In my school days at Rugby I was always an admirer of the great American cartoonist, Thurber. And in my Cambridge days, I became cartoonist to the undergraduate paper "The   Granta"...... "The only paper of any consequence north of the equator". But in my second year my tutor forbade me to continue since I wasn't spending enough time on my work....... reading classics.

In spite of this, cartooning has remained one of my lifelines all through a varied career.As a schoolmaster at Eton, I would draw on the blackboard for my boys......as a reward for good work. As a staff writer at Ealing Film Studios ...during the heyday of the Ealing Comedies my drawings used to appear in the house magazine.  And when I became a television executive in the BBC, I would sometimes send cartoons in the place of memos......usually done on the back of old scripts.