Bruce Bairnsfather was born at Strawberry Bank Cottage, Murree, Punjab, India, on 9 July 1887. He was the eldest son of Thomas Henry Bairnsfather, a Scottish officer in the Bengal Infantry, and his wife, Amelia Jane Eliza Every. Arriving in England at the age of eight, he stayed with his maternal uncle, the rector of Thornbury, near Bromyard, Herefordshire, before attending Rudyard Kipling’s old school, the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, between 1898 and 1904.
He went on to an army crammer, Trinity College, Stratford-upon-Avon, and served with the Third Militia Battalion of the Royal Warwicks, while also attending evening classes in art at the local technical college. Though he gained a commission as a second lieutenant with the Cheshires, he soon became disillusioned with army life, and resigned to become an artist.
In 1907, Bairnsfather studied under Dudley Hardy and Charles van Havermaet at John Hassall’s New Art School, in London. However, he was unable to establish himself as a poster artist, so returned to Warwickshire to live with his parents, and worked as an electrical engineer at Spensers Ltd, in Stratford. In his spare time, he took part in amateur theatricals. Through this activity, he met the novelist, Marie Corelli, who in turn introduced him to the tea merchant, Sir Thomas Lipton. Sir Thomas commissioned some of his earliest advertising drawings.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Bairnsfather rejoined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and served as a machine-gun officer in France, eventually achieving the rank of captain. He sent comic drawings from the Front, which appeared in The Bystander as ‘Fragments from France’ from January 1915. During the second battle of Ypres, later that year, he suffered shell shock and hearing damage, and was hospitalised. While recovering, he invented his most famous character, the pipe-smoking Tommy, ‘Old Bill’ Busby, who was introduced to the readership of The Bystander on 15 September 1915 in the cartoon, When the ’ell is it going to be strawberry. Two months later, he drew his most celebrated cartoon, Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it. His work proved so popular with the troops that he was appointed Officer Cartoonist and transferred to the Intelligence Department of the War Office.
Despite the end of the First World War in 1918, ‘Old Bill’ had so taken on a life of his own that he continued to appear not only in periodicals and books, but also on stage and screen, and through a range of merchandise. In addition, he was the subject of a number of lectures, given by Bairnsfather on both sides of the Atlantic for many years. Bairnsfather’s popularity in the United States was such that he was appointed Official War Artist to the US Army in Europe in the Second World War (1942-44).
Bairnsfather died in the Royal Infirmary, Worcester, on 29 September 1959. His wife, Cecilia, and his daughter, Barbara, both survived him.
Further reading:
Mark Bryant, ‘Bairnsfather, (Charles) Bruce (1887-1959)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 3, pages 352-354; Tonie and Valmai Holt, In Search of a Better Hole: The Life, the Works and the Collectables of Bruce Bairnsfather, Portsmouth: Milestone Publications, 1985
