Thelwell: more than a one-trick pony
Mar 10, 2021
4 minutes
NORMAN THELWELL is undeniably best known for his cartoons of fat hairy ponies and their fearless young mounts. Yet to look past these instantly recognisable characters is to discover a Hogarth of the countryside, who left no aspect of British rural life untouched.
Born in Birkenhead, Merseyside, in 1923, the young Thelwell nurtured an innate fascination with the great outdoors from an early age, aided by family holidays to a farm in North Wales. Even as a child, he noted in his autobiography Wrestling with a Pencil (1986), he had ‘an irresistible compulsion to draw almost everything’ he saw.
During the Second
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