Searching for “Scherzo”

Posted: July 14th, 2024

RESEARCHER Glenn Reuben has been in touch, seeking information about two cartoonists: Scherzo, and Leonard Ward/Len Ward. If you can help Glenn, please email him here: gluben@live.com

Glenn says: I’m trying to identify the artists and photographers of the front covers of every Christmas issue of the TV Times magazine going back to 1955, in time for its 70th anniversary next year. This also includes the TV Times Christmas Extra supplement which ran sporadically from 1957 to 1979 with various titles.

The front cover of the 1958 TV Times Christmas Extra (see above) was done by “Scherzo”. From what I’ve gathered from my research, he contributed one-panel gags to TV Times between 1956 and 1966 (shortly before it went national in 1968). In a January 1959 article about the various cartoonist contributors, (below), he was annoyingly the only one who declined to give his real name or a photograph, but he was described as being in his mid-thirties (so probably born between 1923 and 1925), married and a Northerner.

He also contributed to Meccano magazine in 1960, the Sunday Mirror between 1965 and 1972, to the Telegraph, the Daily Sketch and Punch magazine. The most recent work I could find was from the Look-In TV Comedy Annual in 1974.

I’ve asked John Freeman to put a blog out about him here: https://downthetubes.net/can-you-help-track-down-tv-times-and-punch-cartoonist-scherzo/ … and Vilnis Vesma of the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain : https://ccgb.org.uk/wordpress/?p=8654 (this has also been sent out in their “Jester” newsletter). Also Bas Schuddeboom of the Lambiek website: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/s/scherzo.htm

Scherzo was employed by the Charles E. Gilbert Artists’ Agency in Fleet Street, along with Reg Smythe of Andy Capp fame (well-known at the Mirror) and Roy Raymonde, but Raymonde’s son hadn’t heard of him. Nor has Steve Holland of the Bear Alley blog, nor veteran cartoonist Peter Maddocks. I’ve no other information on where he lived or when he was born or died, or if he’s still alive. Here are some more examples of Scherzo’s work.

Leonard Ward/Len Ward: The second face is Leonard Ward, who also went by Len Ward, LW or Nelward. He did drawings for football publications such as Raich Carter’s Soccer Star and Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly in the early 1950s.

From what I’ve gathered, he became the very first art editor of the TV Times in September 1955. The late Eric Linden, a columnist who worked at those football publications, went with him to TV Times (unfortunately, his daughter Kerry hasn’t heard of Ward). Ward did the TV Times Christmas Extra covers for 1959, 1962, 1964 and 1965, presumably leaving around the same time as the magazine went national in 1968. Below is his Lambiek page:
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/w/ward_len.htm

Ward eventually became a freelance artist and art consultant for a Brentwood-based printing company called Hussey & Greaves (later Hussey Knights), with the attached article from the Brentwood Gazette showing his face in 1987. According to the son of one of the founders of Hussey & Greaves, he may have been in the navy, maybe born around 1920 and possibly lived in the Epping/Loughton area in the 1980s, but this is guesswork. I suspect he’s no longer with us, but because it’s such a common name, searching Ancestry makes it hard to ascertain his birth and death dates. Steve Holland, Peter Maddocks et al. also don’t know any more about Ward.

I suspect he may have been born in 1924, lived in Hackney in London, married in 1947 and later lived in Whittlesford, perhaps with a wife called Betty (maiden name Stovell?), and died in 2001 and was buried in Cambridgeshire. This is having exhausted all possible routes via Ancestry’s website, but I’m not 100 per cent sure it’s correct.