Sid Black

 

Sidney Black was born on 9 November 1911, into a coal mining family in Chopwell, then in the County of Durham in UK. Chopwell was later nicknamed "Little Moscow" because of the strong support there for the Communist Party. The village had streets named after both Marx and Lenin. Following World War 1, economic conditions in England were difficult, and with the 1926 General Strike, life became even tougher for the family. Sid was educated at the Westwood Higher School in Durham County. He left school in 1927, aged 15½ years, and tried his hand as a salesman. By the end of 1927 he was looking for other opportunities. He applied to join the Dreadnought Scheme and, in 1928, left England on SS Ballarat, arriving in Sydney on 13 June, with 39 other Dreadnought Boys.

Following his farm training at Scheyville, Sid Black was placed with a German family who ran sheep and cattle, on their farm at Carlingford. Sid stayed there for two years before heading across to the Goldfields area of Western Australia. There he spent the following years as a station hand, also in gold mining, and sometimes living rough; then it was time to move to Perth, where an older brother Frank had settled.

When World War 2 broke out, Sid was trying to make his living as a draughtsman and commercial artist. He enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force on 18th of March 1940, and spent the next three years as corporal in the service police, with postings to Air Force bases all around Australia. During that time, he applied to be moved to aircrew, but that came to a halt when he was found to be colour blind. Eventually he moved to other work, as an Equipment Assistant. Leading Aircraftman Sidney Black received his discharge on 7 November 1945.

  

LAC Sid Black

After the war, Sid's preferred options were to do a general art course and get back into commercial art, or to reenlist in the Air Force. He was actually accepted for service in the Interim Air Force, but decided to find other employment, this time in the Commonwealth Public Service. Sid worked in various government departments in Canberra, such as Air, Immigration, Treasury, Supply and Army. After moving back to Sydney, he was employed in the National Roads and Motorists Association before re-joining the Public Service. His last work before retirement in 1980, was with a firm of stockbrokers. Sid Black passed away in 1989, aged 77 years.

Sid Black is best remembered for his black and white artwork. While he was in Western Australia before the war, Sid started his "other job" as a freelance cartoonist, with his artwork appearing in The Sunday Times into 1946. Following on from this, The Bulletin (one of Australia’s longest running magazines, produced weekly in Sydney) published his work through to the mid-1960s. In around 1959, Sid was responsible for the design of most of the covers for The Bulletin.

In 1999, 10 years after Sid's death, there were two exhibitions in Sydney which included his work. These were the “Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White” exhibition at the S H Ervin Gallery, and the complementary “Australians in black and white: (the most public art)” exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales. Examples of his work are held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

Perhaps a look back, to his own time before becoming a Dreadnought Boy, inspired Sid's cartoon "Wistful thinking". Drawn originally in black and white, this sepia version comes from the cover of one of our Dreadnought publications.

‘DRAWN BY DREADNOUGHT BOY (OLD) SID BLACK’

John Frith

John Eric Frith was born to Henry and his wife Kate in London, in 1906. John’s father was employed as the Bootmaker-Shopkeeper in Kings Road, Chelsea. In the 1880s the Frith family had been well known suppliers of footwear to the gentry of London. John’s father became ill and died in 1909. The family had, by then, moved to 359 Kennington Road Lambeth.

John’s school years were not good years for him. He was at boarding school, a savage place with brutal masters. ‘The food was Dickensian before the war but it was double-Dickensian when the War was on....’ Sport and art were of most interest to John in those years, but art had a distinct downside. ‘I got belted more than the average kid at school because I could draw the masters. I really got whacked, and I was not encouraged at all for my drawing ability……..….

Other than his mention of being a jackaroo, little was known about John Frith’s first visit to Australia until recently. In the difficult years after World War 1, John spent a lot of time with his grandparents at Wrotham in Kent. Encouraged by his grandfather, John developed an interest in farming and applied to travel to NSW under the Dreadnought Youth Migration Scheme. He was accepted and boarded the new SS Moreton Bay, just back from its maiden voyage. John, aged 15, was one of a group of 40 Dreadnought boys. After six weeks at sea, he reached Sydney on 22 May 1922. Along with four other boys from the group, John was sent to the Cowra Apprentice Farm run by the NSW Department of Agriculture.

The farm training at Cowra covered horse work, ploughing, milking and fencing and other farm tasks, under the direction of the farm foreman, a man of tough discipline. In September 1922, having completed his three months training, John was employed at Mr Jack Scott’s dairy farm at Warwick NSW (near Cowra on the Lachlan River). He was the first of four English Boys to have worked at the Scott farm.

                                         

John Frith - Dreadnought Boy

Jack Scott - The Boss

               

                                                                    

All Dreadnought Boys were required to write home to the UK once they had been placed in work, so we can only guess what John said in his letters. It’s also uncertain as to how much John’s mother knew or approved of his travel to Australia, but on 23 April 1923 when the SS Hobsons Bay docked in Sydney – Kate Frith was here to take her son home!

Back in London, John began work with Sale and Company, one of the six private banks behind the Bank of England. He had been there nearly four years, when he was sent to Yokohama in Japan. John turned 21 on the voyage between Vancouver and Yokohama. Evidently, his drawing of the firm’s chief in London had led to the preference for him to be given this plum job overseas. For the next two years based in Japan, John did much the same as he had been doing in London. He did have some time in Korea, which was annexed to Japan at the time. However, even with the firm’s range of agencies (for example, Rolls Royce) and the freedom his motorbike provided, the job soon became boring. It was time to move on.                                                      

In late 1929, John was aboard ship on his way back to England from Japan when he arrived in Sydney. He disembarked for a day, and, he decided the ship could go without him. John Frith was back in Australia. But the Depression was now biting hard and, for the next three years especially, life was tough. John Frith had some money when he arrived, but fell victim to a confidence man. ‘I was literally left with threepence in a foreign country.’

Soon, art was to intervene again! John’s snapshot sketch of Premier Bavin in Martin Place was accepted by the Bulletin. He was paid for the sketch, but also given a job. John took the opportunity to develop his art, to combine his skill as caricaturist with the calligraphic techniques he had discovered in Japan, to teach himself a full range of creative techniques, so that he could then call himself an artist. After two years, John Frith became the Deputy Art Editor of the Bulletin.

On 30 June 1932 the new P&O liner, RMS Corfu, reached Sydney – Kate Frith was here again! This time for the marriage of John to Dorothy Mae Horseley.

John had fourteen most interesting years at the Bulletin, working with Norman Lindsay and Ted Scorfield, as the three permanent artists, in a relaxed club-like atmosphere. John Frith was always grateful for the encouragement and help he received from his colleagues at the Bulletin.

In late 1944, John joined the Sydney Morning Herald as its first cartoonist. It was not long before he made impact, especially with his cartoons of Arthur Calwell, who became federal Minister for Immigration in July 1945. John was at the SMH for five years, finishing in February 1950, when he was recruited to the Herald and Weekly Times in Melbourne. As part of the negotiations, John was able to secure a good house in Kew which he subsequently purchased. He remained at the HWT as cartoonist until he retired in 1969. By the time he left Sydney for Melbourne, John had modelled and cast in bronze, some 150 heads of distinguished Australians.

When he retired in 1969, John Frith went to Europe, first to England - where one cold winter was enough, and then to Algeciras in Spain. While in London, a five thousand years old piece of terracotta in the British Museum ignited his interest in the material. Back in Australia, John began making hundreds of pieces. Some were made for Bendigo Pottery and included a range of toby jugs of famous Australians. He also made a range of Reform flasks. These were based on the Prime Ministers of Australia.

A family man, John drew for children as well as for adults. Retirement provided time for more pottery, caricatures and cartoons, and picture stories for the grandchildren. Eventually, John Frith moved into Moorfields Community Aged Care, in their Broadmead Hostel in Hawthorn Vic. John was still able to draw two hundred cartoons on the big whiteboard at Broadmead. In time, aging took its toll and his eyesight failed. John Frith died on 21 September 2000, aged 94.

In July 2001, the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House in Canberra, launched the exhibition, A Brush With Politics: The Life and Work of John Frith. This popular retrospective showed works spanning his long career; with wide appeal it ran for months longer than first planned. It was then developed into a Visions of Australia travelling exhibition, which toured interstate. A Brush With Politics was a fitting way to celebrate John Frith’s life.

   

                   

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We are indebted to the Frith family for their generous provision of material for this story and for their permission to use the photographs and drawings provided.