Gan'
to Home
Way back when I was kid, my mam
used to visit an elderly woman by the name of Mary who used to 
run
the bed and breakfast over the road from the old Launderette on the corner
of York and Lowthian Rd. Walking into the house I will never forget, was
a number of ink drawings featuring some bloke with a fag hanging out of
his mouth and a old woman that reminded me of me gran. The front room was
much 
the
same with more of these ink drawings hanging off the wall. To keep me amused,
Mary would give me annuals containing whole loads of these sketches which
I was left to read whilst her and my mother smoked tabs and wittered on
for a couple of hours.
It turned out that the bloke in the cartoons went by the name of Andy Capp, and Mary turned out to be a old friend of Reg Smythe. The ink drawings adorning the walls as it transpired, were all originals and are probably worth a few bob now that the old guy has drank his last pint.
Andy
Capp was a cloth cap wearing, drinking, good for nothin' layabout allegedly
inspired by the men folk of the town. Things have moved on since these
initial observations, the blokes in the town have stopped wearing cloth
caps. The other characters in the cartoons were also inspired by personality
traits observed by the wily Smthy before he fell off this mortal beer mat.
I'll dedicate this page to the work of Reg which was always sharp and humorous.
Reg Smythe
Smythe was born Reginald Smyth in
Hartlepool on July 10 1917. His father worked in the Teesside shipyards.
Young Reg attended Galleys Field School
in Hartlepool, leaving at 14 to become a butcher's boy. In 1936 he joined
the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, and served throughout the Second World 
War
as a machine-gunner. On
demobilisation, Smyth became a civil servant, working as a junior clerk
at the General Post Office. In his spare time he began first to draw posters
for 
the
Post Office amateur dramatic group, and then to send pocket cartoons to
such specialist journals as the Fishtrader's Gazette and the Drapers
Record. Soon he was turning
out several dozen drawings a week, using an alarm clock to limit the time
he spent on each to half an hour. He also began to use Smythe as his professional
name.
Andy Capp was first commissioned by the Daily Mirror in August 1957 as a strip just for its northern readers, but within six months it was in included in every edition. The strip probably went some way in strengthening the southern stereotype of Northerners being nothing more than unemployed layabouts with nothing to do all day but go down the pub and drink beer and smoke fags. Andy Capp was the brainchild of one of Hartlepool's most respected inhabitants, Reg Smythe.
Smythe modelled the layabout, male
chauvinist Andy Capp and his long-suffering wife Flo on his own 
parents
and based many story lines on life in his native Hartlepool. Smythe's development
of 
the
work shy, beer swilling, rent dodging pigeon fancier was condemned by feminists
but acclaimed in equal measure as a breath of fresh air by the critics.
Smythe, who turned to comic strips after a stint as a postal worker in
London, continued to produce 60 drawings a week and refused to modernise
Andy Capp, who he said represented "the bloke in the local".
Reg recently passed on, falling victim to cancer at the ripe old age of 80. He died in Hartlepool were he had spent most of life. His legacy will live on however. Andy Capp has been sold to just about every corner of the world. Exactly what foreign readers may think of it, who knows, but one thing is for sure, I'll bet they don't realise that this fictional character is based on a male stereotype which is alive and well, and living in Hartlepool the cultural centre of the NE of England.
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