Willie Rushton

[Straff]

Is anyone aware of a biography (rather than the Wikipedia entry) of Willie Rushton? The nearest thing I have is 'Super Pig - A Gentleman's Guide to Everyday Survival' which gives very few personal details. Its a shame if the full story of this most erudite man is not made known.

[CaptainWaggett]

Don't know of any biographies but here's his DNB entry if it helps

Rushton, William George [Willie] (1937–1996), cartoonist, comedian, and author
by Ned Sherrin

© Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved
Rushton, William George [Willie] (1937–1996), cartoonist, comedian, and author, was born on 18 August 1937 at 3 Wilbraham Place, Chelsea, the only child of John Atherton Rushton (d. 1958), a publisher, and his Welsh wife, Veronica Hannah Gilbert James. Willie Rushton was educated at Shrewsbury School, where his contemporaries included Richard Ingrams, Christopher Booker, and Paul Foot. With Ingrams and Booker he produced The Wallopian, a satirical version of the school magazine, to which he contributed cartoons. Along with commentary on schoolmasters that was more barbed than the authorities found acceptable, their chief targets were pseudo-intellectuals, for whom they coined the term ‘pseuds’, which later gained common currency in Private Eye. Academically undistinguished, Rushton claimed to have failed O-level maths seven times; confronted with a specimen in a bottle during a biology exam and asked ‘What's this?’, he answered, ‘Disgusting’. His theatrical talent found an outlet at Shrewsbury: he recalled that when he played Lord Loam in The Admirable Crichton, ‘the audience wondered which elderly member of staff had been dragooned into playing Loam’ (The Independent, 13 Dec 1996).

Rushton did his national service in the army, among the last generation to do so. He failed the officer selection board, and served in the ranks. An anti-authoritarian, he found the army absurd, but welcomed the egalitarian ideas he developed as a trooper in Bad Oeynhausen. After leaving the army Rushton worked for a short time in a solicitor's office. The occasional cartoons he sent to Punch were rejected. He left the law firm after narrowly missing being knocked down by a bus, vowing that he would not waste another day of his life doing something he did not enjoy. His contemporaries from Shrewsbury had gone on to university: at Oxford, Ingrams was editing two magazines, Mesopotamia and Parson's Pleasure, to which Rushton contributed cartoons. The idea for a London-based satirical magazine was developed in a Chelsea pub, and the first issue of Private Eye appeared on 25 October 1961. Early issues of the paper were put together in Rushton's bedroom in his mother's house at 28 Scarsdale Villas, Kensington: he alone mastered the art of laying out Christopher Booker's copy and his own cartoons, which were then taken to Neasden to be printed by the then revolutionary photolitho process. Private Eye was well received, and favourably reviewed in The Observer, and its success was assured. Rushton was more than a cartoonist for the magazine. He supplied jokes, puns, and doubles entendres, and had a genius for inventing names for Eye characters, such as Lunchtime O'Booze, the archetypal hard-drinking journalist.

Also in 1961 Rushton made his professional acting début, in Spike Milligan's The Bed-Sitting Room, at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury; the critic Kenneth Tynan deemed his performance brilliant. Shortly afterwards, he joined Ingrams, John Wells, and Barbara Windsor in a bizarre cabaret at the Room at the Top (of a department store) in Ilford, where he was recruited by Ned Sherrin, the producer of the satirical BBC television show That Was The Week That Was (or TW3 as it was familiarly known). Rushton had already started writing whimsical songs, like ‘Neasden’, ‘The Bum Song’, and ‘Fornicazione … is Italian for Love’. On TW3 (1962–3) he was an immediate success. His weekly impressions of tory politicians have been called ‘masterpieces of refined cruelty’ (The Times, 12 Dec 1996), although he did not really do impressions of individuals so much as impersonations of types: he excelled as the embodiment of pompous, overbearing establishment figures, ripe for knocking down. In 1963 he was persuaded to run against Alec Douglas-Home in the Kinross by-election, a decision he regretted. He won forty-five votes. He was unhappy with the sequel to TW3, and left after a few shows. He was put to better use in Not Only … But Also (1965–6), which starred Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. In 1968 he married the actress Arlene Dorgan, with whom he had a son; there were two stepsons from her previous marriage.

Rushton's theatrical career continued fitfully (he appeared in Gulliver's Travels at the Mermaid in 1971 and again in 1979, and in Eric Idle's Pass the Butler at the Globe in 1982), and in 1996 he toured with Two Old Farts in the Night, an anarchic run of one-night stands with his fellow radio panellist Barry Cryer. He had a series of cameo roles in films, including Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965) and Monte Carlo or Bust (1969). On television he took the parts of Plautus in Frankie Howerd's comic foray into ancient Rome, Up Pompeii (1970), and Major Trumpington in the drama Colditz (1974). He never had a satisfactory vehicle to showcase his own talents: Rushton's Illustrated (1980) had only one season. He was a regular panellist on the television quiz show Celebrity Squares (1985–9) and a popular reader on the children's story programme Jackanory. Perhaps his widest following was gained through the cult BBC Radio 4 ‘antidote to panel games’, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue; he joined it in 1974 and appeared in each yearly series until his death. The show's formula, in which the teams of (usually) Tim Brooke Taylor, Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden, and Willie Rushton were given ‘silly things’ to do by the chairman, Humphrey Lyttelton, admirably suited Rushton's humour; even his silences could leave the audience rocking with laughter.

Rushton remained prolific as writer, cartoonist, and illustrator. His commitment to Private Eye diminished, but he continued to supply it with cartoons, especially to illustrate the regular ‘Mrs Wilson's Diary’ item, and Auberon Waugh's ‘Diary’. He also illustrated Waugh's ‘The Way of the World’ column in the Daily Telegraph, and contributed to his Literary Review. As well as illustrating the work of others, he published a number of humorous books, including Pigsticking, a Joy for Life: a Gentleman's Guide to Sporting Pastimes (1977), Bureaucrats: how to Annoy Them (under the pseudonym R. T. Fishall) (1981), and Willie Rushton's Great Moments in History (1984). The original drawings from the latter work found a permanent home in the Victoria and Albert Museum. His cartoons were distinctive, ‘distinguished by their clean line and bold use of black and white’ (Daily Telegraph, 12 Dec 1996), and his caricatures are readily identifiable with their subjects. In his later years he began to work brilliantly in colour. Cricket was a personal passion. His father had sent him for coaching at Lord's before he went to Shrewsbury, and in later life he played for the Lord's Taverners. He wrote a novel, W. G. Grace's Last Case (1984), based on a fictional episode in the life of the great cricketer.

Rushton was diagnosed with diabetes in the early 1980s, and gave up beer; he became, according to Richard Ingrams, ‘quite grumpy as a result, but his grumpiness had an admirable and jaunty quality to it’ (Daily Telegraph, 13 Dec 1996). His sudden death profoundly shocked his friends and contemporaries. He went into hospital for heart surgery, and died from complications on 11 December 1996, in the Cromwell Hospital, Kensington.

NED SHERRIN
Sources

private information (2004) · personal knowledge (2004) · Daily Telegraph (12 Dec 1996) · The Times (12 Dec 1996) · The Independent (13 Dec 1996) · The Guardian (12 Dec 1996) · b. cert. · d. cert.
Archives


FILM


BFI NFTVA, documentary footage

SOUND


BL NSA, performance recording

Likenesses

photographs, 1963, Hult. Arch. · T. Cuff, photograph, Apex Photo Agency Ltd, Exeter [see illus.] · W. Rushton, self-portrait, caricature, repro. in The Independent
Wealth at death

£400,929: probate, 12 March 1997, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–8 All rights reserved

Ned Sherrin, ‘Rushton, William George (1937–1996)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2006 [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 29 April 2008]

William George Rushton (1937–1996): doi:10.1093/refdnb/63998

[Straff]

Thanks CW. Pads out Wiki a little.