Snippets of war
The wartime work of cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather has already turned up in a couple of past snippets. Both of these featured Bairnsfather’s legendary British Tommy – the walrus moustached ‘Old Bill’. The snippet for January 2015 showed Bill and a younger Tommy examining an empty tin can suggesting that ‘plum and apple’ jam was rarely seen ‘nowadays’ and must have gone to be used for munitions. Later In July we saw Bill sharing a trench with an American ‘doughboy’.
This cartoon (with strapline ‘in the same hole now’) was composed to celebrate the entry of the USA into the war in 1917. Bill, a great favourite with the troops as he ‘spoke’ for them through his humour, was often featured in a trench mumbling to readers that if they knew a better hole they should go to it. He turned up frequently in the wartime Bystander magazine but also branched out into other forms of memorabilia.