The inside story of Scottish war cartoonist Archie Gilkison

I am filled with sadness and pride. This work is perhaps on public display for the first time in 100 years (it was last seen in the Glasgow Herald in 1915) but it’s an image I know well. It was drawn by my tragic, talented great-great uncle. 

And here’s the amazing thing – he used to be forgotten but in the last couple of years Gilkison has been rediscovered, and is now feted, studied and exhibited beside Warhol and Picasso, billed as “the Wilfred Owen of cartooning”. It’s a remarkable journey for a self-taught artist from a humble background in Glasgow. 

The journey has been remarkable in another way, however. It has brought together two members of the same family, born 90 years apart, who worked for the same newspaper in different centuries. It has built a bridge between their worlds and an unbreakable bond between them. I may never have spoken to Uncle Archie, but through his work I feel we can – and do – converse. I feel like I know him, have laughed and cried with him.

As far back as I can remember Gilkison figured in my life – there was always something about Archie. But by the time his niece, my grandmother, started telling me his story the work had been all but forgotten outside the family for 60 years. My grandmother, like most others, was always full of great stories and from an early age “tell me again about Uncle Archie” was a common refrain on my part. 

Looking back, I suppose I can understand why this particular family tale struck a chord. It had everything: prodigious artistic talent, war, drama, death – in my experience children are suckers for all of these things. Then there was the old photograph of the handsome young man with the intense eyes. I was hooked. 

Over the years, even after the death of my beloved grandmother, I retained my interest in Gilkison and his work. And, as the centenary of the start of the First World War approached in 2014, I decided to take a book of his cartoons that had been in the family for years to an expert at the University of Glasgow. I was stunned when Professor Laurence Grove, director of the university’s Stirling Maxwell Centre for the study of text and image, got very excited. He has since described Gilkison’s work as “an astounding discovery of international importance”. 

Indeed he felt the quality and style of the work was so unusual that it merited a place in the Hunterian’s Comic Invention exhibition, which brings together work from an array of global styles and sources. 

“Gilkison is the perfect addition to this exhibition, telling the story of the First World War through cartoons which not only had a mass audience but really made people think,” explains Grove.

“Archie is the only cartoonist I know who evokes an anti-war sentiment during the war itself. That makes him very important. He could be for cartooning what Wilfred Owen was for poetry. As well as that his style is extremely fine and erudite – his talent is up there with the great 17th-century etchers. 

“But at the same time there is a very dry and black humour in the work, which goes with the text he writes alongside the drawings. These are figures that we recognise from contemporary events and classical and literary sources.” 

Newspaper circulations grew exponentially during the war – for many it was the only source of news about the conflict – and cartoons played a key role in the government propaganda machine. But where most cartoonists underplayed the terrible reality of the trenches, focusing on everyday humour, Gilkison – who was working mostly at the time for the Glasgow Herald and Evening Times, producing three, sometimes four cartoons a week – often took a more sophisticated path. And, crucially, he did not shy away from the horror.

“Gilkison is also patriotic,” adds Grove. “He clearly puts the blame for things on the Kaiser – he’s not John Lennon. But he makes it clear that the war is going nowhere, that it is serving no purpose.

“He puts different events together and marries different styles. He makes you question things; he creates a puzzle that you have to put together. Gilkison does for cartooning what Owen did for poetry – he puts it into a different perspective, one which people just didn’t get at the time.

“Comic art is about putting text and image together to tell a story. But comics aren’t always funny. We thought it was important that if we were going to talk about horror comics, one of the great horror events is the First World War and the best depiction of that, in my view, is Archie Gilkison.”

Born in 1885, one of six siblings, the eldest of whom was my great-grandmother, Gilkison was apparently a shy man, a writer and poet as well as an artist, adored for his warmth and wit by his family and friends. Before the war he had travelled widely in the US and worked for publications in London, Bristol and Dundee. 

But it was his sophisticated mix of humour, patriotism, despair and outrage that increasingly impressed his editors and readers as the war rumbled on and the casualties stacked up. The conflict may have brought out the best in his art, but it was also his undoing. Despite suffering from chest problems all his life, Gilkison was conscripted into the Royal Scots in October 1916, at the height of his cartooning career, and sent to training in Berwick. A chill developed into pneumonia and he died aged 31 on November 2 of that year. He never made it to the front line.

His family was devastated – I remember my grandmother telling me her mother never got over the loss of her little brother and spoke regularly of him for the rest of her life. My grandmother, meanwhile, never met her uncle but the history she passed down to me had been passed to her in exactly the same way.

Gilkison must have been held in high regard by the Scottish journalism profession, too – the book in the exhibition, one of only a few copies, is a beautiful memorial made two years after his death.

One of the most poignant things about the volume is the front page that visitors to the exhibition won’t get to see. It features a watercolour by Gilkison completed not long before his death, depicting a Scottish soldier piping his comrades over the top. He wrote a short poem to accompany it:

I heard the piper blaw/ 
Wi my ain een I saw/ 
What ye can never knaw/ 
For I was Fey wha followed.

In Scots, “fey” means fated to die and in these lines Gilkison predicts his own fate and that of so many members of his lost generation. A hundred years on, so many conflicts later, these lines remain desperately sad. 

As a journalist, I marvel at Gilkison’s talent, bravery and the pioneering spirit of his work. I wonder at the parallels in our lives – how astonishing it is that I work for the same newspaper exactly 100 years on.

And as a relative I mourn his loss, as my grandmother and great grandmother did before me. I only wish they could have joined me as I explored the exhibition to see how his work earns its place alongside the likes of Picasso, Lichtenstein and Hogarth. They would have shared my immense pleasure and pride, I’m sure. And maybe, like me, they would have shed a tear.

Comic Invention runs at the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow until July 17. Admission costs £5/£3.