Apsley’s Women

Cartoons have been a feature of magazines and daily newspapers since their inception, and the motoring cartoonist has been active since the end of the nineteenth century.

In the early days, the cost and practicalities of photography, and its reproduction using the regular printing presses, presented insuperable obstacles. In any case, the number of artists prepared to work at rapid speed, reflecting topical issues, and for modest compensation, comfortably satisfied the needs of the most discerning editors. Even now, when colour photography is available in every medium, for magazine, newspaper and screen readers, the cartoon still has a role to play.

 

Anyone who has faced the challenge of telling a joke or a funny story to a multi-national audience, will be thoroughly aware of the difficulties involved in conveying humour; there is no perfect recipe for generating laughter from an audience. It is the case, however, that since the first appearance of a motoring cartoon towards the end of the nineteenth century, in magazines, its drivers and passengers, have been a very regular feature.

 

 

An enduring feature of cartons has been the role of women: in all their guises. Certainly, women have been regularly depicted as individuals whose navigational skills have been hampered by an inability to discern a left hand from a right hand, whose appreciation of the mechanical attractions of a gas-guzzling, oil-spitting, exhaust-belching V-8 has had a lamentable tendency to be lukewarm at best and, of course, their driving skills, or rather the lack of them, have occupied many pages of newsprint. 

 

In the recently published Apsley and Old Cars, a 'retrospective show ' of the best of the work of Tony Phillips-Smith, there is the striking of a balance between this chauvinistic view of women in the motoring world and the reality. In one drawing, the caption “Oh Graham, what a big starting handle you have” does rather play to the stereotype, but in another of the cartoons, when a man’s wife hands her motoring husband a baseball cap and dark glasses uttering the words “but if you don’t wear a baseball cap and dark glasses how will anyone know you’re an idiot”, the essential vanity of the motoring man is brought to the surface. 

 

During the upcoming Retromobile show, this book full of funny cartoons that we can all recognize in our everyday live will be for sale at the PreWarCar.com – PostWarClassic.com stand. For more information, click here or visit the website of Surrenden Press.