Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Wally Fawkes was born Walter Ernest Fawkes on June 21, 1924 in Vancouver, Canada. His family moved to Britain in 1931 and enthused by comic books he started out pursuing a career as a cartoonist, first enrolling in Sidcup Art School. Due to financial restraints he left school, took a job painting camouflage onto factory roofs at the onset of WWII but a bout of pleurisy kept him from service.

The Coal Commission employed Fawkes to work on maps and in 1942 he entered an art competition that was adjudicated by the Daily Mail and was found work in the Clement Davies ad agency and later at the Daily Mail drawing column-breaks and decorative illustrations.^[1]

It was during the war years that he began playing in jazz bands and because of the amount of time spent in air raid shelters that people living in London were becoming troglodytes and adopted the name for one of his first groups – Wally Fawkes and the Troglodytes. In 1947 he joined the George Webb Dixielanders, a semi-professional revivalist jazz band that featured Humphrey Lyttelton on trumpet. The two would leave and form their own group that evolved into mainstream jazz. He would record with Sidney Bechet in 1949, George Melly and John Chilton in the early Seventies.

Over the years clarinetist Wally Fawkes combined playing jazz with his love of cartooning and had a successful career in both. His political satire in the comic strip he illustrated gained praise from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Poor eyesight retired him from cartooning at the age of 81 and he has concentrated solely on his clarinet playing.

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