This year marks the 60th anniversary of the death of one of Fleet Street’s leading graphic satirists of the last century, Victor ‘Vicky’ Weisz (1913-66).
Described by Harold Wilson as ‘the greatest cartoonist of our time’ and by Randolph Churchill as ‘a genius’, he was voted Cartoonist of the Year in 1960 by Granada TV’s What the Papers Say.
His best-known creation was Supermac, lampooning the then ageing Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), the 40th anniversary of whose death also falls this year.
Vicky was born in Berlin, on 25th April 1913, the youngest of three children of a Hungarian Jewish jeweller and goldsmith, who died by suicide in 1928.
Following his father’s death, in his early teens Vicky began drawing caricatures freelance to help the family’s finances. He then joined the graphics department of the radical anti-Hitler newspaper Das 12 Uhr Blatt.
He became a regular illustrator on the paper, producing sports and theatre cartoons signed ‘V Weiss’.
In 1933, the paper was taken over by the Nazis. In October 1935, with help from his brother, Oscar (who was already in London), Vicky arrived in the UK. He became a British citizen in 1947.
His first work in Fleet Street was drawing caricatures and cartoons for Lilliput, the New Statesman, Tatler and Time & Tide. In 1939 – the year he married the first of his four wives – he joined the pro-Liberal News Chronicle as political cartoonist.
As the paper’s editor Gerald Barry later said, ‘His English was then almost as funny as the cartoons he brought under his arm. Yet, with the outstanding talent his drawings revealed, it would have been a blunder to turn him away.’
Under Barry’s tutelage, Vicky quickly absorbed the necessary background required to understand British manners, customs and conventions. He immersed himself in Shakespeare, Dickens, Alice in Wonderland and Punch. He listened to BBC radio programmes, watched cricket and went to the theatre and music halls.
During the Second World War, Vicky produced some powerful cartoons for the News Chronicle. A hundred of these were published in 1944 in his first collection, Drawn by Vicky.
After the departure of Gerald Barry from the News Chronicle, in 1954 Vicky moved to the Daily Mirror. He drew particularly poignant cartoons on the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising.
His final move was to the Evening Standard, on 3rd November 1958. Three days later, he drew his most famous cartoon, ‘Introducing: Supermac, or How to Continue to Stay Top Without Actually Having Been There’.
He added, ‘Note Mac’s Torso is, of Course, Padded’ and below his signature wrote, ‘With Apologies to Stephen Potter’. The reference was to Potter’s most recently published volume in his bestselling Gamesmanship series of humorous books, begun in 1947.
The books were later the basis for the 1960 British comedy film School for Scoundrels, starring Alastair Sim, Terry-Thomas and Ian Carmichael.
The title of Potter’s 1958 book was Supermanship, or How to Continue to Stay Top Without Actually Falling Apart. Its front-cover drawing showed a middle-aged man dressed as the American comic-strip hero Superman (though with ‘No 1’, not ‘S’, on his tunic), flying through the air.
In Vicky’s version the figure was a caricature of the ageing, white-haired Macmillan, holding his spectacles in one hand, with ‘No 10’ emblazoned on the breast of his flying suit.
More than 130 of these Macmillan drawings (from 1958 until he resigned from Number 10 in 1963) were later published in book form as Vicky’s Supermac (1996). In his foreword, Vicky’s great friend Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, said:
‘Vicky, of course, had never intended that his portrait of the Prime Minister should be turned to Macmillan’s advantage, but that is what did happen, and Vicky, slightly shaken himself, never heard the last of it from enemies and friends alike.
‘However, it is almost always the satirists who see things more clearly than anyone else and when Macmillan died 20 years after Vicky, it was Trog in the Observer who showed that he, at least, understood the true relationship between Supermac and little Vicky.’
The cartoon mentioned by Trog (Wally Fawkes) was published in the Observer on 4th January 1987.
It shows Macmillan (who died on 30th December 1986) arriving in heaven, only to meet his old adversary Vicky, sketch pad and pencil in hand, awaiting him. Macmillan, visibly shaken, cries out, ‘Oh no…’
Vicky, suffering from depression like his father, killed himself on 23rd February 1966, aged 52.
In 1996, to mark the 30th anniversary of his death, an English Heritage blue plaque was unveiled on his former home in Welbeck Street, Marylebone, London, by his sister, Elizabeth, and Michael Foot.
