Reg Smythe was born Reginald Smyth in Hartlepool, in the north of England, on 10 July 1917. He was the son of Richard Smyth, a boat-builder in the Teesside shipyards, and his wife Florence. The family was poor, and Smythe later described himself as a "canvas shoes kid", just one step up from going barefoot. "My father hadn't worked since the First World War", he later recalled. He attended Galleys Field School in Old Hartlepool, but left aged fourteen to work as an errand boy for a butcher. In 1936, after a long period on the dole, he joined the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and was sent to Egypt. He served with the regiment during the Second World War, acting as a machine-gunner in North Africa, and in 1945 achieving the rank of sergeant. He also submitted cartoons to Cairo magazines.
After demobilisation in 1946 Smythe left Hartlepool, and worked as a telephone clerk for the GPO in London. A poster he designed for an amateur production of Toni Block's Flowers for the Living brought suggestions that he should sell some of his drawings. Smythe sent thirty of his cartoons to an agent who quickly sold two of them to Everybody's for three guineas each. "My gross earnings for the two cartoons came to more than I was making in a week at the GPO", Smythe later recalled: "From that day onwards I not only worked at the Post Office, but I also drew sixty cartoons a week." He began using "Smythe" as his professional name, and maintained a high output of cartoons by using an alarm clock to limit the time he spent on each one to half an hour.
Smythe's mentor was the cartoonist Leslie Harding ("Styx") who used the same agent and gave him advice. Smythe began contributing occasional cartoons to specialist journals such as the Fishtrader's Gazette and Draper's Record, and also sketched council meetings for local papers. "I was never a very good artist and couldn't get the councillors' faces right," he remembered: "So I did them from the back." From 1950 onwards Smythe worked as a freelance, contributing to Speedway World ("Smythe's Speedway World"), Monthly Speedway World ("Skid Sprocket"), Evening Standard, and the Mirror Group's Reveille amongst others. "I badly wanted to get into Punch because I couldn't stand being rejected by its editors", he later admitted: "I sent them more than 6,000 cartoons before I had my one and only acceptance."
Smythe was a frequent contributor to the Daily Mirror's "Laughter Column", and in 1954 the art editor, Philip Zec, chose him over Derek Fullarton to contribute a daily cartoon under the title "Laughter At Work." Three years later Smythe was asked to create "a cartoon to appeal to northern readers," which would occupy the same spot in the Manchester edition of the Daily Mirror. He responded with the single-panel "Andy Capp", which first appeared in the northern edition on Monday 5 August 1957. The flat-capped, pigeon-fancying, beer-swilling, work-shy northerner was created when Smythe was on a visit to his mother in Hartlepool, and was summoned back to London by Hugh Cudlip. "Andy Capp was born on the A1", Smythe admitted: "The trip was seven hours, and the name took three - the pun on 'handicap' was irresistible." Andy Capp's wife, Florrie, was named after Smythe's mother.
Andy Capp was supposedly based on a real person, and although Smythe never revealed who that was, it was widely believed to have been his father, who separated from his mother before the war. Smythe's reluctance to identify his inspiration may have been due to the fact that Andy Capp was openly portrayed as a drunken wife-beater. "He was too savage, a proper bully," Smythe later admitted of Andy Capp: "In one of the early ones [20 August 1957], Flo is sitting on the floor with a black eye having had a beating from Andy and he says: 'Look at it this way, Honey, I'm a man of few pleasures, and one of them 'appens to be knockin' yer about.' That was a dreadful cartoon and it was terribly naive of me to have done it." However, there were no objections at the time, and in 1958 this became the opening cartoon in the first Andy Capp album.
Another inspiration for Andy Capp was Smythe himself, whose views on marriage were described by one interviewer in 1963 as dating "back to the Neolithic age." He claimed in 1965 that at home he did nothing "on principle." After his death the Daily Mirror's cartoon editor, Ken Layson, recalled an occasion when he stayed with Smythe and his wife: "After she had poured Reg his tea, Vera walked back to the kitchen. He looked at his cup and shouted to her that something was not right. Vera walked back and without another word, turned the cup so the handle was pointing in the right direction." Smythe found it easiest to give Andy Capp his own likes and dislikes, and his real friends were also incorporated in the strip, including Jack McLean and Madge Rigg (the models for the barman and barmaid), Alan Goodman (the police sergeant who became Andy's local policeman), and Doris Robinson (the barmaid who appeared as a cleaner).
Although originally conceived for northern readers of the Daily Mirror, "Andy Capp" spread to the other editions of the paper on 14 April 1958, was transformed into a strip, and from 6 May 1960 also featured in the Sunday Pictorial - later renamed the Sunday Mirror. On 28 May 1960 the strip spawned a junior version - "Buster, son of Andy Capp" - complete with flat cap, which later developed into the children's comic Buster, but was not drawn by Smythe. Over the next forty years Smythe made a comfortable living from Andy Capp, whom he described in 1963 as "my best friend yet." From 1961 to 1965 the strip was voted CCGB Best Strip Cartoon of the Year, and with success came a certain mellowing, as Andy stopped beating Flo. In 1966 Smythe became one of the founder members of the British Cartoonists' Association.
By 1966 Smythe was earning over £25,000 a year, partly in salary and partly from syndication. "Andy Capp" was being syndicated overseas, and proved very popular in the United States, where it was first run by the Chicago Sun-Tribune. In 1976 Smythe returned to live in Hartlepool, which he felt had changed very little since his youth, despite the decline of local industry. "The mindset's exactly the same", he later claimed: "I can still go down to the Boilermarkers' Club and get two or three ideas just listening to the conversation." Andy Capp was now being used to advertise beer, Post Office bonds, etc., and in 1982 became the star of the musical Andy Capp, featuring Tom Courtenay and with music by Alan Price. The critic of the Financial Times did not find it "particularly rewarding to watch Tom Courtenay shambling about as a drunken half-wit," but the show successfully transferred from Manchester to London, and later proved enormously popular in Finland.
In 1983, in a move that pleased his syndicators, both Andy Capp and Smythe gave up smoking. In 1988 an ITV series based on the character, adapted by Keith Waterhouse and starring James Bolam in the title role, was also screened in Britain, but a second series was cancelled because of poor ratings. In 1993 Andy Capp received praise from one of his followers, Homer Simpson, when an episode of The Simpsons cartoon series featured him reading the paper and declaring happily "Oh, Andy Capp. You wife-beating drunk. Heh heh heh." In 1997 a female spin-off named "Mandy Capp" appeared in the Daily Mirror - a new character described by the paper's editor, Piers Morgan, as "a mischievous ladette daughter of miserable old Andy." However, it was not drawn by Smythe, and proved a step too far.
Smythe was left-handed and worked with an Osmiroid left-handed pen using a broad nib for lettering and Daler Trimline board. Even towards the end of his life he would sit in a room he called "the den", sketching away from 9am often till 2am next day. Everything he drew was accepted by the editorial staff. As he acknowledged towards the end of his life, "they've never censored anything I've drawn": "I have never yet had a single cartoon turned down by the paper." In politics he claimed to be a Socialist.
Smythe died in Hartlepool of cancer on 13 June 1998. At the time of his death the strip was being syndicated to 1,700 newspapers in 52 countries, had been translated into fourteen languages and was read by 250 million people. Smythe continued to draw until just a few days before his death, and he left over a year's supply of unpublished Andy Capp strips. His last contract with the Daily Mirror had included an agreement to train another artist to draw Andy Capp, but Smythe could never bring himself to do this, and this stockpile was his alternative. When it finally ran out the series was continued in the Mirror by Roger Kettle.
Ian J. Scott (ed) British Cartoonists Year Book 1964 (London, 1963), p.38.
Michael Bateman Funny Way to Earn a Living: A Book of Cartoons and Cartoonists (Leslie Frewin, London, 1966), pp.49-52.
Rosalind Carne "Andy Capp/Manchester", Financial Times, 1 July 1982, p.15.
Reg Smythe [with Les Lilley] The World of Andy Capp (1990)
Tony Horwitz "Britain 1992: The view from Wall Street", The Independent, 23 February 1992, p.3.
Joseph Connolly "Many happy strips, mate", The Times, 7 July 1992.
Gill Swain "Cappy Birthday", The Mirror, 5 August 1997, pp.18-19.
The Times, 15 June 1998, "Obituary: Reg Smythe."
Tim Jones "Incorrigible Capp survives creator", The Times, 15 June 1998.
Michael Mcnay "The North Star", The Guardian, 15 June 1998, p.15.
Denis Gifford "Obituary: Reg Smythe", The Independent, 15 June 1998, p.6.
The Mirror, 18 June 1998, p.14, "Thanks For The Fun, Reg."
Northern Echo, 18 June 1998, p.13, "Reg Leaves Them With Laughter."
Tony Jones "Posh lad from Hartlepool", The Journal (Newcastle), 20 June 1998, p.34.
Mark Bryant Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000), pp.210-11.
| Holdings Summary | |
|---|---|
| description |
64 boxes originals (AC0001 - 4540) (AC0001 - 1454 catalogued)
2 boxes memorabilia 1 photographed image (AC0614) 105 framed originals (6 catalogues, 99 uncatalogued) (no.s 1 - 39a, 55 - 77, 213 - 220) Prism: AC0001 - 1454 |
| daterange | 50s; 60s; 70s [8/1957 - 12/1972] |
| number | 4639 |
| publication | Daily Mirror |