Steve Bell was born on 26 February 1951 in Walthamstow, London. His father, an engineer, was a Scottish Presbyterian. They took the Daily Mail, and Bell recalled that it "had a superb cartoonist called Illingworth who was a brilliant draughtsman...and Trog, who was big influence on me": "My dad was a great fan of his strip, Flook, and I used to read it. I didn't understand what it was about but I loved it." Bell was educated at Slough Grammar School, and then went to study art at Teeside College of Art in Middlesbrough. Disillusioned with the College's narrow definition of art, he left to study art and film at Leeds University, from which he graduated in 1974.
After taking a teaching certificate at Exeter University, Bell spent a year teaching art at a secondary school in Birmingham, recalling later that it was "hell on earth": "The worst year of my life...I just wasn't suited to it." However, Bell had begun cartooning at Leeds, producing posters for the Film Society, and in 1976, alongside his teaching, managed to produce a strip called "Maxwell the Mutant" for the alternative paper Birmingham Broadside. He secretly hankered to work for The Beano, whose cartoonist, Leo Baxendale, was a major influence on his work, but it was not to be. Bell carefully preserved The Beano's rejection letter.
The success of "Maxwell the Mutant" encouraged Bell to become a freelance cartoonist in 1977, and his first regular paid work was for Whoopee! comic in the following year. In 1979 his strip "Gremlins", about a gang of misbehaving ink blots, began in the comic Jackpot. However, in the same year his strip "Maggie's Farm" began in London's Time Out magazine - an inspired political fantasy that later transferred to City Limits and was condemned in the House of Lords as "an almost obscene series of caricatures". In 1981 the Guardian decided to look for a British strip to run alongside Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury". The paper's design editor, Mike McNay, was a fan of "Maggie's Farm", and Bell was duly recruited to draw a daily strip cartoon called "If..."
Steve Bell draws his cartoons to reproduction size and works on card or watercolour paper using John Heath's Telephone Pen (Fine), brush and indian ink. The "If..." strips were at first drawn in batches of six, and posted to London from Bell's home in Brighton, but soon he was faxing them in. This allowed him to work to closer deadlines, usually the evening before publication. "I do my own editing" he explained: "I don't submit roughs to the paper. I couldn't stand that - it would take years off my life...I decide what I'm going to do and do it. Generally it goes in."
In 1982, during the Falklands War, Guardian editor Peter Preston did refuse one of Bell's "If..." strips on grounds of taste, and there was another disagreement over a set of strips showing the Ayatollah and the Pope. As Bell admitted, "I dragged the Pope into it for no reason, and he (the editor, not the Pope) got stroppy about that": "I didn't want to change it, because there was nothing much I could change. What happened there was he just didn't run them." In 1983 there were further problems when the Guardian was taken to the Press Council for Bell's depiction of Henry Kissinger as a giant turkey with a German accent.
"I'm always coming up against the problem of taste and I freely admit, I do transgress," Bell told one interviewer: "I step over the line quite a lot but I think, well, you have to. It's almost your duty to do it if you can." However, he admitted that the principal interventions in his Guardian work were small - "like a word change": "I mean, I try to get fuck through...they always asterisk that one." One reason for the lack of intervention was that the Guardian editorial staff knew his importance to the paper - as did Bell himself. Peter Preston later recalled that conversations with him were "mostly laddishly jovial until they turn to money."
In 1990 Bell began to work alongside Les Gibbard as the Guardian's editorial and political cartoonist. John Major was elected Prime Minister in the same year, and Bell created an enduring image of Major "as a crap Superman", wearing his underpants over his trousers. After Bell's caricature was well established, Alastair Campbell of the Daily Mirror revealed that the Prime Minister did actually tuck his shirt into his underpants - a sartorial gaffe that seemed to confirm the cartoon image. However, according to Major's biographer, Anthony Seldon, the Prime Minister's response to Bell's caricature was that "it is intended to destabilise me and so I ignore it."
Other politicians were less sanguine. In 1994 Bell claimed that "its not usually politicians who are bothered, but someone on the fringes of public life who is likely to sue." However, in June 1995 he drew a mock pieta with Margaret Thatcher as Mary and John Major with his head in her lap. Bell added Conservative Minister John Selwyn Gummer as the onlooker, and Gummer immediately wrote to the Guardian complaining that "to be forced to participate in Steve Bell's perversions is degrading." Bell said afterwards that "I put Gummer in because he is a religious bullshitter": "But I have framed his letter like a commendation."
Bell admitted that he "never really got Kinnock", and Tony Blair "took a while". However, by the time Blair won the General Election of 1997 Bell had detected a "psychotic glint" in one of the Prime Minister's eyes, and did not have the same problems as other cartoonists in developing a likeness. "He has sticky-out ears, receding hair, a flabby lower lip and those starry eyes," Bell noted soon afterwards: "That should be enough to be going on with." The Conservative Opposition proved less difficult. "Hague was easy!" Bell later recalled: "He came ready-made, an overgrown baby in schoolboy shorts. IDS was a joy too - too good to be true. Howard - I swore I'd never do that bugger again after Major's government, but he was great. A vampire."
Bell views cartooning as "an attacking medium": "It's not very good for saying positive things. You don't attack someone you agree with." It is also hard work, he argues, for "taking the piss is a business that demands considerable application." Blair's Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, reportedly told a friend that if Bell came to the Labour Party conference he would head-butt him.
Bell has also contributed to Cheeky, Private Eye - including colour covers for Christmas issues from 1992, New Society, Leveller - the "Lord God Almighty" strip, Social Work Today, NME, and the Journalist. He has contributed to the New Statesman, but in 1999 lost his job as cover illustrator after the deputy editor, Cristina Odone, told him she wanted "happy covers". As Bell observed, "my cover depicting Tony Blair's brain in a food-processor was dropped": "Now I've been told that readers want politics with a small 'p' and cartoons must have bright and new colours." Bell has also made animation shorts - with Bob Godfrey - for Channel 4 and BBC TV.
As Martin Rowson wrote in 1994, "Bell is without doubt the finest political cartoonist working in this country": "It's not just that he's almost unique among his peers occupying the leader pages of the nationals in coming from the Left, but also that he steadfastly pursues a personal political agenda often at variance with the editorials he rubs shoulders with. This is just what Low and Vicky used to do for Beaverbrook." “Steve Bell…can stand shoulder to shoulder with any of his predecessors”, observed Nicholas Garland in 2005: “he creates a consistent parallel world - it is like ours, but full of strange creatures that can be machines or beasts or clouds and yet be politicians at the same time. And his work is always suffused with wild, even frightening, humour.”
"Maggie's farmer takes the penguin biscuit", Guardian, 12 November 1983.
"Cartoon Ruled Not Anti-Semitic", Guardian, 7 December 1983.
Steve Bell "A Psychopath, a Mega-Nerd and now Bambi", Guardian, 21 July 1994, p.22.
CSCC Archive, John Harvey "Stiletto in the Ink: British Political Cartoons", c.1994, pp.12-13.
Martin Rowson "Funny peculiar, I'd say", The Independent Sunday Review, 4 December 1994, p.42.
Steve Bell interviewed in 1995: http://freespace.virgin.net/g.hurry/s_bell.htm.
"Disgusted of SW1", Guardian, 15 June 1995, p.18.
"Who's Calling the Toon?", Guardian Features, 4 January 1996.
Simon Hoggart, "The Y-factor", Punch 5-11 October 1996, p.12.
Jack O'Sullivan "Can you recognise this man?", Independent, 12 May 1997, p.6.
Steve Bell "No Laughing Matter", Guardian Media, 2 November 1998, p.3.
Peter Preston, "His Nibs", Guardian Unlimited, 1 May 1999.
London Evening Standard, 26 February 1999, p.12.
Alan Thompson "Saviour of Satire", Sunday Herald, 19 September 1999, p.12.
Mark Bryant Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000), pp.20-21.
Ollie Stone-Lee "Seriously Funny Work," BBC News Online, 5 November, 2001.
Nicholas Garland “What makes cartoons great”, The Daily Telegraph, 15 February 2005, p.24.
Guardian Unlimited, 7 December 2005, “Now for the difficult bit.”
| Holdings Summary | |
|---|---|
| description |
SB0001 - 2270
Prism: BBC cuttings and PCs |
| daterange | 80s, 90s, 2000 |
| number | SB0001-SB2270 |
| publication | Guardian, Time Out, City Limits |