Fred May
(1891-1976), CartoonistArtist of 22 portraits
Fred May was a caricaturist and painter. May's earliest drawings were produced for the Liverpool Daily Post and North Eastern Daily Gazette. His first cartoons for the Tatler were sent home in 1917 from the trenches where he was serving as an infantry officer with the Green Howards. He was asked to provide caricatures of men on the Western Front between the shelling. He developed an acute, gentle and humorous style from the 1920s onwards, caricaturing personalities including Winston Churchill, who autographed his own likeness. May served again during the Second World War, when honoured with the Legion d'Honneur, and after the war he continued to work for the Tatler, but also the Graphic and Weekly Sketch and News Chronicle right up until his death in 1976.
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Sean Bellew
23 September 2019, 01:13
Hello,
Fred May painted my Grandfather, LT Col John Grant Peckston OBE TD KSG - they were great friends and died within months of each other. My mother has Fred’s hand painted Christmas cards to my grandparents covering many years - sadly none are portraits (apart from St Nicholas!).
However, whilst doing a bit of research I came across an article from the Northern Echo about Fred, which you may find useful. https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/7107539.talent-of-a-kindly-caricaturist-drawn-to-record-an-entire-generation/
Roger Newman Turner
06 December 2019, 10:46
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fred May contributed several cartoon collages to the quarterly organic farming magazine, The Farmer, 'published and edited from the farm' by my father, F Newman Turner. These were caricatures of some of the luminaries of the agricultural world attending the Royal Show or the London Dairy Show. I have the framed originals of two of these which featured my father as he had an exhibitors' stand at the shows.
I also have an original (unframed as yet) of the panel for a Food and Farming Any Questions? put on at the Kingsway Hall by my father's Whole Food Society in Autumn 1950 and chaired by Freddy Grisewood, for many years the presenter of the eponymous BBC radio programme. This shows caricatures of Grisewood, Ralph Wightman, Robert Henriques, Dr GE Breen, and my father. It appeared in the Winter 1950 edition of The Farmer.