Unmasking "Pipsqueak" - The remarkable Sheffield ‘cartoon’ couple who helped spark Sir Quentin Blake’s artistic career

At Sheffield City Archives, there is a series of century-old cartoon illustrations which have, up until now, concealed a fascinating secret. One of the cartoons depicts a young First World War Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) serviceman, smoking a pipe and carrying a violin case. Another shows a female trainee teacher, wearing a ‘teacher pupil’ uniform and clutching a school textbook. Recent research carried out at the city archives has revealed how, remarkably, the individuals caricatured in these two drawings both played a crucial role in helping to  launch the artistic career of arguably Britain’s best-loved illustrator today Sir Quentin Blake.

                                

Blake’s highly distinctive artwork can be seen all around us today - in the children’s books of Roald Dahl, Michael Rosen and David Walliams, on the walls of children’s hospital wards and even on the front of greeting cards. But, until now, it has not been known that the individuals responsible for first steering Blake on the path to becoming a professional artist were a couple from Sheffield with an astonishing story to share.

Quentin Blake has often credited two standout figures from his school days as helping to shape his later career choice as an artist: ‘Mrs Jackson’, his old Latin teacher at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School in Kent, and her husband ‘Alf’, who he remembers was then working as an illustrator for the satirical magazine Punch. In various interviews he has conducted over the years, Blake recalls how Mrs Jackson came across some cartoons he had drawn as a schoolboy in the margins of his Latin exercise book back in the mid-1940s and showed them to her husband. Alf Jackson was impressed and the teenager was invited to the Jackson home to meet the artist. Alf Jackson showered the schoolboy with advice and encouragement (impressing upon him the importance of incorporating “joke ideas” into his drawings) which led to Blake securing his earliest artistic commissions - he had his first pictures published in Punch magazine a couple of years later aged just 16. Blake’s memories of Alf Jackson are of an eccentric violin-playing, pipe-smoking artist (who would frequently drop ash from his pipe onto the drawings on his desk!). However, the precise identities of Mr and Mrs Jackson have remained (up to this point) something of a mystery. The truth about the couple has now come to light in records held at Sheffield City Archives, chiefly through a remarkable document produced in the unlikely setting of the First World War battlegrounds of the Western Front.

 One hundred years ago, in March 1919, the last edition of a little-known magazine The Leadswinger was issued. The Leadswinger was the First World War “bivouac journal” or “trench magazine” of the 3rd West Riding Field Ambulance Service - a unit which provided medical support to troops on the Western Front including at the bloody battles of the Somme and Passchendaele. The delightfully illustrated magazine was produced in manuscript form “in the trenches, dressing stations and field hospitals” at regular intervals from September 1915 through to the end of the war by a select group of young RAMC servicemen, primarily from Sheffield, with shared literary and artistic interests.

Bursting with humorous articles, cartoons, inventive short stories and poems, the Leadswinger aimed to chronicle the “lighter side” of war and provided the unit with a welcome diversion from the drudgery, hardships and horrors of life on the frontline. Contributors to the Leadswinger went under pen names, their real names hidden. However, recent investigations have unmasked the men behind the magazine, revealing their true identities and leading to some fascinating discoveries.

‘B Section’ of the 3rd West Riding Field Ambulance Service, c. 1914 - a number of men in this photograph contributed to the Leadswinger, the unit’s trench magazine (Sheffield Local Studies Library: Picture Sheffield v03838)

The “Swingers” (as they often referred to themselves) were spearheaded by a dashing young doctor, Captain William Barnsley Allen (1892-1933), chairman of the Leadswinger Committee, who went under the pen name ‘Jack Point’. Allen became one of Sheffield’s most decorated First World War heroes, awarded both the Military Cross and Victoria Cross for his bravery on the battlefield, but, after the war, succumbed to alcohol and drug addiction, culminating in his premature death from an opium overdose. Also central to Leadswinger operations were two brothers: Private Ernest Northend (1891-1964), pen names ‘Castorius Iodinus’ and ‘Ye Corporal’, the magazine’s editor, and Private William Frederick Northend (1887-1968), pen name ‘Dug-Out’, who served as the design and cover artist. The Northend family ran a printing business back in Sheffield and the Northend brothers arranged for souvenir copies of the Leadswinger to be published back in their home town, using the family firm’s printing press. As a result, a century on, some printed editions of the magazine have survived in addition to the original manuscript versions which are now preserved at Sheffield City Archives. 

Arguably the Leadswinger member who has gone on to make the biggest impact on the world as we know it today was the magazine’s chief cartoonist ‘Pipsqueak’ - real name Private Alf Jackson (1893-1971). After the war, Jackson abandoned a career as a violinist to become a freelance artist and we are now able to reveal was the same man who went on to play a decisive role in inspiring and mentoring a teenage Quentin Blake in the 1940s.

Every edition of the Leadswinger magazine, from September 1915 through to March 1919, is peppered throughout with Pipsqueak’s cartoons, depicting his friends and fellow comrades, and the often-perilous situations in which they found themselves, in comical poses (accompanied by witty captions, regularly interwoven with literary and classical quotations). 

Despite his obvious flair for drawing, as showcased in the Leadswinger, Jackson did not have a formal background in art and illustration. On joining the Field Ambulance Service in September 1914, at the beginning of the war, Jackson’s occupation (as recorded on his army service record) was a ‘musician’. 

One of Jackson’s old Leadswinger pals, Jack Jenkinson (1889-1965), who contributed articles for the magazine under the pen name ‘Falstaff’, relates in his First World War memoirs how Jackson was a “practically self-taught artist”. It appears that Jackson may well have inherited some artistic talent from his father John William Jackson (born c. 1871) who worked as a ‘silver engraver’ in Sheffield’s then flourishing silver and cutlery-ware industry. The Jackson family lived at 55 South View Crescent in the Sharrow district of Sheffield. Alf left school aged just thirteen and his father arranged for him to be apprenticed to a local pawn-broker. Working in a pawn-broker’s shop did not suit Alf, who (as his future wife would later recall) was rather “forgetful and dreamy” in nature “with no aptitude whatever for business… interested only in music, drawing and books”. Before war broke-out, he had left his pawn-broker shop role to become a musician, playing the violin in Sheffield’s silent cinemas. 

As he departed for France in 1915, Alf Jackson could never have imagined that the war would open-up an alternative artistic career avenue for him, throwing him into the path of a group of like-minded young men with similar preoccupations with art, literature and the realm of ideas and imagination, which they channelled through their Leadswinger initiative. Out on the Western Front, Jackson’s unofficial role as a trench cartoonist was obviously secondary to his primary duties as an RAMC private. His illustrations in the Leadswinger magazine, oozing with charm and comic-wit, are a far cry from the often-brutal reality of the life he and his fellow Leadswinger members led on the Front - navigating heavy stretcher-loads of wounded soldiers away from danger through mud-clogged trenches at the Somme and over shell-scorched wastelands at Passchendaele. Whilst the prevailing jovial tone of the Leadswinger gives the impression of a close-knit bunch of pals having fun out on the frontline and making light of the difficulties they encountered there, the continual peril Jackson and his RAMC comrades faced was only too real as reflected by the fates of some of his fellow servicemen who Jackson caricatured. 

Take, for example, Colonel Ernest Octavius Wight (1858-1915), the 3^rd West Riding Field Ambulance Service’s hugely respected ‘Assistant Director of Medical Services’, depicted by Jackson as a heroic knight riding into battle (on a hobby horse!) alongside a paraphrased quotation from a Shakespeare sonnet in the Leadswinger issue of November 1915. Just a few weeks later, Wight was killed by a shell on the banks of the Yser Canal, Ypres, whilst supervising the evacuation of wounded troops during a German attack. A moving ‘in memoriam’ piece published in the Christmas edition of the Leadswinger of 1915, observes how, just days before his death, Wight had been “expressing his pleasure” at Pipsqueak’s cartoon of him.

The  chairman of the Leadswinger Committee, Captain William Barnsley Allen (1892-1933), aka ‘Jack Point’, who Jackson depicts in a Leadswinger cartoon in March 1916, in a confident, authoritative pose, surrounded by fawning “maidens” above a quotation from Keats, was later seven-times wounded, gassed and blinded for six months. Although decorated with the Distinguished Service Order, Military Cross and Victoria Cross for his gallantry, risking his own life to save others on numerous occasions, notably during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, Allen also carried deep psychological scars from his war-time experiences into his return to civilian life which ultimately contributed to his sad early demise in 1933 from an opium overdose.  

Jackson himself suffered brief bouts of shell shock whilst carrying out his duties as a stretcher bearer under heavy shell-fire during multiple German bombardments. A German gas attack at Nieuport, Belgium, in July 1917, left Jackson blinded for three weeks and gave him respiratory and stomach problems which afflicted him for the rest of his life.

There is a witty serialised story included in the Leadswinger titled ‘Metamorphosis’ written by ‘Pygmalion’ and illustrated by ‘Touchstone’ - both pen names of Private John Gerald Platt (1892-1975). The story is set at an imagined point 15 years in the future in April 1932, where the author depicts himself as a penniless, failed artist - in actual fact, by 1932, Platt had become headteacher of Harrow School of Art. In the story, Platt (one of the few Leadswinger members not to originate from Sheffield) relates how he leaves his home town of Newcastle and goes to Sheffield to try to discover what has become of his fellow former "Swingers". One by one he tracks his old comrades down, seeking out them out in the “ale houses of Sheffield” only to discover how they have each similarly fallen on hard times. He encounters Pipsqueak (Alf Jackson) as a pitiful figure, dressed in rags, forced to go from pub to pub, cap in hand, playing the violin in return for a few pennies.  

In truth, Pipsqueak’s prospects were far more favourable than the future envisaged for him in his fellow artist Platt’s comic scenario. After the war, encouraged by the successful reception to his cartoons in the Leadswinger, Jackson turned away from his pre-war occupation as a violinist, and set out instead on a career as an artist. He began by contributing artwork for local publications, including regular commissions for Sheffield Weekly Telegraph illustrated annuals.

The close bonds between the Leadswinger members continued after the war. An Old Comrades Association was formed in Sheffield for the 3^rd West Riding Field Ambulance Service veterans and they remained in regular contact. One of his former comrades who played a key role in Jackson’s post-war fortunes was Private Edward “Teddy” Topham (1894-1966) who had served as the Leadswinger’s secretary and contributed numerous articles for the magazine under the pen name ‘The Scribe’. Topham had been a central figure in founding the Leadswinger in the first place - as a young reporter for the Sheffield Independent newspaper at the outset of the war, his journalistic impulses had been one of the main driving forces behind its creation. Jackson caricatured his bespectacled journalist friend in an early issue of the Leadswinger with a caption “Brother Topham” which proved to be particularly prophetic as the two men became brothers-in-law after the war.

Soon after they were de-mobbed and back home in Sheffield, in Spring 1919 Topham introduced Jackson to his sister Eva Lucy Topham (1902-2002), a fiercely intelligent young trainee school teacher, then still living in the Topham family home on Fitzwilliam street near the city centre. Jackson and Eva bonded over a shared love of art, literature and poetry and kindled a romance over long chats about the works of Shelley, Keats and Swinburne. A cartoon of Eva in her “pupil teacher” uniform (pictured at the start) sketched by Jackson c.1920 survives amongst some memoirs she wrote about her early life growing up in a struggling working-class family in Sheffield in the early 1900s. 

The couple married on 14 September 1926 at the Ecclesall Bierlow District Register Office in Sheffield. Their marriage certificate records Alf Jackson’s occupation at the time as ‘Black and White Artist’ and that of his wife as ‘Secondary School Teacher’. 

The following year Eva and Alf had a baby son Gilbert Keith Jackson. Wanting to return to teaching after the birth of her son, Eva struggled to find a school in Sheffield willing to re-employ her now she had a young child in tow and the Jacksons relocated to Ashford in Kent after Eva was offered a job there as Classics and Latin teacher at Ashford Girls Grammar School. The move down South helped Jackson’s artwork to reach a larger audience and he started to receive regular commissions from the satirical magazine Punch amongst other London-based publications. 

By the mid-1940s, Eva had moved to another Kent school - Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School. It was at this latter school that she came across the caricatures in the exercise book drawn by the teenage Quentin Blake, which led to the meetings she set up between her pupil and her artist husband. Blake’s vivid recollections of Alf Jackson back in the 1940s as an imaginative, characterful fellow, periodically playing his violin and dropping ash from his pipe over his drawings as he dispensed advice to his young apprentice, dovetail with the impressions we get of the young Pipsqueak which shine through the dog-eared pages of the Leadswinger compiled some three decades earlier. A cartoon of Pipsqueak (pictured at the start) carrying a violin-case and smoking a pipe by fellow artist Touchstone (John Gerald Platt) which was published in the Leadswinger edition of August 1918, alongside a reference to Pipsqueak as “our fiddler friend”, neatly mirrors the picture of Jackson conjured up by Blake’s memories of his old mentor. Likewise, does an old photograph of Jackson playing the violin in his garden in Kent in front of his beaming young son (dating from the early 1930s) which has been kindly supplied by Jackson’s daughter-in-law Norma who was tracked down through this recent research into the enigmatic artist. 

Alf Jackson died in London in 1971, aged 78, just a couple of years after Quentin Blake published his first children’s picture book Patrick. Interestingly, Patrick is a charming tale of a man who plays the violin and causes magical things to happen around him, easing sorrow and hardship and instead spreading colour and joy. It is tempting to see something of Pipsqueak in Patrick, the eponymous hero of the book, suggestive perhaps of how Blake carried forth the spirit of the violin-playing Alf Jackson into his work.

After her husband’s death in 1971, on the advice of her doctor as a way of dealing with her grief, Eva (pictured in another photograph provided by Norma dating from the early 1920s) wrote up her memoirs about her early life which recall, in rich detail, her upbringing in Sheffield in the early 1900s and how she first met Alf. Eva died in Cockermouth, Cumbria (where her son and daughter-in-law had relocated) in early April 2002, two months shy of her 100th birthday. Now, intriguingly, the story of the Jacksons has emerged in the century-old records forged amidst the shell-fire of the Western Front trenches.

Quentin Blake’s impact on our collective visual imagination is far-reaching. His illustrations continue to enthral and inspire children and adults alike just as they have done for decades. Next time we reflect upon Blake’s artwork, we might see in his drawings the echo of ‘Pipsqueak’, and the influence of a young Royal Army Medical Corps private, who, a little over a century ago, in between gruelling spells striving to save lives on the battlefields of Flanders, put down his stretcher, picked up a pen, and helped to enrich the world of illustration as we know it.

 Note: The original manuscript editions of the Leadswinger magazine 1915-1919 can be accessed at Sheffield City Archives (Ref. MD2071) as can a copy of the memoirs of Eva Jackson (nee Topham) compiled c. 1971 (Ref. MD8228/1) and the First World War memoirs of Jack Jenkinson compiled c.1930 (Ref. MIL/JEN) both of which include recollections of Alf Jackson (aka Pipsqueak) the Leadswinger’s chief cartoonist. An abridged version of this article, written by archivist Tim Knebel, appeared in the Sheffield Star 'Retro' section, 16 March 2019.