Holy smoking nurses! Who was the cartoonist in a Hastings hospital in 1961?

Nurses, patients, and smoking. They were all there in an unidentified patient and artist's sketch of hospital life in Hastings in 1961. Photo / Supplied

The hunt is on to identify a dab-hand artist responsible for a cartoon depicting a Hawke's Bay Fallen Soldiers Memorial Hospital ward in Hastings 60 years ago.

The framed but unsigned sketch is in the hands of Paraparaumu woman Lynn Evans, who grew up in Hawke's Bay, where her now-deceased father, Bill Kyle, was a patient in the hospital about September 1961.

Now Evans wants to return the sketch to family of the artist, or see that it is archived or placed in a museum in Hawke's Bay.

The cartoon reflects daily life in the ward, and also takes a fun poke at hospital life.

Staff are depicted smoking, and a patient seems to be sneakily siphoning alcohol from a bottle behind a nurse's back.

The cartoon depicts real people, though - three patients and six staff, including a 'Dr GJ Taine'.

It was apparently drawn by the man in the bed next to Evans' dad and was delivered by mail to her father after the artist was discharged.

The artist had encouraged Bill Kyle to paint to bide the time in hospital, and the sketch includes images of the painted birds on the wall of the ward, along with postage stamps of the era.

Evans said her dad was in the bed by the window and was admitted for six weeks for back operations, under back specialist Dr G J Taine.

She could remember as a 5-year-old being not allowed into the hospital but waving to her dad from outside – sometimes with a recorder, a popular schools musical instrument of the times and which she had bought to play to him.

But otherwise she said she had no idea how to find any connection with the clearly skilled and probably well-known artist.

Hawke's Bay Today inquiries found some similarities with the work of New Zealand born cartoonist and sketcher John McNamara (1918-2001).

A founder and member of a short-lived New Zealand cartoonist association, he worked mainly in England, for London magazines and newspapers, becoming the artist for the famed tales of Francis Durbridge character Paul Temple, a fictional author and private detective portrayed not only in print but also in radio and television series.

But HBT was unable to find anything that might have placed McNamara in Hawke's Bay at any time, and inquiries had by early afternoon on Friday, er, drawn a blank.