Page 33 - Chiron Autumn 2018

Reg Carter
Reginald Arthur Lay Carter was born in 1886 in Southwold, Suffolk into a well- known local building family. He was a compulsive sketcher at school, but left at 14 to work in a solicitor`s office. The drawing continued, however, and at just the age of 18 he received his first commission to create comical picture postcards. Many of his later postcards were in colour and often somewhat `risqué`.
Reg is most famous as the cartoonist who created the cartoon ostrich Big Eggo that appeared in the first cover strip of the Beano comic on 30 July 1938. He worked for the Beano drawing Big Eggo and other strips until his death in 1949.
The postcards shown are four comical mule ones published around 1915. The other two are from his famous first series of railway cards, the `Sorrows of Southwold`, published in 1910. One of the most fascinating curiosities of the series was the card which originally featured a suffragette hiding in the branches of the tree, lobbing a bomb at the engine! Eight years later, when universal suffrage was introduced, the lady and the bomb were duly expunged, leaving a suffragette-shaped gap in the foliage!
The mule postcards were published by E.Mack, London and the `Sorrows of Southwold` by Reg Carter.
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