Jon's Two Types (John Jones 1913 - 1992)

John Jones 'Jon' was evacuated to North Africa with shell-shock during the Second World War. "I was a nervous wreck, shaking like a jelly". Whilst recovering, Jones started drawing cartoons of a pair of battle-hardened British officers. They wore a bizarre mixture of military and non-military clothes, but he recalled that "a lot of 8th Army officers dressed like that." Hugh Cudlipp, formerly editor of the Sunday Pictorial, was working as Editor-in-Chief of the British Army Newspaper Unit, producing a series of army newspapers, and Jones sent him some of these cartoons over the signature "JON." They were accepted, and the officers made their first appearance in the Eighth Army News in July 1944 under the title "Page Two Smile." By August 1944 they were appearing as "The Two Types," and the name stuck.

Cudlipp arranged for Jones to join the British Army Newspaper Unit in Italy as a full-time cartoonist. As he remembered, "my Colonel called me in and said HQ had assigned me to the mobile newspaper unit": "Colonel Jasper wasn't too pleased, until I drew him a portrait to send home to his wife. I put so many medals on his chest that he looked like Monty, and he was so pleased he promised to get me a destroyer to ferry me across to Naples. He did too, HMS Atherstone." Cudlipp employed Jones to draw cartoons for Eighth Army News, Union Jack, and Soldier, and for the unit's Sunday paper Crusader - for which Bill Connor persuaded him to develop a heavier style of political cartoon signed "Philpin" or "William Philpin." The "Two Types" proved popular in the ranks, and were syndicated to other publications, including the Daily Express from 1944. However, they brought criticism from higher up. General Montgomery banned a cartoon showing one of them jumping into a slit trench at El Alamein as the German tanks approached, and saying to the other "When this lot's over, I bet some ruddy General proposes a reunion!" Even more disastrously, Jones recalled, "General Alexander tried to ban me altogether, but Hugh Cudlipp convinced him that if he did, it would prove what the troops had always suspected - that some officers were pompous and humourless too. Alexander accepted that."

Jones drew only some three hundred "Two Types" cartoons between 1943 and 1946, but over a million copies of the wartime collections were printed. After demobilisation in 1946 Jones followed Cudlipp back to the Sunday Pictorial, but was very unhappy, producing only sports cartoons. "He said no-one was interested in The Two Types readjusting to civvy life", Jones recalled: "I thought he was wrong, but accepted it." When Cudlipp left in 1950, Jones decided there was no reason to stay at the Sunday Pictorial and moved to Kemsley Newspapers, where he worked for the Daily Graphic, Sunday Graphic, Empire News and Sunday Times. In 1956 he transferred to the News Chronicle, where he created two daily pocket cartoons, one a political series and the other entitled "The Sporting Types".