Merrily Harpur – RIP
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British cartoonist Merrily Harpur has passed away.
Merrily Harpur
April 3 1948 – December 4 2024
Merrily Harpur, who has died aged 76, was an illustrator, writer and poet, organiser of poetry and literary festivals – and an authority on big-cat sightings.
She was best known as a freelance cartoonist with an eye and acute ear for social niceties. “What do you mean, grounds for divorce?” a husband protests to his wife in one offering: “Those are my idiosyncrasies!” Another cartoon has a woman advising a younger friend: “The secret of life is to snatch the fleeting moments of happiness between premenstrual tension and postcoital depression.”
During the 1990s her Sunday Telegraph weekly cartoon, “The Chattering Classes”, and her strip, “The Arcadians”, skewered the rural pretensions of urban emigrants to the countryside, introducing readers to her spiky drawings and quirky imagination. “I had a lot of fun at the expense of people who live in ‘Ye Olde Pigsty’, etc,” she recalled.
The Telegraph continues:
Merrily Harpur drew cartoons for most of the British broadsheets and various Irish newspapers as well as magazines including Punch, The Spectator and The Listener.
For the last of these she drew the cartoon strip “Unheard of Ambridge”, later collected in a book, featuring Archers characters “who are spoken of but never speak”. Jean-Paul, the volatile French chef at Grey Gables, starred, with big parts for “Herr” Rodway, the mysteriously German estate agent; Pru Forrest, the gamekeeper’s wife; and such villains as the Horrobins and Snatch Foster.
In a delightful 2011 autobiographical article from Bridport LIfe she describes her entrance to cartooning:
I started off as an apprentice picture restorer, living in a farmhouse in Herefordshire with various artists and craftspeople. About that time I began to get into cartoons. I’ve always had a feeling I could draw cartoons, even at school, and that I could make them funnier than the ones I saw in newspapers. Then I got an agent, and that made a huge difference. They force you to produce a huge amount of work, very quickly, on typing paper, and none of these beautifully crafted images I used to do sitting at a table. And then I suppose my little vow of never having to undergo formal constraints rather went out of the window, because I had to reel off all these cartoons, rather like having to do an exam every day. If you’re working for a newspaper you have to produce a cartoon by say 2.00pm on Friday or else forget it, and you have to produce four or five different ones because the editor chooses the one he thinks is funniest, and you’ve maybe only started that morning. Luckily I’m quite good at exams.
Getting into cartoons was actually brilliant, especially as it was during the 1980s which was the absolute heyday for cartoons. Most of the magazines had cartoons, and I had a double page spread to myself in Punch every week, when Alan Coren was editor. I was lucky enough to surf that wave in the 1980s, coinciding with the success of Steadman, Trog, McLachlan, John Glashan and Michael Heath, wonderful cartoonists, when having great cartoons in a magazine seemed to be the coolest thing…
Punch has a Merrily cartoon archive for your viewing and laughing pleasure.
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