101 Brockbank Cartoons
by David Finlay (12 November 2008)
It would be impossible to single out anyone as the single finest motoring cartoonist, but if you were to conduct a poll into people's favourites the name of Russell Brockback would surely crop up time and again.
Brockbank was born in Canada (his mother, who was living in the US, rushed across the bridge at Niagara during a thunderstorm in the final stage of her pregnancy to ensure that he was born on British Empire soil), but moved to the UK in 1929, at the age of 16.
An artist and a keen fan of motoring, and particularly motorsport, he had his first break when he approached the racing driver and Thai prince B Bira with five cartoons. Brockbank wanted £5 for the lot. Bira, a very generous man as well as a very rich one, gave him £5 for each - this in the days when £25 represented several weeks' wages.
After this promising start, Brockbank went on to become Art Editor at Punch and the regular cartoonist for Motor. He was justly famous and well-loved from the 1950s until his early death in 1979.
27 years later, his family created a website, www.russellbrockbank.com, where you can buy prints of his work. I recommend that you do this, but as a taster it's worth investing £6.99 in the new Haynes book, 101 Brockbank Cartoons, which brings together much of his best work in one small volume.
The book takes just a few minutes to read, but once you've laughed at the jokes (and perhaps winced slightly at the ones which come across as sexist nowadays - it's worth remembering that humour changes as the years go by) I can almost guarantee that you'll have another, slower browse.
That's because the joke itself isn't everything. Brockbank's love and knowledge of cars, along with his artistic eye, meant that his renditions of Minis (a lot of Minis), Austin 1100s, Bond Bugs, Citroen Lights 15s, Rolls-Royces, huge American sedans, very specific racing cars and even the 1911 Blitzen Benz, among many others, are far more detailed and careful than they need to be for the purpose of a cartoon. Brockbank was clearly being brilliant simply for the fun of it.
More than that, he was a master of conveying both the movements of his cars and the emotions of his characters, often achieving remarkable effects with maximum economy. Look, for example, at how, in possibly his most famous cartoon, Citroen Pressé, both the joyful patriotic determination of the Englishman driving the Blower Bentley and the alarm of the Frenchman in the Citroen which is being driven to the absolute limit immediately in front are so magnificently obvious even though neither character has more than a couple of dots for eyes.
My own favourite is captioned " . . . return you to the studio", which is what the BBC commentator is saying as he leaps from his chair, trying desperately (though surely without much hope) to be out of the commentary box before the flying C-Type Auto Union six feet ahead of him crashes into it. You can't see the commentator's face, but you can see that the Auto Union driver is glumly resigned to the enormous accident which is less than a second away, and that he knows he is going to have to apologise about this for a long time afterwards.
To me, this is the most wonderful motoring-related cartoon that has ever been drawn, but you may prefer another one. Buy this book to find out, and to immerse yourself in the strange, fantastic, beautiful and very funny world of Russell Brockbank.
101 Brockbank Cartoons is published by Haynes at £6.99. ISBN 978 1 84425 647 1. More details at www.haynes.co.uk, or www.russellbrockbank.com.
