Philip Zec, the outstanding British newspaper cartoonist of World War II, died last Thursday at the age of 73. He is chiefly remembered for a cartoon in The Daily Mirror in 1942 showing a lone merchant seamen, from a torpedoed oil tanker, clinging to a piece of driftwood in mountainous seas. It bore the caption: “The price of petrol has been increased by one penny – official.”
It infuriated Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who said that the cartoon could undermine the morale of Britain’s merchant seamen during the battle of the North Atlantic. But Zec was unrepentant and the cartoon, like his other war work received public acclaim.
The grandson of a Russian rabbi and the son of a tailor who came to London to escape Czarist oppression, Zec studied art and at 19 had his own commercial and photographic studio.
Following his cartoon of the shipwrecked seaman, the government threatened to close down the Daily Mirror, in which it appeared. Zec rejected the government’s interpretation of it, pointing out that he was a socialist and a Jew and bitterly anti-Hitler.
In 1958, he left the Mirror to join The Daily Herald. In that year he won a prize for the cartoon with the greatest political impact submitted by cartoonists from 24 countries. The subject was the crushing of the Hungarians by the Soviet army. For 25 years, Zec served as a director of the London Jewish Chronicle.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
