Ralph Steadman

“My earliest memories are of Blitz food in an Anderson [air raid] shelter, the kind of food that my mother prepared. It wasn’t bad, just quickly cooked and put in a container so that we could go down and wait for the bombs to finish dropping. One of my most vivid memories is my mother picking me up as a baby and being taken down in the middle of the night.

At 16 I went to technical college in Wrexham and there I had to do technical drawing, which is where I picked up the straight lines and circles, which I still use in my work. When I was 17 my late brother-in-law Ron got me a job in the stock room at Woolworths in Colwyn Bay. One day, my old headmaster, who I couldn’t stand, caught me clearing up outside the store. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘sweeping the streets’. He was a wicked bastard. I thought I’d become a manager [at Woolworths] but there was another under-manager there who was mean. We ended up fighting in the stock room. I can’t remember why but it’s the only tussle I’ve ever been in and I had to leave.

I thought that because I built model aeroplanes I could try and get in the raf, or, as I used to call it, the ‘Raff’. I remember being told off about that. I went and became a radar operator, where they taught me how to watch television. I had nine months left before I had to go on military service so I got a job as tea boy in an advertising agency. McConnells it was called. The studio manager was Mr Fiddler. He didn’t fiddle but he used to draw. While I was working there I saw an advert that said, ‘You too can learn to draw and earn pounds’. It was for a Percy V Bradshaw Press Art School course, where for £13 you get 12 lessons in how to draw. You could have also another six lessons on how to be a cartoonist.

I thought it could be a career and that I’d get a job. I also sent drawings to the Leicester Mercury, The Aberdeen Press and Journal, and the Manchester Evening Chronicle. The first cartoon I had published was for the Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1955. It was of a lock-keeper, sitting on a deckchair, legs crossed. He’s just saying, ‘Nasser, who’s he?’ Nasa was big at the time, you know. I got an agent. I also started drawing down-and-outs. I remember one with a park-keeper who was lifting him on the bench and putting him in the bin. It was an attempt at humour.

I try and help the younger cartoonists. I remember once I went to Turkey to be on a judging panel for a cartoonist-of-the-year award. [But] I’ve always said that awards are the badges of mediocrity. I say to them, ‘You’ve got to see some wet ink.’ Most of the things in this century are done online and are so lacking in a sense of being there or liveness.

My first international assignment was to cover the Kentucky Derby in 1970. I saw Hunter S Thompson for the first time in the press room and he said, ‘They said you were weird but not that weird.’ I was intrigued – curious about him. He once invited me to meet his pals and said, ‘By the way Ralph, don’t do any of the filthy scribbling.’ Americans don’t have a tradition of a William Hogarth and James Gillray and people like that – and so me drawing somebody is a kind of insult. They don’t see it as just a bit of fun, you know; they take it personally.

I still dabble in politics but in an impartial way. I’ve done – what’s her name – Theresa [May]. I’ve drawn Trump as ‘Trumplestiltskin’. I’ve also done him fouling as a baby. I think that’s an apt image. He’s a ghoulish man, isn’t he? He’s probably the worst they’ve ever had.

For my ‘last meal’ I’d be with Anna [his wife] and my daughters, the whole family. But I don’t want to start talking about that. My father said the only thing he knew about growing old – this was when he was 87 – was that the undertaker now raised his hat to [greet] him. We’re all getting older.”