At 8pm on 29 January 1919, Bruce Bairnsfather was introduced to a packed audience at the Queen’s Hall in London by General Sir Ian Hamilton, and proceeded to deliver his very first lecture, on the subject “Old Bill & Me.” This article focuses on that lecture and the tour which immediately followed it, and illustrates some of the associated ephemera available to collectors.

The tour was the suggestion of Gerald Christy, of The Lecture Agency Ltd, London. Christy had managed tours for some of the top ‘celebrities’ of the day, and with the war over he saw an opportunity to further enhance Bairnsfather’s status as the country’s most famous cartoonist through the medium of the ‘popular lecture.’ Bairnsfather himself was terrified at the suggestion, but the Directors of The Bystander were very much in favour of the idea, and he was persuaded to ac

TICKET FOR LECTURE AT ALBERT HALL, LEEDS 25 FEBRUARY 1919

ADVERT FOR LECTURE AT THE QUUEN’S HALL, LONDON.  FROM THE TIMES, 29 JANUARY 1919

cept.According to the Graphic, following his first appearance at the Queen’s Hall on 29th January 1919, Bairnsfather would  “lecture in the big centres of England and Scotland—about twenty towns, and occasionally twice a day.”

The cartoonist spent some considerable time planning the format of his lecture. It began with his return from Canada just as war broke out, and followed him through his first six months in France, the Second Battle of Ypres, demand for drawings from the Bystander, attachment to the War Office, the Better ‘Ole, visiting the French, Italian and American fronts, and concluding with his trip to America and return home just as Peace was declared. It was, in effect, the story of his personal war, as told in Bullets & Billets and the yet to be published From Mud to Mufti. All crammed into an hour and a half, and accompanied by lantern slides of his cartoons made specially for the purpose, and blackboard drawings.

Introducing Bairnsfather at the Queen’s Hall,  General Sir Ian Hamilton said that the cartoonist “had rendered great service to his country as a soldier and one who had done much to lighten the darkest hour. Captain Bairnsfather was possessed of a great gift, that of being able to turn tragedy into laughter, and he had undoubtedly assisted considerably in maintaining the moral of the British troops.”

The packed audience were “delighted” by Bairnsfather’s lecture, and even the Times admitted that he had proved that “his humour is not exhausted when the pencil is out of his hand.”

Less than a week after his debut at the Queen’s Hall he was ‘on the road’ and on 4th February  appeared at Hove Town Hall where his lecture was delivered in a “delightfully free and easy, conversational way which made it all the more enjoyable.”

During the tour Bairnsfather had to make all his own travel arrangements, and as a result was often dashing around the country with very little time between appearances. Declining an invitation from Col. Sir Berry Cusack-Smith who presided at his evening lecture in Hove, he wrote: “I am motoring down to Brighton, then have to go back to the country for the afternoon and back again for the evening show, and also have to go back to London the same night to enable me to get to Cheltenham the next day.”

Bairnsfather made it to Cheltenham, where, on 5th February, he took to the stage and delighted audiences at a “well filled” Town Hall with both an afternoon and evening lecture. According to the local paper his talk was an “agreeable entertainment” but they noted that “the delivery of his lecture might be improved. He speaks rather too fast, and to be well heard in a large hall he should employ more vigour.”

At the Winter Garden in Eastbourne’s Devonshire Park on 10th February, “the opportunity of seeing a large number of the popular sketches on the screen and of hearing from Captain Bairnsfather himself some reminiscences of Old Bill, Bert and Alf….was eagerly taken advantage of.”

For Bairnsfather himself, the highlight of the whole tour was meeting the author Rudyard Kipling, who attended the cartoonists lecture at the Assembly Rooms in Bath on the afternoon of 13th February.

Kipling had been amongst the “large and appreciative audience” in the Assembly Rooms, and following the lecture had  “some moments conversation with Captain Bairnsfather.” Twenty years later, in Wide Canvas, Bairnsfather revealed that the famous author greeted him with the words “Bloody good!”

The two men had of course attended the same school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! In Devon (immortalised in Kipling’s book Stalky & Co., published in 1899 while Bairnsfather was a pupil at the school) and the cartoonist had been born and spent his early years in the India of Kipling’s Kim and Just So Stories.

As the tour progressed, Bairnsfather’s ‘style’ of delivering his lectures was receiving mixed comments. At the Colston Hall, Bristol on 13th February, he “gossiped in delightful style” but at the Albert Hall in Leeds on 25th February the reporter from the Yorkshire Post felt he “rattled along almost too briskly.” By the time he reached Glasgow on 17th March on the last leg of the tour, the local press disagreed on his performance. The Glasgow Herald reported that “his delivery is amazingly fluent” while the Evening Times said he “delivered his remarks as rapidly as a machine gun delivers bullets and as a result his jeu d’esprits were at times difficult t to catch.”

To round of each lecture Bairnsfather would draw two or three large sketches of Old Bill, depicting him in 1914—wearing balaclava and muffler, and after demobilisation—sporting a cigar and a trilby with a small Union Jack stuck in the top. At Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on 14th March, two of these  drawings, “executed by the artist at the close of the lecture” were auctioned in aid of the Scottish Blinded Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Hostel at Newington House, making £8.00 and £11.00 respectively. Three days later after Bairnsfather’s lecture at St Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow two similar drawings were sold for ten guineas and seven guineas each.

FLYER FOR LECTURE AT HOVE TOWN HALL, 4 FEBRUARY 1919

In Aberdeen on 15th March, the cartoonist received a “hearty welcome” and the Aberdeen Daily Journal even sent their own special artist along to the lecture at the city’s Music Hall to sketch Bairnsfather for their paper. The Daily Journal’s artist was 22-year old Horace Gaffron, who himself deserves special mention as he would eventually make his own claim to fame as the oldest surviving veteran of the Gordon Highlanders from World War One (see note at end of this article). Horace Gaffron’s sketch of Bairnsfather is illustrated on the cover of this newsletter.

Following the Glasgow lecture, Bairnsfather had one further appearance scheduled, at the Victoria Hall, Sunderland on 19th March. This would be his final lecture of the tour. Peter McFarlane, his Manager from The Bystander had accompanied him on the

Scottish leg of the tour, but had now returned to London.  Alone at the station waiting to catch the Sunderland train, Bairnsfather “observed a long, low, smart Pullman-car train, complete with dining saloons, draw in on the opposite platform...and above the carriages on a long board, the magic and alluring words ‘King’s Cross.’ This was too much for me altogether. ‘Hang the lecture!’ ‘Forget Sunderland!’ ‘King’s Cross for me!’”

Thus Bairnsfather broke the last engagement of his tour, and returned to London. He later wrote “I had finished with lecturing, I fondly thought” - but little did he realise what a large part this field of work would play in his future career.

Bairnsfather’s 1919 Old Bill & Me tour produced a variety of paper ephemera collectables. They include flyers promoting the lectures in different towns and cities, newspaper advertisements and articles about his appearances, and even tickets to the lectures. And of course we mustn’t forget the large drawings which he did on stage at the end of each lecture, a considerable number of which  will have survived. Examples of all these items are illustrated in this article.

Despite his initial lack of enthusiasm, within a year Bairnsfather would undertake the first of an eventual eleven lecture tours of America and Canada. Click here to read about his American tours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OLD BILL IN WARTIME AND DEMOBBED—SKETCHED BY BB DURING HIS LECTURE  AT THE MUSIC HALL, ABERDEEN, 15 MARCH 1919