James Boswell, New Zealand born but a Londoner throughout his adult life, became a noted cartoonist in the Thirties, mocking Chamberlain and others for Left Review. Boswell's drawings are observant, witty, tough and affectionate. He notices details of mess behaviour, attitudes to the locals; he watches the desert and thinks up monstrous officers and horrific surrealistic spectres. Back in Britain, post war, he became art editor of Lilliput, the most imaginatively illustrated magazine of the time and chronicled the post-war period of shortages and spivvery in Camden Town.
James Boswell, New Zealand born but a Londoner throughout his adult life, became a noted cartoonist in the Thirties, mocking Chamberlain and others for Left Review. His politics made him, in effect, unemployable as an Official War Artist so, during the war, while serving as a radiographer in the RAMC he drew army life around him. Boswell's sketchbooks cover his experiences in London during the blitz, training in Scotland and from 1942-3 a year spent in Iraq. Nothing much happened in the field hospitals of the army camps in Basra and elsewhere, but he found plenty to record: 'Our world shrinks to a tiny island', he wrote. 'No steady stream of casualties fills our hospital to remind us that we are part of the war. For us there is only the tedious struggle against malaria, dysentery and boredom.'
Boswell's drawings are observant, witty, tough and affectionate. He notices details of mess behaviour, attitudes to the locals; he watches the desert and thinks up monstrous officers and horrific surrealistic spectres. Back in Britain, post war, he became art editor of Lilliput, the most imaginatively illustrated magazine of the time and chronicled the post-war period of shortages and spivvery in Camden Town. Chronicler to a generation, Boswell produced an unsurpassed record of the experience of ordinary military life, from training among the dripping trees of the Scottish Lowlands to serving in Iraq, dumped in an alien land.