John Kent

Although he worked as a caricaturist, illustrator, writer and painter, John Kent will probably be best remembered for his controversial political cartoon strip "Varoomshka" which was published in The Guardian in the 1970s.

Capel John Kent, cartoonist and illustrator: born Oamaru, New Zealand 21 June 1937; married 1971 Nina Brilliant; died Antibes, France 13 April 2003.

Although he worked as a caricaturist, illustrator, writer and painter, John Kent will probably be best remembered for his controversial political cartoon strip "Varoomshka" which was published in The Guardian in the 1970s.

Capel John Kent was born in 1937 in Oamaru, New Zealand, 40 miles north of Dunedin on the east coast of South Island. He was the elder of two children of Ronald Capel Kent, an official in the New Zealand Justice Department, and his wife Winifred. After school he worked in a variety of jobs before deciding at the age of 22 to visit Tahiti. However, he somehow missed the boat and came to Britain instead, arriving in London in 1959.

A self-taught artist, he worked at first as a copywriter and art director in advertising companies such as Dudley, Turner & Vincent and was Creative Director of Dorlands when he had his first strip, "Grocer Heath and His Pals", lampooning the Conservative Party leader (and later Prime Minister) Edward Heath, accepted by Private Eye in 1969.

This was followed on 13 October the same year by "Varoomshka", which ran for 10 years in The Guardian and led to two books, Varoomshka (1972) and Varoomshka's Bumper Colouring Book Annual (1975), and an exhibition of the cartoons at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Varoomshka reappeared briefly in the early 1980s in The Journalist and later The Sunday Times but without the impact of the Guardian years.

Varoomshka was inspired by the German fashion model and actress Verushka and was originally based on Kent's wife, Nina, and a mutual friend, Liz Barnes. He once described the character as "the permanent link between absurdities. A Miss Everyone who, unlike most people, manages to retain a sense of incredulity at all she encounters." An innocent blonde beauty asking simple questions of wily politicians in the Wilson/ Heath/Callaghan era, Kent's character exposed hypocrisy and self-interest in government. She was frequently attacked by feminists, and the trade union leader Jack Jones even sued for libel over one episode of the cartoon.

Kent also worked as an illustrator for The Guardian and continued to draw regularly for Private Eye until his death, combining political comment and caricature with a strip format, notably in series such as "The Brothers" (Wilson/Callaghan), "5th Form at St Maggie's" and "Maggie Rules OK" (Thatcher), "Worzel Gummidge" (Foot) and "John Major's Big Top" (Major). There were also two strips about Fleet Street figures, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch. Kent's controversial Falklands War drawing of Margaret Thatcher as a war memorial ("They Died to Save Her Face", published in Private Eye in January 1983) is now held in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.

In addition he contributed to The Sunday Times (1980-83, 1990-94), the London Evening Standard (1982-86), The Times (from 1998, notably the "La Bimba" political strip), The Sun and the Daily Mail (from 1974).

John Kent was also a successful watercolour artist and illustrator and designed, wrote and illustrated two books: John Kent's Venice (1988) and John Kent's Florence and Siena (1989). Other illustration work included The ABZ of Pornography (1972, edited by Richard Michael), The Wit and Humour of Sex (1975, compiled by Richard Huggett) and Tales of the Redundance Kid (1975, by Barry Norman) and he drew book covers, notably the jacket for Patrick Marnham's The Private Eye Story (1982), celebrating 21 years of the magazine.

He designed posters, too, and gave occasional lectures (for example at the Royal Institute of British Architects), and exhibitions of his work have been held at the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh and elsewhere. Some of his cartoons were included in "Drawn and Quartered: the world of the British newspaper cartoon" at the National Portrait Gallery in 1970 and examples of his work are held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

In 1971 Kent had married Nina Brilliant, an editor who worked for the romantic book publishers Mills & Boon, and they settled in north London, but from 1987 spent an increasing amount of time in Juan-les-Pins in the South of France.

An admirer of the American cartoonist Al Capp (creator of "L'il Abner"), Kent worked at first mostly in Rotring and fine felt-tip pen and occasional brush and ink on A3 board but later switched to A4 paper which was easier to fax. He had a clean line using solid blacks, often with thin vertical lines for shadow, and employed a variety of framed and unframed spaces in his cartoons rather than the more conventional sequence of regular boxes favoured by comic strip artists. Non-partisan in his politics, he said, "My job is to knock the party in power."

John Kent was 5ft 8in tall, wore a large moustache and had prematurely silver hair and blue eyes. A fanatical and highly competent DIY enthusiast, he also enjoyed restoring old houses, including a 15th-century hall house in Suffolk.

Mark Bryant

Interesting? Click here to explore further