Wally Fawkes

DESCRIBED as the world’s greatest clarinetist, Wally Fawkes played jazz with Humphrey Lyttelton and was so accomplished that his all-time hero, the legendary musician Sidney Bechet, said listening to him play was like hearing his shadow perform.

But playing the clarinet was not the only world-class skill Wally possessed.

His day job was that of political cartoonist, working under the pen name Trog, and his bitingly brilliant works carved a special place for decades in the nations political psyche.

Wally, who has died aged 98, was born in Canada in 1924.

His family moved to Britain in 1931 and aged 14, he won a scholarship to Sidcup Art School. He took up the clarinet at 18, drawn to the music of Bechet, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong. Self-taught, he never read a note of music.

He recalled being “swept away” by Bechet, and his talent was such that Bechet would describe Wally as the world’s best. Wally was exempt from war service, and was given a job painting camouflage on factories.

He recalled how his first piece suffered a direct hit by the Luftwaffe and joked his harshest critic was Hitler.

It was while playing jazz in air raid shelters Wally came up with the name The Troglodytes, later giving him his pen name of Trog.

After the war, Wally joined the Camberwell School of Art – and it was here he met Humphrey Lyttelton. With Humph, the pair would lead the trad jazz revival in the UK through the 1950s.

The demands of touring and holding down a day job became increasing hard. Wally made the decision to keep music for pleasure and cartoon drawing as a livelihood, as it was more secure.

He believed there was a link between the two art forms.

“You’re drawing in the air,” he said. “You’ve got to keep to the same chords and get them right, but you start improvising, as with a caricature. “The clarinet and the pen are similar: with the clarinet you depend on the reed at the end, and with a pen it’s the nib. “You dip the nib into ink and you dip the reed into your head.”

While Wally performed at the biggest venues – a recording at the Royal Festival Hall in 1953 was released as an album – he enjoyed gigs in numerous pubs.

He played at the Prince of Wales and Red Lion and Sun in Highgate, the Tufnell Park Tavern and led Sunday jams at the Dartmouth Arms in Dartmouth Park. Wally enjoyed rustling up dinner – he had a penchant for spicy food – and entertaining.

His home was full of people around the table, with Wally making sure glasses were charged and appetites sated. Wally worked for the Daily Mail – a newspaper whose politics he disliked.

It would lead to them parting ways, the final straw a take down of UK passport queue-jumping Olympic runner Zola Budd. Two days later, Robert Maxwell offered Wally a job at the Daily Mirror.

His strip, Flook, about a cuddly creature, was published from 1949 to 1985 and Wally worked with such celebrated writers as Lyttelton, George Melly, Barry Norman and Keith Waterhouse.

Mr Fawkes’ picture of Flook drawing him

Private Eye, The Spectator and New Statesman turned to Trog to lighten their pages, and his work for The Observer stretched from 1971 to 1985.

He moved to the Sunday Telegraph, leaving the role due to failing eyesight aged 81 – brought on, Wally claimed, by having to repeatedly draw Tony Blair.

He said: “I’ve done lots of cartoons of Blair, week after week, and I think that’s what drove me blind.”

Playing the clarinet, he said, took away the sadness. When he moved from one Dartmouth Park home to another, he knocked on a neighbours door to apologise for the noise and was told that the only disturbance felt was when he stopped playing.

A seaside home in Hastings provided a base for family breaks. Summers would be spent playing cricket on the beach. Wally, a tall man with a large frame, was an accomplished cricketer and founded a musicians’ team.

He was a member of the MCC and when he could not attend Lords in person, Test Match Special would be glued to his ear.

Wally married his first wife Sandy in 1949. They had four children. A second marriage, to Sue, took place in 1965 and they had two children.