Spot the difference.
Sir Philip was President of the Oxford Union and is married to former prime minister and serving MP, Theresa May. Phil May, frankly, looks like a dodgy Edwardian bookmaker. Phil had a tough adolescence.
“May had begun to earn his living in a solicitor’s office; before he was fifteen he had acted as time-keeper at a foundry, had tried to become a jockey and had been on the stage at Scarborough and Leeds. When only fourteen years old, had drawings accepted for the Yorkshire Gossip. When he was about seventeen he went to London with a sovereign in his pocket. He suffered extreme want, sleeping out in the parks and streets, until he obtained employment as designer to a theatrical costumier. He also drew posters and cartoons, and for about two years worked for the St Stephens Review, until he was advised to go to Australia for his health.” (Wikipedia)
Not a promising start to life and his ill health took its toll – he died of TB aged thirty-nine. Nonetheless he has a blue plaque at 20 Holland Park Road.
In Australia he was an artist onThe Sydney Bulletin and toed the paper’s xenophobic line. The Canberra Times in 1987 described one of his drawings as “the most scandalous and racist cartoon ever to grace the Australian media”. What do you think?
While it is somewhat harsh on Chinese immigrants no doubt some Australians today may sympathise with The Sydney Bulletin’s view (“Australia for the White Man”) so trenchantly portrayed by Phil May. He only stayed in Australia for three years and thereafter drew blameless cartoons and caricatures of artistic merit, possibly influencing Paddy Bellew – my grandfather’s brother; the cartoonist in the family.