World War I also saw the rise of one of Britain’s most important “cheesecake” artists, Arthur Ferrier. Born in Scotland in 1891, he was originally an analytical chemist working in Glasgow. He started his career by sending cartoons to the local newspaper, the Daily Record, but as his art took off Ferrier moved to London, where he worked on numerous magazines, including Blighty.
Blighty was a collection of the best articles, cartoons, and stories from the British press, given free to 100,000 troops in France during the war. The magazine had General Sir Douglas Haig as a patron and was launched on May 31, 1916. That year’s Christmas editorial wrote, “You boys who are doing the fighting for us on land and sea, we have nothing much to say beyond wishing you good luck and God speed this Christmas time—and come home safe to us, because we love you. Thank you many times and very heartily for the hundreds of sketches and stories and jokes you have sent us… some of the sketches have been redrawn, because they could not be reproduced for printing.”
One of Ferrier’s jobs was to reinterpret the troops’ drawings, and he soon became the cover artist. Ferrier also drew “gag” cartoons and caricatures for Punch, London Opinion, The Humorist, and many other weekly magazines.
In 1938 he started his first weekly strip for the Daily Mirror newspaper, Film Fannie, which charted the adventures of a naïve actress at a time when British cinema was at its peak. This strip pioneered the “glamour girl” cartoon in Britain, and Ferrier’s sumptuous brush strokes and sleek lines made his leggy ladies hard to resist. When his newspaper contract ended in 1939, he created another girl in Our Dumb Blonde, for the Daily Mirror’s sister publication, the Sunday Pictorial. The strip ran for seven years.
In 1945, Ferrier started Spotlight on Sally for the News of The World as an obvious foil to Norman Pett’s incredibly popular Jane strip in the Daily Mirror. Ferrier’s only attempt at a daily strip—Eve—ran in the Daily Sketch from 1953. During this time the Scottish cartoonist also contributed cartoons to numerous men’s magazines—including Blighty and its numerous incarnations—and continued to do so right through to the 1960s.
Ferrier had caught the public’s attention to a remarkable degree, with his work appearing on exclusive headscarves and even highly collectable, fine bone-china tea sets. He died on May 27, 1973.
Film Fannie appeared in the Daily Mirror, while her younger sibling Our Dumb Blonde made her debut a few years later in the Sunday Pictorial.
Albert Ferrier’s cartoons graced the inside of Blighty magazine for years and were the first thing readers saw when they opened the cover. This example, from October 19, 1957, condenses the alpha-versus-beta-male conflict into one sentence: “The devil with tossing for it. Let’s fight!” Notice how the beautiful woman is referred to as “it.”
