Cartoonist who created Andy Capp, the bone-idle Northerner interested only in pigeons, beer and football

REG Smythe, who has died aged 80, was the creator of the immensely popular Andy Capp cartoon strip.

The character, who first appeared in the Fifties and changed little thereafter, was Smythe's idealisation of the unreformed Northern working man of a generation before.

Capp, his mouth rarely unadorned by the stub of a cigarette, is a work-shy chauvinist, his twin passions pigeons and football, his foe the rent-collector, his life's goal the next pint of mild. Smythe based both Capp and his long-suffering wife, Flo, on his own parents.

Despite his peculiarly regional and British origins, the character's incorrigible idleness and brutishly funny attitudes made him as much-loved in Istanbul and Moscow as he was on Wearside.

The strip was syndicated in more than 200 newspapers around the world, becoming Tuffa Victor in Sweden, Jan Met de Pet in Holland and An'Dicap in Ghana. The character became almost as universally recognisable as Snoopy.

Charlie Brown, however, would never receive the welcome Capp was liable to deliver. "What are you hanging around in the cold for, pet?" he would ask his sister-in-law on opening the door. "Buzz off."

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 Draper's 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.

Smythe joined the Daily Mirror in 1954 and was given the job of drawing their "Laughter at Work" cartoon. Three years later, the Mirror's guiding light, Hugh Cudlipp, was seeking to increase the newspaper's Northern readership and commissioned Smythe to draw a strip that would strike a chord with North Country experience.

The first Andy Capp cartoon appeared as a single-panel in the Mirror's Northern edition on Aug 5 1957.

The character was a great success and within a year was being run in the newspaper's national edition where, said Cudlipp approvingly, "it sets an appalling example to the youth of Great Britain".

In May 1960 the strip began to be featured too in the Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror).

Within a decade, syndication had made Andy Capp one of the world's most recognisable images of British life, even as economic change began to make the North East less and less like the flat-capped environment from which Smythe had drawn sentimental inspiration.

Andy Capp was used to advertise beer and Post Office bonds, and in the Eighties a musical and a television series briefly gave Capp's philosophy a three-dimensional existence.

The strip won the Best British Cartoon award from 1961 to 1965 and was voted Best Strip Cartoon by the USA Cartoonist Assocation in 1974.

Despite the offer of larger salaries, and even a Rolls-Royce, from other newspapers, Smythe remained loyal to the Mirror and, although Andy Capp made him rich, he continued to live and work from his home in Hartlepool.

Reg Smythe married, in 1949, Vera Toyne, who died last year.

Arts & Books | Connected | Expo | Fashion | Food & Drink | HomeFront
Horoscopes | Lingua Franca | Motoring | Obituaries | Opinion | Science | Travel

© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 1997. Terms & Conditions of reading.

Information about Telegraph Group Limited and Electronic Telegraph.

"Electronic Telegraph" and "The Daily Telegraph" are trademarks of Telegraph Group Limited. These marks may not be copied or used without permission. Information for webmasters linking to Electronic Telegraph.

Email Electronic Telegraph.