“If you knows of a better 'ole go to it.” Captain Bruce Bairnsfather probably was one of the major reasons men survived “The War to End All Wars” and retained their sanity. He was at the front, knew what a hell it really was, and yet saw the humor in some of the situations and reactions of the men who fought that awful war.

There is something about British humor, which is almost touching. No one makes more fun of the British than the British and that is saying something, as most of the time everyone is taking a poke at their stiff upper lip. Bairnsfather’s creations Ole Bill and Bert were two loveable and vulnerable (because they were comical) guys at the front that you couldn’t help but have empathy for. All these years later his work is still collected and people smile and guffaw at the captions. His cartoons, postcards, books, etc. were enjoyed in every English-speaking country in the world. At the onset of the Second World War Bairnsfather was still drawing laughs with his cartoons only now it was Young Bill that was making both soldier and civilian chuckle.

Food and comfort are on most people’s minds much of the time and the soldier of WWI was no exception. Actually, they had more to worry about than most, as often their supplies never arrived. American forces actually had tainted canned meat, left over from the Civil War, sent to them under the not so watchful eye of Uncle Sam, which led to the deaths of many of them. These were just some of the problems that the WWI soldiers had to endure. The British soldier, by the end of the war was choking on Plum Jam, hence one of Bairnsfather’s most quoted lines, “When’s the ‘ells it going to be strawberry.” Everyone knows how easy it is to begin to hate a taste when it is the only thing you get day in and day out, especially if it is a taste you didn’t care for particularly to begin with. You eat it if that’s all you have but that doesn’t mean you like it.

Bairnsfather was born in 1887 in India and died in 1959. His life was long and he was creatively productive for most of it. When his plays were running on Broadway he spent quite a bit of time in America and was as popular here as he was in his native Britain. Sheet music from this show is available with different titles and music; however, the covers are all the same graphics. This is a man who spent his whole life trying to make people laugh and yet he was a very sad individual. Everyone who met him commented that you could see the sadness in his eyes.

In 1914 he went to France for two years to an area known as Plugstreet Wood. He was a second lieutenant in the 1st Warwickshire Regiment. It was here he began his drawings of the war as he sat in the trenches on a bleak November day. He had no idea how important a figure Old Bill was to become in the life of many a soldier, or to those who waited at home for them.

In April of 1915 he was wounded in the first gas attack at St. Julien as well as falling victim to long-term shell shock. He hated war, what it did to people and the destruction of it all. It made no sense to him to send young men to be used as cannon fodder. He had experienced the horrors of war and they had transformed him from the devil make care miscreant of his schoolboy days to a somber, sad person. This was a young man who before the war became a comic and specialized in female impersonations in a time when they were not as profuse as they are today. Bairnsfather became an introvert, a man who saw the humor in things but had become so morose that the raucous laugh was no longer there. He was a man who shrank from his fame. Here was a literary lion that had roared out across the veldt of war and yet half of that roar at least, was that of dismay.

When he died in Worcestershire he had all but given up creating humor and was painting landscapes, a genre which is solitary not social and full of playful laughter. He died a man burdened by both the glory and fame that war had brought him as well as the pain and suffering which it inflicted upon him.

Shell shock is a form of dementia, which comes and goes and is experienced by many participants in horrific conflicts, that see horrors beyond what their minds can fathom. He was one of many that would be perfectly normal one moment, if there is a such thing as normal, and then triggered by some memory mechanism he would once again be back in the hell that controlled those humanly inconceivable moments that changed their llives.

Between the two wars Bairnsfather did a plethora of work for the Royal British Legion, including recruiting posters and Christmas cards. In 1939 when he published “Old Bill Stands By” which incidentally sold over 20,000 copies at the time, he was still being copied and imitated by artists just as he had been in the First World War. His output had always been prolific.

In 1928 Warner Bros. made a movie using old Bill starring Sydney Chapllin. In 1917 the British had made a film also, but it was not the posh production that Hollywood turned out. The posters for this movie are in the 800.00 range and the cigarette card about 6.00. If there were window or lobby cards, which there probably were, we are not aware of them. In 1940 a movie was produced called “Old Bill & Son” starring Sir John Mills as Young Bill. As in most of his work it was the humor that made them such a success but there was still an underlying tinge of melancholy. One can laugh at two soldiers in a fox hole with bombs dropping on them and one becoming fed up of the others complaining and telling him in his typical caricature way, to go and find a better ole if he knows of one. These cartoons were so loved and so characteristic of the feelings of many of the soldiers that they were produced as plates, vases, mugs, cups and saucers, etc. etc. His work was basically done in one color, the color of the mud of the trenches and despair of war.

Perhaps, the one thing that most people remember and respond to about the Tommy is his sense of humor. The British regiments whether they were English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, etc. kept themselves going with songs from the music halls and making fun of themselves and the enemy. It was what got them through the two wars. It is often said that Bairnsfather was “the man who won the war“. Certainly he never had any idea that Old Bill would lift the heart of the nation and help it through it’s most awful times. The Germans were very aware of his influence and wrote a manual trying to show how they might accomplish the same thing. A joke isn’t funny when you have to translate the translation, and explain it to the point that you think they will never quite understand that it is funny. They often used the same cartoon altered to make it more Germanic. Artists like Thiele did their own thing and did not try and copy him in style or content and that is why they were successful. Where others were not.

Bairnsfather items to look for are: the sheet music for $25-$30, the “Fragments” for $65.00, while the postcards are approx. $10.00 ea. The postcards for recruiting and for the Surrey Chapter of the Red Cross are $25 on up. The pieces of china that fetch the most depend on shape but the motif of a plum jam weary Tommy, wishing for strawberry rather than the hated everyday fare of the trenches seems to fetch more as it tugs at so many people’s hearts.

Bairnsfather’s poster card for the 4th divisions “The Follies” is of one uniformed soldier playing a banjo while the other dances on a newspaper. “ The Follies will stop anyone hating anything”. The sad face and eyes of a man haunted by the horrors of war has left a legacy that beseeches tolerance from a world that has no ears to hear. “When the 'ell is it going to be strawberry?” Who knows, but we hope it will be soon.