George Worsley Adamson

George Adamson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in 1987.

Adamson was the winner of the P.G. Wodehouse Centenary Illustration Award in Punch in 1981 and was subsequently commissioned to illustrate an anthology of P.G. Wodehouse short stories for the Folio Society published in 1983.

In 1970, Adamson illustrated the book based on Richard Carpenter's television series Catweazle; this was followed in 1971 by the drawings he did for the book based on the second series, Catweazle and the Magic Zodiac. In the 1980s, he illustrated the first five of the Richard Ingrams and John Wells Dear Bill books for Private Eye.

Besides work for books, Adamson undertook commissions to illustrate articles in periodicals, among them the Listener and Nursing Times. For the latter he drew more than two hundred illustrations between 1963 and 1983.

From the mid-1960s he illustrated Norman Hunter's Professor Branestawm books, providing a suitably zany continuity with W. Heath Robinson's illustrations from the 1930s. Also in the 1960s, Adamson painted the jackets for Alan Garner's first two novels for children: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). In the same decade Adamson did the drawings for the first book of poems Ted Hughes wrote for children: Meet My Folks! (1961); this was followed by the drawings he did for Ted Hughes's first book of children's stories, How the Whale Became (1963), and those for the first edition of The Iron Man (1968).

In 1954 he worked briefly in London with the designer John Morgan for the newly formed design group Byrne and Woudhuysen Limited (later Woudhuysen & Company Ltd), before setting himself up as a full-time illustrator and cartoonist.

The first book for which he did the drawings and dust-wrapper was Marjorie Vasey's The Day is Over (Epworth Press, 1954).

Between his portrait of his two-year-old son Peter One Morning (completed in 1950) and Killerton from the North (1979), however, there was a gap of many years during which he pursued his career as illustrator and cartoonist. He went back to printmaking with great enthusiasm in the late 1970s, exhibiting his works both new and old at the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers. Among his later prints are portraits of John Ogdon (1979) and Patricia Beer (1982).

Between 1946 and 1953 Adamson taught engraving and illustration at Exeter School of Art, Exeter, Devon.

Adamson published his first cartoon in Punch in September 1939 and his last in the Spectator in September 1994. Over the intervening fifty-five years his cartoons appeared not just in Punch but in the Tatler and Bystander, Time & Tide, the Peterborough column in the Daily Telegraph, Private Eye and other magazines.

He exhibited at the Royal Academy (in 1937, 1939, 1940 and 1948) and contributed to Punch from 1939 to 1988.

Following the death of his mother in February 1921, George Adamson sailed to England with his father, his Aunt Florence, and his two sisters, Marie and Dorothy, on the Cunard liner RMS Caronia, landing at Liverpool on July 10. His father sailed back to New York in October 1921, where he died the following year.

George Worsley Adamson, RE, MCSD (7 February 1913 – 5 March 2005) was a book illustrator, writer, and cartoonist, who held American and British dual citizenship from 1931.

Adamson was born in the Bronx, New York City. His parents were George William Adamson, a master car builder for the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, and Mary Lydia (Lily, née Howard). His father, born in Glasgow, Scotland, and his mother, born in Wigan, Lancashire, had moved to New York City from Bombay in 1910.