The cartoons of Ed McLachlan, who has died aged 84, were at once as deliciously dark and twisted as Charles Addams, as imaginative as William Heath Robinson, as surreal as John Glashan and as quintessentially British as the Punch cartoonist Pont.
Ed’s immediately recognisable pen line, and cast of buck-toothed, big-nosed protagonists, entertained, shocked and outraged from the pages of Punch, Private Eye, the Oldie and Spectator, among many others. Often set in traditional gag cartoon settings, from date nights and office boardrooms to middle-class front rooms and Stannah stairlifts, his cartoons took the mundane and delivered the hilariously absurd.
Giant creatures were often present, creating destruction in otherwise quaintly British scenes. For Private Eye’s 10th anniversary edition in 1971, Ed drew a monstrous hedgehog rushing across a busy road, pulverising an unfortunate car and its occupants as it goes. In another cartoon, an enormous dinosaur rampages through a city past an ongoing cricket match, while an exasperated commentator complains that “once again we have interruption of play caused by movement behind the bowler’s arm”.
Ed combined his vivid imagination with a relentless work ethic, his work also appearing in magazines as various as the New Statesman, the Big Issue, Reader’s Digest, the New Yorker and Playboy.
Initially he had not considered a career in cartoons, despite contributing a number to his college magazine. However, in 1961, while working at a printing company designing posters, he was persuaded by colleagues (by way of a £5 bet) to submit a scrapbook of cartoons to Punch. To his surprise, the magazine bought one for seven guineas, more for an hour’s work than he was earning in a week at the printing office. Within weeks they had bought several more, thus beginning a regular contribution to the magazine that would last until it ceased production in 2002.
Born in Humberstone, Leicestershire, to Edward McLachlan, a structural engineer, and his wife, Josephine, a secretary, Ed went to Wyggeston grammar school, then studied graphic design at Leicester College of Art (now DeMontfort University), graduating in 1959.
Following his success with Punch, in 1965 he went freelance, resolving to establish a career by “making myself a nuisance banging on agencies’ doors”. The following year, he began drawing a series of political cartoons for the Sunday Mirror, under the title McLachlan’s View. In 1967, he started to contribute cartoons to Private Eye, and in 1970 left the Sunday Mirror for the Evening Standard as its new political cartoonist. Between 1972 and 1974, he produced a series of pocket cartoons titled Insiders for the Daily Mirror.
Apart from a brief return to Leicester College of Art as a part-time lecturer in graphics (1967-70), Ed thereon focused on his cartoon and illustration work, which also encompassed children’s books, TV series and advertising campaigns.
In 1969, he wrote and illustrated his first children’s book, Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. This was the first of four books about a little boy who owns a magic chalkboard, upon which everything he draws becomes real. The books were made into an animated television series, which first aired in Canada before appearing on British television on ITV in 1976, running for 24 episodes. The series was directed by Ivor Wood, best known for shows such as The Magic Roundabout and The Wombles, and narrated by Bernard Cribbins. It remained popular in Canada, where it was remade in 2002.
Ed also wrote and illustrated the children’s books Claude Makes a Change (1979), Magnus in the Land of Lost Property (1985) and The Dragon Who Could Only Breathe Smoke (1985), and illustrated more than 80 books in the Bangers and Mash educational reading series by Paul Groves, which were made into a children’s ITV series in 1989. Nonfiction books include Bill Beaumont’s Bedside Rugby (1986) and John Walker’s Chess for Tomorrow’s Champions (1994), as well as many of the For Dummies instructional series.
Over the years Ed was also in demand for advertising campaigns for brands such as Dunlop, Renault, Alka Seltzer, Dewar’s Whisky and Walkers. Most recently, his cartoons were used for a series of London Underground posters for Timothy Taylor’s Brewery.
He received many awards, including illustrative cartoonist of the year (1980) and advertising cartoonist of the year (1982) from the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain, and gag cartoonist of the year twice (1982 and 1997) from the Cartoon Art Trust, which also presented him with a lifetime achievement award in 2011. In 2016, he was given an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester.
Across the span of his 60-year career, Ed’s style of drawing, a confident ink line and a monochrome wash on artist’s board, remained remarkably consistent. Later in his career, he began to add colour, working skilfully in watercolour on a scale much larger than his cartoons would be reproduced in print. While much of the detail would be lost when the cartoons were shrunk down for reproduction in magazines, when the originals began to be exhibited in a gallery setting – and in the Chris Beetles gallery, of which I am director, from 2001 – his expertise in these mediums could be truly appreciated.
Ed continued to draw cartoons up until his death. In one of his final cartoons, for Private Eye, taste testers at a crisp factory lament their new range of extra crispy snacks, which are so crunchy they have caused one of their colleagues to explode.
He is survived by his wife, Shirley (nee Gerrard), whom he married in 1964, their daughters, Danielle, Joelle and Aimee, and son, Alex, and by four grandchildren.