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Tony Bryant
Alhaurín el Grande
Friday, 6 December 2024, 12:30
One the most popular Fleet Street pocket cartoonists, Peter Maddocks, died in his home in Alhaurín el Grande on 20 November after a short illness. The 96-year-old artist, known simply as Maddocks, settled in the Guadalhorce town in 2000 to escape what he described as the “hubbub of London”. He became involved with the local artistic community shortly after arriving in the area, and he was an active contributor to the Artsenal Inoxis cultural space, an initiative run by an association of local artists. When he first arrived in Spain, he was commissioned to draw a cartoon strip for SUR.
Although he was adored for his ability to highlight the absurdities of life as an illustrator for more than 50 years, on retirement, and due to a failing eye sight, he began painting with acrylics on canvas, experimenting in every style with a hope of finding one of his own.
Born in Birmingham in 1928, Maddocks began drawing at an early age and, in 1939, he received a scholarship to attend the Moseley School of Art in Birmingham, where one of the tutors was Norman Pett, creator of the ‘Jane’ cartoon strip in the Daily Mirror.
He joined the merchant navy at the age of 15 and spent six years at sea travelling the world, until 1949; after which, he took a job adding the lettering to Amalgamated Press strips such as Kit Carson and The Saint. He had his first breakthrough in 1955 with the strip cartoon Four D Jones, which ran in the Daily Express for ten years.
Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, his amusing, goggle-eyed characters with splayed-out fingers brought a ray of hope to readers of the London Evening Standard and London Evening News, the Daily Star, the Manchester Evening News, the Mail on Sunday, Private Eye, the Daily Telegraph and Mayfair.
Maddocks was also a founding member, along with Carl Giles and Osbert Lancaster, of the British Cartoonists’ Association. He also set up the London School of Cartooning in 1977, briefly reviving it as The Cartoon School in 1990. He also set up Maddocks Cartoons, where he was joined by his sons to create children’s animated cartoons for television, including The Family Ness and Jimbo and the Jet Set, which he described “as the most enjoyable period of his career”.
Maddocks was a diehard freelancer who refused to give himself to just one newspaper, preferring to draw for as many as wanted him and many did.
His son, Guy Maddocks, said, “Political satire was his true love and an area in which he excelled. A true Fleet Street legend gone but not forgotten. He died peacefully in his sleep in his beloved Spain.”
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