Philip Zec, “ ‘The price of petrol has been increased by one penny.’ –Official” (1942) (illustration credit 14.1)
By the time he died in 1983, Philip Zec (born 1909) was generally acclaimed as Great Britain’s most important cartoonist of World War II. From 1939 to 1945 he provided 1,529 cartoons to London’s Daily Mirror, which in 1939 was selling 1.4 million copies a day (by the late forties that was up to 5 million). During the war the paper had abandoned its Conservative roots and had positioned itself as the paper of the ordinary soldier and civilian.
In 2002, when BBC’s History Magazine invited newspaper editors and political figures to nominate their all-time favorite political cartoons, both Lord Callaghan (prime minister, 1976–79) and Charles Wilson, former editor of The Times, chose a Zec cartoon that had appeared on January 8, 1942. It showed an exhausted, torpedoed British sailor adrift on a raft in the Atlantic. The caption: “ ‘The price of petrol has been increased by one penny.’—Official.” Wilson declared: “In fifty years in Fleet Street I can recall no cartoon that had greater impact. No wonder Churchill’s War Cabinet went berserk.”
The original caption for the cartoon had read “Petrol is dearer now.” But since the government had just increased the price of petrol, a colleague persuaded Zec that the other caption would be stronger. There quickly followed an intense and explosive hurricane of controversy and government condemnation. The home secretary, Herbert Morrison, described the cartoon as worthy of “Goebbels at his best … plainly meant to tell seamen not to go to war to put money in the pockets of the petrol owners.” The Daily Mirror was deluged with requests for copies. Zec himself recalled: “I had hundreds and hundreds of letters from readers who understood what I was saying.… Many of them said that they were going to put their car away for the duration.”
Philip Zec, “ ‘The price of petrol has been increased by one penny.’ –Official” (1942) (illustration credit 14.1)
Winston Churchill believed that the cartoon, which he interpreted as saying that lives were being put at risk to increase the profits of the oil barons, would undermine the morale of the merchant marine, and ordered an investigation to discover who owned the Daily Mirror, looking for Nazi sympathizers on its board.
On March 18, 1942, the editor, Cecil Thomas, and the chairman, Guy Bartholomew, were summoned to the office of the home secretary, who produced a dossier of alleged transgressions from which he extracted the Zec cartoon, which, in addition to comparing it to Goebbels’s propaganda, he described as “wicked.” At the end of question time later that day in the House of Commons, in what Michael Foot would later describe as “one of the stormiest debates the wartime parliament had known,” when a Conservative MP asked Morrison if he had seen the cartoon in question, he declared that it was “only one example, but a particularly evil example, of the policy and methods of a newspaper which, intent on exploiting an appetite for sensation and with a reckless indifference to the national interest and to the prejudicial effect on the war effort, had repeatedly published scurrilous misrepresentations and irresponsible generalizations.” Morrison concluded by threatening to shut the paper down.
In the end, as Zec’s brother Donald later wrote, “Churchill and Morrison went back to fighting the war. Philip Zec went back to [the] drawing board.” Three years later there was an interesting postscript to the affair. The war was over, and Zec was asked to produce some posters for Labour’s election campaign. The Labour leaders were eager to exploit the power and ingenuity he had brought to his cartoons. Zec produced about a half-dozen posters, all of which were instantly accepted, and Herbert Morrison showered him with the most extravagant praise. Zec commented wryly about that years later:
Politicians have thick skins. Herbert Morrison used everything I submitted. Finally, when he said “thank you” I did say unto him: I think you’ve forgotten something. I am the chap you called a saboteur. You thought I was vaguely unpatriotic, and here I am advising you on how to become the Government of the country. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd? He just laughed and said “Oh, everybody makes mistakes.” But I insisted. I really do think you should apologize to me. He said: “My dear fellow, of course I apologize.”
Ironically, like other cartoons in these pages (especially Barry Blitt’s Obama), the outrage over the cartoon was due at least in part to a misinterpretation. In most cases when a cartoon is misunderstood, it’s because the picture is misinterpreted. But in this case it’s the changed words that caused the misinterpretation. Nevertheless it’s important to remember that it was the powerful picture, in tandem with the words, that led to the furor; without the image, the probability is that nobody would have noticed.
Here was a case where the absence of words explaining the cartoon images simultaneously gave the cartoon its power but opened it to multiple interpretations.