TERRY WILLERS, who died recently aged 76, was by no means a caricature of a cartoonist. He dressed smartly. Grey suit, collar and tie. Always perfectly turned out with only the ubiquitous cowboy boots giving away that he wasn’t a sergeant, lieutenant or captain of industry. Dapper would be the word.
He drew in a similar fashion. Every line was in its right place, every drawing carefully designed. His line was even, well, even. He acknowledged his early career in comics by drawing with a line that retained the same width throughout. Not for him the erratic scratch of a Steadman or an André François but something more manageable and repeatable and print friendly.
He was more of an artist with a built-in sense of humour than a cartoonist who could draw a bit. In his spare time he would produce wonderfully detailed fantasy landscapes reminiscent of Arthur Rackham.
He even drew cartoons in oils (not often) and beautifully crafted watercolours.
He was also something more of an extrovert than his cartooning colleagues. When the cartoonist troops would be sitting in the corner of the pub enjoying quiet moments of cynicism and sarcasm The Boss, Chief, Guv’nor (I heard him described in all three ways) would be up at the bar buying drinks and cracking jokes with the regulars.
Although capable of quiet introspection in private (but with no sarcasm or cynicism) he was at his best on the public stage where the showman in him blossomed. As Tom Mathews said, paying tribute to Terry on the radio last week, “if you didn’t like the gag Terry was currently telling don’t worry – there’d be another three following closely behind”.
His good humour was infectious. He would sit in his studio, neat and tidy like the man but full of bits and pieces, ornate furniture and birds in cages, and say how lucky he was. Where he lived, what he did and who he married. Three things he got right, he said.
Away from his vast body of work for Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, the Evening Herald, the Farmers Journal and virtually every advertising agency this side of the Urals he became known as the man behind the Rathdrum Cartoon Festival which ran for half a decade or so in the 1990s. I was telling him, one day, of a cartoon festival I had been to in France. He said “We could do that here”. So we did. The location was, as they say, a no-brainer as Terry knew everyone and everything in Rathdrum. We divided the work, sort of. I invited the cartoonists and planned an exhibition. He (and Valerie, his wife, and a local committee) did everything else, with the emphasis on everything. It was then I discovered that he knew pretty well everyone in Ireland; and those he didn’t know, if they might help the festival, he was quite happy to call up and get to know them.
Many of the stories he told were self-effacing. In the years after RTÉ and after the Herald his worked slowed down. He was out of the public eye. He rang one day to gleefully tell me that he had been sitting in the pub, of course, chatting to a stranger. The man, at one stage looked at him quizzically and said, “Didn’t you used to be Terry Willers?” He could hardly tell me for laughing.
Thanks for all the laughs, mate. We will miss you.
Terry Willers is survived by his wife Valerie, son Steven and daughter Julie.
– MARTYN TURNER