Timothy
TIIREE or four times recently Timothy Birdsall was too ill to do his usual political cartoon on this page. The cause was leukaemia and he died of it on Mon- day. He was twenty-six.
I first became a close friend of Tim and of his wife, Jocelyn, when we were neigh- bours in Chelsea. They kept open house, if you could clamber over their two small sons to the table. I shall remember Tim with gratitude for many things: for his hos- pitality and gaiety; for his continual dood- ling; for the drawings of Jocelyn and the children all round the walls; for his extra- ordinarily powerful and direct reaction to everything, ideal in a cartoonist; and re- cently, almost above all, for his colossal enjoyment of his children. He would have drawn them some superb stories and characters in a year or two, and he already had plans for children's books.
His success in four years had been stag- gering: the 'Little Cartoon' on the front page of the Sunday Times immediately after leaving Cambridge; then the Spec- tator, Private Eye, illustrations for Michael Frayn's book and others due for the text of Beyond the Fringe; and a vast new audience on That Was The Week and To- night. The `satire' boom helped him, but he eventually became disgusted by it, by its ballyhoo and self-congratulation. It will be monstrous if the tragedy of his death is given the fashionable publicity which he hated.
MFILR GASCOIGNE
Previous page
