Norman's conquest

A major new exhibition marks the centenary of artist Norman Thelwell’s birth and 70 years of his endearing if wilful cartoon creation, Kipper

- JANET MENZIES

THEIR ponies were cheerful little shitlands. The children – mainly girls – grew up to manage careers and families and anything else that needed sorting out. The adults ran around picking up cast shoes and fallen riders and the pieces generally. Yet in this joyous chaos of wrecked marquees, ruined lawns and inevitable bramble thickets there is one person missing. Unseen in the cartoons, Norman Thelwell himself is the bemused, non-horsey dad, looking on with fond bafflement at our inexplicable obsession with all things pony.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Norman Thelwell’s birth and the 70th birthday of the spherical yet mercurial beast universally recognised as the Thelwell Pony. Thelwell, living in the Midlands at the time with his wife and young son, had started drawing cartoons for Punch magazine in the 1950s. He writes in his autobiography, Wrestling with a Pencil, how he was struck by the daily struggles of two young children with their ponies in the field opposite his studio: ‘As the children got near, the ponies would swing round and present their ample hindquarters and give a few lightning kicks, which the children would sidestep calmly, and they had the head-collars on those animals before they knew what was happening.’ Resilience met reluctance in a relationship of attrition played out in paddocks to this day. No wonder the resulting cartoon for Punch in 1953 struck an instant and universal chord, although Thelwell recalled his surprise at the response: ‘Suddenly I had fan mail. So the editor told me to do a two-page spread on ponies. I was appalled. I thought I’d already squeezed the subject dry.’

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