Search for elusive cartoonist

When a set of cartoons arrived in the Wairarapa Archive as part of a collection from the family of early settler George Smith, we were intrigued to find out what we could about the artist. From inscriptions on the cartoons it became obvious that the artist was friendly with Smith's two unmarried daughters, Margaret and Gladys. The friendship seems to have started before the outbreak of the war, and continued beyond that, the last of the cartoons being a birthday card from the 1950s.

The cartoonist signed his works with a variety of names - Gunner Dobson being the most usual, but the name "Billy" was also used so it gradually became clear that it was the work of a soldier named William Dobson.

At first glance they appeared to be the work of an Australian-born Masterton-based soldier by that name, but a check of his military record soon indicated he had joined the army in 1915. He had served overseas, been injured and returned to New Zealand as unfit for further service in late 1917. From the cartoons, we could determine the cartoonist had actually been in Featherston Military Training Camp in 1916 before serving in France, and being injured. He spent a long time in hospital recuperating, before returning home just before the end of the war in August 1918.

The cartoonist William Dobson was born in Queensland, Australia, in 1891, where his Scottish-born parents had settled. His father, also named William Dobson, was a plumber who had migrated to Warwick, Queensland, in the hope of bettering himself and securing his children's future.

Things did not go well in a business sense, and around 1904 the family moved over to Wellington, where the father once again set up in business.

The younger William Dobson trained as a carpenter. He was working for Briscoe and Company and living with his mother in Daniel Street in Newtown when he joined the army in 1916. He was sent to Featherston Camp and was assigned to the artillery, where he worked with the horses that pulled the guns.

He frequently came up to Masterton on leave and visited the Smith sisters, leaving cartoons as reminders of his calls.

He left New Zealand in January 1917, for further training in England. Unfortunately, he was struck with illness within six weeks and spent time in hospital in Manchester, and then recovering in the vicinity. From there he wrote to the Free Lance, saying that the soldiers were all doing fine but they would rather be back in New Zealand. "It is the only place on the map. The sun does shine there."

He also reported that the soldiers had been incensed at a pacifist meeting in Oldham, and had attacked those taking part, breaking the meeting up. He reported the streets rang with the sounds of the New Zealand soldiers' blood-curdling Maori war cry and that no more meetings would be held.

The worst of it, he said, was that there was not enough to go around, so the soldiers could not have one pacifist each, and a lot had to be content with a piece of coat, or a vest.

Once fully recovered, he left for France in September 1917, and was posted to a battery on October 11, 1917. His work entailed handling the draught horses that moved the guns, and on November 28 he was seriously injured. He was leading the horses through a particularly muddy section of road when they became bogged at the same time as the German artillery starting bombarding the road.

Shells struck, killing the horses and damaging bones in Dobson's skull. He was admitted to a field hospital, and then shipped across to Brockenhurst Hospital in Hampshire, England, for recuperation.

While at Brockenhurst he also found time to make more cartoons, and he sent the Smith girls cards that thanked them for gifts he had received from them, although he was concerned that their cakes and sweets would lead to him putting on weight.

What he failed to mention was that he had fallen in love with one of his nurses, Liley Wright, who lived in the nearby village of Boldre.

William returned to New Zealand in late 1918, Liley shortly afterwards and they married in Lower Hutt in 1920.

William largely put his wartime cartooning behind him, and concentrated on his work as a tiler to raise the money needed for his family.

They stayed in the Hutt Valley, William drawing cartoons for the Hutt News at times. In the 1950s the family moved to Levin, where he and Liley eventually died. One of their sons became a commercial artist, while others in the family have followed artistic careers.

Their son Neil remembers his father as a hard man, feeling the effects of his war service throughout his life. But he also remembers him as an artist.

He said his father always took his chalks with him, and sometimes, when tiling a fireplace in a new house, he would draw a scene on the clean GIB plasterboard above the fire.

Sometimes the house builders would remove the drawings and replace the plasterboard.

When I first rang him about his father, and described what we had found, he simply said: "Yes, that's Dad - the frustrated cartoonist."