Tributes paid to legendary cartoonist Bill Tidy MBE after his death aged 89

Legendary cartoonist Bill Tidy MBE, who spent many happy years living in Southport, has died aged 89. 

The iconic artist who was born in Tranmere in Wirral in 1933 will be fondly remembered for his widely published comic strips. 

Deeply proud of his working-class roots in Northern England, his most abiding cartoon strips, such as The Cloggies and The Fosdyke Saga, were set in an exaggerated version of that environment.

He was also famous for his regular TV appearances, on popular shows including Blankety Blank, Watercolour Challenge, Through the Keyhole and Countryfile died with his two children, Sylvia and Rob, at his side. 

In 2000 he was awarded an MBE for “Services to Journalism”. 

He was also well-known for his immense charitable work, particularly for the Lord’s Taverners,  which he supported for over 30 years. 

When in Southport he was always happy to support local causes through his artwork. 

Bill Tidy (right) joins staff at Casa Italia restaurant on Lord Street in Southport as they celebrate the venue’s third birthday party in September, 1981.

Son Rob had become his full-time carer after his health declined following two major strokes. 

Speaking to The Mirror, daughter Sylvia described her father as the ‘UK’s best loved cartoonist’, and a ‘talented and very funny man’. 

She said: “We are all deeply saddened but his legacy and cartoons will continue to live on.”

Speaking in the Stand Up For Southport Facebook group, artist Tony Wynne said: “I met Bill Tidy quite a few times; I used to work at his accountants and lived opposite him in Birkdale. “He was a really lovely man and when I began cartooning in the 1980s he encouraged me, even after he’d moved to Kegworth. Sincere condolences to all the family.”

Ada Price said: “I remember Bill well when he used to fill up at the Mobil petrol station where I worked he was a lovely friendly man and he drew me a picture of Mickey Mouse on a piece of paper while I was serving him. 

“RIP Bill you will be missed.”

More cartoons from PUNCH by the legendary cartoonist Bill Tidy who has died at the age of 89. #RIP pic.twitter.com/obGSrHgGz6

— Punch Cartoons … and more (@PunchBooks) March 12, 2023

Neville Grundy said: “Bill Tidy was a neighbour in the early 1980s when our family lived in Birkdale. He used to enjoy a pint in the long-gone Berkeley on Queens Road where I occasionally saw him.

“CAMRA members will remember him as the cartoonist behind the ‘Kegbuster’ strip that appeared for many years in the campaign’s newspaper, ‘What’s Brewing’.”

Tributes also poured in from famous faces including Harry Potter star Miriam Margolyes who simply said that Mr Tidy was a ‘very special man’ who ‘will never die’. 

Composer Tim Rice said: ‘Bill will be missed not only for his great talent but for his warmth, wit and wisdom.’

Today's PUNCH Cartoon Classic. “We’ll have to decide! Are we storming the Winter Palace or the Summer Palace?” Doesn't seem the weather for shorts… Bill Tidy 1968 #revolution #Russia #Russians #revolutionaries #protests #demonstrations #StPetersburg #Petrograd #demonstrators pic.twitter.com/DKFIbaPM7h

— Punch Cartoons … and more (@PunchBooks) January 29, 2023

Bill Tidy started his cartoonist career when he sold a sketch to a Japanese newspaper in 1955, the same year he left the Royal Engineers branch of the Army. 

As his work became more well-known and began finding spots in the likes of the Daily Sketch and The Daily Mirror, he moved to London, where he formed the British Cartoonists’ Association with the help of some colleagues on Fleet Street.  

Over the course of his career, he wrote 20 books, and illustrated 70. 

He drew the popular cartoon strip The Cloggies in Private Eye from 1967 to 1981, before going on to draw the Fosdyke Saga strip, which ran in the Mirror newspaper from 1971 to 1985. 

So popular the Fosdyke Saga was that it became the subject of a BBC 42-part radio series from 1983. 

He spent his final years living in Swannington, Leicestershire. 

Today's PUNCH Cartoon Classic. “I’ll serve the parrot, but the rest of you are drunk!” Bill Tidy 1967 #drinking #drinkers #pubs #bars #taverns #barman #pets #customers #dogs #birds #monkeys pic.twitter.com/GKS8sckry8

— Punch Cartoons … and more (@PunchBooks) February 7, 2023

On his website, he said: “I have always been able to draw. From the mess of my earliest memories, I can still recall images of my first attempts at drawing cowboys I’d seen in comics and at the cinema.

“I drew them on the paper lids on jam jars and people would gather round and say ‘What a clever little boy!” It really irritated me. 

“Eventually it dawned on me that for most of us, once we are out of our comfort zone, according to the law of averages, we are talking rubbish half of the time anyway!  In other words, accept praise and criticism with the same reserve! I’ve had plenty of each.

“Anyway, drawing cowboys was no great thing. In the 1940’s of my youthful, pre-TV Liverpool, everyone could do something! A party piece on the upright piano, spoons, accordion or take the dog through the simple beg, pretend to be dead and roll over routine.  Anything to save the family honour in those days!  My mum kept a pub while my father was away with the Wavy Navy and later with the Royal Navy.

“In the  May Blitz in 1940 we would retire to the cellar with our cousins, the Hughes family, who shared the house with us. It was there we founded the ‘Juanita Club’.  Juanita was a cheap red wine which I discovered at the age of seven to have an excellent nose and delicious hints of strawberries and fish and chips.  It saw us through the air raids and I was only scared once.

Profile of Bill Tidy, funny man who loves good beerhttps://t.co/JIIRMNEwCs@CAMRA_Official pic.twitter.com/egGigPMrMS

— Roger Protz (@RogerProtzBeer) July 29, 2020

“Tom, head of the Hughes family was home during one raid enjoying a bit of peace from his auxiliary fireman’s job when a sprinkle of incendiary bombs ended up on our roof, burning merrily. Up he went with his sandbag and tackled the flames. I realise now it took a bit of bottle and it got worse for him when the blast from an H.E bomb blew his ladder in the next street. “That should have been the start of my cartooning career. The perfect perilous, dangerous, ludicrous situation which a cartoonist dreams of and has to be committed to paper immediately!  No! When they got him down a couple of hours later my mother grabbed my ear and said ” You, Billy, get to bed. School in the morning!

“I should have said “No, mum! This is a major turning point in my young life. I must get my pencil and-” but my mum could handle drunken sailors three at a time so  I put my career on hold till the end of the war and waited for the next one. Korea.

This take on the Titanic disaster by #Liverpool cartoonist Bill Tidy has always appealed to my strange sense of humour. pic.twitter.com/AqlrMopaSa

— The Dusty Teapot🫖/The Devils Nest🐙 (@thedustyteapot) March 2, 2023

“War was the perfect training ground for me. Endless images of action, shocks, explosions, movement, speed, wham, bang, boom! Sport has the same supply of images and tension. I think I am an easy going cove but when threatened with a sheet of spotless paper, wall or drawing board the ideas trapped in my head have to be rescued and nailed down before they disappear and go to someone else.

“I went to art school for one night only and then only because I’d been told that the wildest girls in the north west could be found there. Not so in my case. That night  it appeared that instead of objects of desire, the Springbok, Tongan and all Black front row had turned up. So much for art!

“I signed up as a short term regular soldier with the Royal Engineers for three years, serving in Germany, Japan and Korea. It was mostly interesting for me but I didn’t wasn’t involved in anything hairy. It was not so for the poor people of the Land of the Morning Calm. Their suffering while someone used their country to play a war over was appalling and if you look at the area today – the problems are still continuing to the present day.

“It was in Korea that I first came across a non-humorous person exercising censorship. In Pusan we had a base newspaper which carried a cartoon. I wasn’t doing much drawing then and was just an ordinary reader.

“This is the cartoon;

1st Soldier (new arrival carrying a towel and washbag ) Hey, mate, Where’s the ablutions?

2nd Soldier, (a resident) Dunno, mate. I’ve only been here for 3 weeks!

“It caused ructions. The CO thought it disgusting and said no more cartoons! The only one to profit from the nonsense was yours truly who in anger started to draw again and blow me down, sold a drawing to Mainichi, an English language Japanese newspaper for £2. Which was not to be sniffed at in 1954.

“I thought it’s all plain sailing from now on. When I left the army I found a job in a Liverpool advertising agency where I learned the commercial side of art school, such as the use of expensive advertising space which had to accommodate a drawing of a greenhouse, its dimensions, it’s cost and where to find the thing in a space not much bigger that you thumbnail.!

“I started landing spots in national newspapers and being a storyteller began to produce 2, 3 and 4 picture gags. Regular features are what most cartoonists are looking for and drawing on TV, which I found easy and enjoyable, saw me bringing in a new dimension to my work. The only slightly disconcerting feature was that I was having an odd effect on the Street of Shame!

Nearly every publication in which I appeared shivered and rolled ever! They included the Daily Sketch, Sunday Dispatch, Reveille, Weekend, Sunday Chronicle, Travel World etc.  I was going through Fleet Street like Typhoid Mary!

“I did however have a much better effect on another lady. She was from Italy, a raven haired Neapolitan who was so vivacious that I was totally astonished when she agreed to marry me on our third meeting! We were wed in 1960 and have rarely been more that 30 feet apart! The only mark in that half century is that we lost our son Nick to Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Something that devastated us both beyond words.

“We don’t have a word in English for grown up children whereas the Italians do. Bambini= kids, figlo and figlia= adult male and female. Sylvia and Rob play a big part in our lives. Sylvia and her husband Fred manage my business affairs and they do their best to keep me in the 21st century while Rob removes tattoos and breeds fish and manages to stay awake while they at it.  “Nick’s kids are a wonderful reminder of what a great son he was and they are a testament to his brilliant parenting skills. Our granddaughter Scarlette is now a Marketing whiz in San Francisco and has a wonderful partner Dave, and  grandson Jones just graduated from the University of Las Vegas. They, like our kids, make us so proud.”

Writing, aged 84, he added: “I still take childish delight in what I do. I will never stop drawing and I still can not stop myself from doing crazy things like illustrating horseboxes, ceramic pots and vases. And I am still working undertaking commissions for bespoke cartoons and the odd Private Eye gag.  My characters range from Tripe magnates to the ferocious Folk Dancing Cloggies to Keg Buster who has been the champion of Real Ale for over 40 years. Think of it, Beer, Sport, Food and Family! What more do I need?”

RIP Bill Tidy. 

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