So Cecil Rhodes was ‘Britain’s Greatest’. This may be controversial. But that’s the thing about business: it has its own zone of ethics. Anyway, this is definitely the only time I’ve had this many illustrations in a single magazine, all repeated inside as well as on the front – and in full colour too.
I am not much interested in business (and certainly no good at it), yet I drew a lot of caricatures of business people. I guess this is because business is about people. Wheeling and dealing is done between people. And business people are, I soon found, absolutely fascinated by business people.
In the late 1990s I did stints of regular work for Sunday Business, Financial Times, Business Age, The European and Eurobusiness. And business people kept appearing in other pictures too, like this one for The Times:
Raymond Gubbay, promoter of opera, ballet and classical concerts, who irreverently called the ROH ‘a private club run by the rich for the rich’ before putting in a bid to run it. His bid failed, but he bought the drawing.Henry Tate, an important businessman here in Liverpool, where Tate&Lyle sugar refinery was a big employer. We even get our own Tate Gallery. I drew this for Pool of LifeA millenium drawing for my 1999 calendar. This is how the future of the world looked at that point: all Murdoch and Gates (with Richard Branson starring as the UK). The three-piece computer and cathode ray tv already look as sweetly old-fashioned as Branson’s balloon.
The business drawings I was most happy with were for the Financial Times, which started publishing a weekly illustration in the last months of the 20th Century.
