1978 he set up a short-lived comic magazine, Duck Soup, with his fellow cartoonists Tom Johnston and Kipper Williams. He joined Today in 1986 and also worked for the Mail on Sunday and Daily Telegraph before moving to The Guardian in 1990, producing a daily front-page pocket cartoon (succeeding Bryan McAllister) and later an additional drawing for the letters page, until illness prevented him working. His last cartoon for the paper was published on 28 October.

He also drew cartoons for The Field, Labour Weekly, New Behaviour and various other publications, and produced a number of collections of his work including The Book of Love (1970), Private Eye David Austin (1984), Far From the Madding Cow! (1990, with Nick Newman and Kipper Williams), the Annual Austin (1993) and What Do You Think of the 21st Century So Far? (2004). In addition, he illustrated books, such as Robert Baldwin and Ruth Paris's The Book of Similes (1982), Paul Smith's The Book of Nasty Legends (1983) and The Book of Nastier Legends (1986), Andrew Moncur's Margaret Thatcher's History of the World (1989), Andrew Nickolds and Richard Stoneman's Gate Gate (1993), Drusilla Beyfus's Business: the done thing (1993) and Sex: the done thing (1993), and Gail Donovan's Star of the Sea (2002).

A self-taught artist, David Austin drew with a loose, pen-and-ink style and hand-lettered his captions. These appeared without speech balloons for his "Hom Sap" strip but were set inside oblong bubbles hanging from the top of the frame for his pocket cartoons. For nearly 30 years he shared a studio with Nick Newman and Kipper Williams and in the mid-1980s set up an art gallery, called the Gallery, in Pentonville Road in north London, which exhibited a wide variety of work (including his own) for many years until he moved to Southwark in the late 1990s.

His drawings were also exhibited at Mel Calman's Cartoon Gallery in London, and elsewhere, and a number were included in Private Eye's 35th anniversary exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1996. Examples of his work are held in the collection of the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings and in the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at the University of Kent. In 2003 he won the the Cartoon Art Trust's Pocket Cartoonist of the Year Award.

A generous, warm-hearted, quietly spoken and rather reserved man, Austin made strong and lasting friendships and was greatly liked and admired by his colleagues in Fleet Street. He was very well read, took a keen interest in all aspects of science and loved walking.

Mark Bryant