21 Facts About Wally Fawkes

Wally Fawkes later created a new, more mainstream band with friend Humphrey Lyttelton, and it soon became one of the leading British jazz bands of the 1950s.

Wally Fawkes achieved success illustrating cartoons under the pen name "Trog".

Wally Fawkes was born on 21 June 1924, as Walter Ernest Pearsall in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Wally Fawkes's father, Douglas Pearsall, was a Canadian railway clerk whom his mother, Mabel, later left for Charles Fawkes, a British printer.

Wally Fawkes later joined George Webb's Dixielanders, a semi-professional revivalist jazz band that featured Lyttelton on trumpet, in 1944.

When Lyttelton left the Dixielanders in January 1948 to form his own jazz band, Wally Fawkes went with him and stayed there until 1956, by which time it had evolved past revivalism and became more mainstream.

Wally Fawkes re-united with Lyttelton periodically thereafter, and, though highly talented on his instrument, remained an "amateur".

Wally Fawkes based his style on that of American jazz composer Sidney Bechet and once recorded with him and Louis Armstrong, as part of Lyttelton's band, in 1949.

Wally Fawkes played with George Melly and John Chilton in the Feetwarmers band in the early 1970s.

Wally Fawkes doesn't develop a hieroglyph for each politician and then simply reach for it each time it is needed.

Wally Fawkes signed the drawings as Trog, which was short for Troglodyte which came from his days from World War II.

Wally Fawkes once joked that due to the amount of time spent in underground air-raid shelters people in London were becoming troglodytes.

Wally Fawkes was later inspired by this to adopt "Trog" as his pen-name.

In 1949, Wally Fawkes's comic strip Flook first appeared in the Daily Mail, and was a success.

Wally Fawkes produced political cartoons for The Spectator with George Melly as his author.

Wally Fawkes therefore began submitting work to other publications, and he began contributing political cartoons to The Observer.

Wally Fawkes became the Daily Mails political cartoonist when Illingworth retired in 1969.

In 1971, the Daily Mail absorbed the Daily Sketch, and the role of transforming the old paper from a broadsheet into a tabloid fell to the old Sketch editor Sir David English, who gave the role of political cartoonist to Stan McMurtry and Wally Fawkes was dropped from his old role.

Wally Fawkes returned to The Observer in 1971 and continued to work for Punch.

In 1949 Wally Fawkes married the journalist Sandy Wally Fawkes, who later became known for surviving an affair with the American serial killer Paul John Knowles.

Wally Fawkes died in London on 1 March 2023, at age 98, following a short illness.