THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN OBJECTS
NO.34
Born into a military family at Muree on India’s North West Frontier (now Pakistan)on 9 July 1887, Charles Bruce Bairnsfather is one of the best known of the UK’s First World War artists and cartoonists. Educated at Rudyard Kipling’sold school, Bairnsfather passed the Army entrance exam and enlisted in the Militia. He then studied at commercial art school but re-enlisted with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment when war broke out in 1914.It was as a Second Lieutenant in the 1stBattalion that he arrived on the Western Front, going on to experience the sights and sounds that ultimately led to him becoming a household name by the end of the war.
It was whilst serving in the Ypres Salient that Bairnsfather soon began to use his skill as a cartoonist to depict life at the front. Many of his drawings came to feature the pipe-smoking, walrus-moustached character ‘Old Bill’ and his comrades Bert and Alf. In an article published in The Weekly Dispatch on 5 August 1917, Bairnsfather supplied a copy of a photograph he had taken in the trenches at Ploegsteert in the winter of 1914. Below the picture he indicated the individual on who he had based ‘Old Bill’ – LanceCorporal 7840 Thomas Henry Rafferty.
