Scorfield, Edward Scafe (1882 - 1965)

Ted Scorfield original cartoon artwork.

Ted Scorfield was born in Preston, England. In August 1914 he enlisted in the British Army and served at Gallipoli, Greece, and Palestine. After the war, while employed in a Tyneside shipyard, he began to draw cartoons for the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle. On the advice of his agent Percy Bradshaw, he came to Sydney in 1925 and joined the Bulletin as a cartoonist and illustrator, replacing Norman Lindsay. His political cartoons cheerfully followed the Bulletin line of the period, a combination of Australian nationalism and British conservatism. In the desperate days of the Second World War, he lionized the Digger, exalted the Allies against the Japanese, and lampooned black-marketeers, strikers and 'white-feather conchies'. But he was almost never malicious: even his sinister Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito had a human, almost redeeming, fishiness about them. He published two collections of cartoons, A Mixed Grill (1943) and A Mixed Grill, No.2 (1952). He resigned in 1961, soon after Sir Frank Packer bought the ailing Bulletin and began to transform the magazine.