Martyn Turner has been drawing political cartoons for The Irish Timesfor four decades. What possessed the Londoner to move to Kildare to poke fun at our politicians? He tells KATHY SHERIDANwhy some are more difficult to draw than others
SOME OF US are old enough to remember when his cartoons had to be collected off the bus arriving into Sheriff Street from deepest Kildare. And how, on disconcertingly one-sided phone calls, he would often settle for two words when other freelancers would use a hundred (90 of them probably buttering up the commissioning editor).
What was he doing in Kildare with that posh English accent anyway? Was he some kind of weirdo, arty, recluse? Martyn Turner always played by his own rules. It’s not that he wouldn’t know how to butter up an editor; it’s that he wouldn’t. It’s not that he is monosyllabic, although he can be – just not with people he respects or enjoys. He is no recluse either, although he likes to portray himself as one.
He has been contentedly married for nearly 43 years to Jean, a humorous librarian turned champion Irish Setter breeder, whom he met when he was 17, “two days after England won the 1966 World Cup ”. He is a besotted grandfather to their son’s two little boys. He plays golf with the same bunch of people, loves the banter and is passionate about the game. (His riff on the notion that it’s a game played by capitalists but organised by communists is highly persuasive, even for golf-haters.)
In the Turners’ second home in southwest France, there’s even a neighbouring French gardener who likes him enough to pass fat, flavoursome vegetables through what a grandson calls “the magic hedge”, for fear the 6ft 7in vegetarian might fade away for lack of nourishment.
He is a man “who never wasted words but has a lot going on behind the eyes”, says Prof John Horgan, who once commissioned Turner cartoons for this newspaper’s education supplement. Horgan expeditions to the Turner home “involved being assaulted by the monstrous breed of Irish Setters who would nearly be as tall as Martyn himself when they stood on their hind legs and would want to lick your face . . . The things you’d put up with for the sake of Martyn and Jean’s company are quite surprising,” he says affectionately. Definitely no weirdo recluse then.
So, Jean, what was so impressive about the 17-year-old Martyn Turner? “Eh, I think he was 18 . . . ” But what quality stood out? There’s a strangled laugh. “He’s very tall.” Anything else?
“He has remained a child. I think everyone would know what I mean by that. Yes,” she says thoughtfully, “he has many child-like qualities.”
It's a recurring theme. Turner himself remembers a psychiatrist on The Pat Kenny Showexplaining how, as we attain adulthood, we assume things and stop questioning. "Except Martyn Turner," the psychiatrist said; he was the perpetual child who sees that none of the emperors have any clothes. A very tall child who gets paid for it, Turner adds, with a lugubrious laugh. "I just think of it as seeing events and attitudes and situations at their simplest, and seeing what gives."
So what gives about Turner’s vision? Horgan describes it as a “capacity to put two unrelated contemporary things together to create something extraordinarily rich”. He still laughs at the one depicting Charles Haughey with Margaret Thatcher, in which Haughey is thinking: “This relationship will last at least until she retires.”
This writer cherishes an original 1995 Turner on her wall, in which two unrelated contemporary events are ingeniously combined: an eruption over Finola Bruton’s smoking and Michael Lowry’s first dodgy ethics run-in. Apart from representing a neat piece of political history, the cartoon also represents Turner’s many quiet kindnesses. I found it in the letter box soon after returning home from a distressing assignment.
Turner himself mentions a cartoon of Dick Spring standing in a lost-and-found, asking: “Have you seen the run of myself?”
“I love that cartoon,” Turner says. The twist is that it wasn’t one of his own. “I don’t like my cartoons.” The reason he keeps going, he says, is so that he can have another go tomorrow.
But they have to keep on coming anyway. It's how he has made a living for 40 years, turning out five – four since he hit 60 – a week for The Irish Timessince 1971. That's 40 years of pressure to find a fresh gag every working day, then a way to express it as art, all in a few hours.
“There is a routine, and at some stage in the routine, something emerges. It could happen when I’m swimming, or walking, or when I’m going to make a cup of tea. The trick is not to think too much but to wait for something to come out of the ether . . . The harder you think deliberately about something, the less likely you are to come up with something that isn’t what everyone else is thinking.”
The routine is to start at 7am by tuning into Morning Ireland, then to read the paper, then listen to Pat Kenny, then News at One.
“By the end of the one o’clock [news] I’ll have something to do. Though really it’s more of a concept at that stage. Last Saturday, for example, I knew I wanted to do something about cucumbers and I was also trying to think of a handy way to shut ministers up, but I didn’t know how to turn it into a cartoon till I worked it out: you stick them in ministers’ mouths.”
The trick is to try and draw it as he thought of it in that one-hundredth of a second, to simplify, not to wreck it by over-refining it.
Turner says he thinks in words rather than pictures, “which is why my average cartoon has about 200 words in it. I should really be an editorial writer on Twitter – everything within 140 characters . . . I’m not trying to make people fall over laughing – and I succeed in that quite well, I think – but I am trying to get them to look at something in a different way.”
Turner claims not to be a very good caricaturist – there are about five good ones in the world, he says – so he “doesn’t actually get a likeness . . . What I try to do is create a sense of how I feel about the person. If there’s any magic involved in what I do, that seems to work quite well. So when you look at what I’ve done on Haughey, or Bertie, or Brian Cowen or Garret, you can know instantly what I think about them without adding any words.”
He doesn’t know them personally, so is creating a political rather than a personal view of them, “which is why they’re not strictly caricatures; they’re a person representing that particular character. It’s not a personal attack on him . . . most of the time.”
Despite the fact that John Bruton ended up with scary panda eyes, Turner says he was very difficult to draw. “Very bland. Same with Michael Noonan. I was told one day that I’d drawn him as a half-boiled egg and I realised that’s exactly what he looked like. The only thing about John Bruton was his laugh, so trying to find a way to get his laugh visually finished up with that completely inane grin.”
It took months to “get” Bertie Ahern. “Then one day it clicked. I always drew him in an anorak, even though he wasn’t wearing one any more, and a schoolboy tie. It just looked right. He added the rest himself – he was stupid enough to wear yellow trousers.”
Brian Cowen, Alan Dukes and Barack Obama all shared the scruffy cigarette signifier (Turner doesn’t like smoking) in one way or another.
Dukes told him that it didn’t stop him smoking, but he kept thinking he should be putting a cigarette in his ear so that people would know who he was.
The discovery that Cowen was a smoker was a boon. “I’d say I did three or four cartoons based on it when he was going down, until he eventually finished up as a pile of cigarette ash.”
But that Enda Kenny chap is a challenge. “I’ve kind of given up on him. He’s just sort of stuck with the way he is. It doesn’t really look like him but it doesn’t matter because, repetitively, you’ll eventually realise he’s Enda Kenny.” Is it because he’s unmarked? “He is – for a person who’s 60, he’s amazing, because he looks about six. That’s pretty incredible. I just try and draw him as young as I possibly can. That’s the way it’s turning out”. The point at which Kenny should start worrying is when he starts to look like a baby.
TURNER HAS AN UNDERLYINGpolitical ideology, "but none that transposes to any known political party. I think I'm just an ageing hippy who thinks everyone should love each other and get on with it and be nice . . . You don't like people exploiting other people, or taking advantage of other people, so that kind of rules out most of the economic systems of the world."
He “suffers” from “isms”, he says. His vegetarianism was triggered when he ran over a rabbit 40 years ago. He argued with himself: if he was a carnivore he would take the rabbit corpse home and eat it; otherwise he would bury it. He buried it and decided he no longer wanted people to do his “dirty work” for him – killing animals, doing something he wouldn’t do. “And then if you extend that to other things, like why do I oppose the war in Iraq – well, it’s because I wouldn’t go and do it myself and I wouldn’t expect my children to go and do it.”
He defended a Danish newspaper’s decision to publish the Muhammad cartoons on the basis of press freedom. “If you look at the countries where there aren’t political cartoonists, ask yourself, would you like to live in one of those countries?”
He is only vaguely aware of occasional storms that break over his own cartoons, probably because no one could possibly guess his e-mail address. But he is no effete artist.
This is a man tempered by deep, private tragedy – not for public consumption – but utterly without self-pity. He was the child of London East Enders, whose father was a warehouseman-turned-dustbin salesman and whose “incredibly intelligent” mother had to leave school at 12 or 13 to help her father in his rag-and-bone scrapyard.
It was she who pushed her bright boy to apply for one of two coveted scholarships at Bancroft’s public school in Woodford. He got in, but “loathed every minute of it”. Why? “Because I was one of two poor boys in a school of rich idiots.” He became a surreptitious “golf professional” for a day and a half, until his mother whacked him and sent him back to school.
Nonetheless, Bancroft’s was a life-changer. Those years not only changed his accent – “from East End of London to this sort of vaguely posh accent I have now” – they also transformed him from extrovert to introvert, a painful process intensified by the constant rows that preceded his parents’ divorce. “I used to go and hide . . . So I kind of got used to not being in the middle, to keeping out of the way. I still like that – being on the fringe of things, watching what’s going on, not really getting involved.”
It was the need “to get as far away from London as possible, from school, family, the whole thing, to start again I suppose”, that landed him at Queen’s University, Belfast in 1967 to study geography. After a term there, he discovered that his grandmother had been born in Belfast. “I thought we were all Protestants and Jews, and it turned out we were Belfast Catholics as well.”
In the meantime, he had found Jean, while looking for a summer job in Cologne after leaving school. She happened to be working alongside his sister in the British Council library there. He was just 20, still a student, when they married. A qualified librarian by then, she had got a job in Queen's and he credits her early earning power and budgeting skills with enabling him to pursue his cartoon commissions and edit the "neither republican nor unionist" Fortnightmagazine with Tom Haddon. "If I'd known how broke we were, I would probably have got a teaching job or something."
The move south to Kildare came with The Irish Times'offer of the political cartoonist's job in 1976, a "loose" arrangement which never developed into a permanent staff position.
The upside of the arrangement was independence. It has allowed him to work for many prestigious publications around the world, as well as The Irish Times. He has also turned out numerous wonderfully titled books and calendars. The downside of the loose arrangement manifested itself when Irish Timescontemporaries began to take comfortable early-retirement packages to the south of France, he says with a wry laugh. Luckily, Jean still manages the business side of things.
These days, they spend as much time as they can in France. Some day, if he can afford to, he’d like to retire there. And next week, the grandchildren are coming.
Would he have had things differently? He cracks up laughing. “I’m as happy as Larry. I’m a round peg in a round hole. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I can’t imagine thinking in any other way. I kinda like being cynical, being an outsider. I don’t want to go anywhere, or do those TV or radio things t people are supposed to do. You have your friends, and that’s it.”
