After attending St Martin’s School of Art, Philip Zec set up his own photographic studio. He was invited to become political cartoonist at the Daily Mirror by Basil Nicholson, the paper’s Feature Editor, a post he held from 1939 until 1954. Zec’s most famous cartoon, ‘The Price of Petrol Has Been Increased by One Penny – Official’, showed a torpedoed sailor clinging to a raft and was drawn as part of a series attacking war profiteers. The Government saw this cartoon as being unpatriotic, ‘worthy of Goebbels at his best’, according to Herbert Morrison, the then Home Secretary. After the war Zec became a director of the Daily Mirror, before becoming political cartoonist at the Daily Herald (1958 – 1961). See Don’t Lose it Again! by Donald Zec.
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