George Worsley Adamson was born on 7 February 1913. He was the son of George William Adamson, a Glaswegian engineer working in New York and Mary Howard. Following the deaths of both his parents in the early 1920s, George and his two sisters were brought up by aunts in Wigan, Lancashire, his mother’s hometown. He studied at the Wigan School of Art, and in 1935 took the Oxford University art teacher’s certificate, with distinction in figure composition and history of art. Until 1939, he studied at Liverpool School of Art, specialising in engraving, under Geoffrey Wedgwood. He also exhibited at the RA and had his first drawings accepted by Punch. During the Second World War, he served as a navigator with RAF Coastal Command in Catalina flying boats on the Western Approaches and trained on B-24 Liberators in the Bahamas. Pencils, pens and ink were always at his side, and, in 1942, an Illustrated London News spread, recording a transatlantic round flight, led to his spell as a war artist. In 1944 he married Mary Diamond and, in 1946, they settled in Exeter. Adamson had become one of a handful of young lecturers at the art college (now part of Plymouth University) who were to make it one of the most influential post-war centres of art education, especially so, because of its links with the St Ives Group – the leading edge in 1940s and 1950s British art. Adamson’s specialty was graphics, and he expanded this area from traditional drawing and illustration into traditional and contemporary printmaking, re-establishing 17th-century techniques of soft-ground etching, while building up a reputation as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist. The college’s tradition of prominence in graphics, with its own successful small press, was established by Adamson. In 1954, he gave up that calling, in favour of full-time work as an illustrator and cartoonist. He retained close links with the college, and with printmaking in particular, for decades, and was always a welcome guest tutor. He was to have had considerable success with witty illustrated books of his own – with inputs from Peg Adamson – and he wrote and illustrated the delightful Rome Done Lightly (1972), gently sending up the Eternal City’s baroque splendours. For more than 40 years, Adamson campaigned on behalf of illustrators and cartoonists. At that time, publishers often retained, gave away or sold work without reference to the artist, while payment for reproduction was almost unheard of. Helped by the Society of Authors, Adamson negotiated contracts for his work on principles finally accepted with the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, and there is now some international protection. It is arguable that Adamson never got the recognition he deserved. But he was awarded the 1981 PG Wodehouse Centenary Illustration Award, and a Folio Society contract to illustrate a Wodehouse anthology. He was proudest of the recognition by his own profession, with an honorary fellowship from the Royal Society of Painters-Printmakers (1994) and life membership (2001) of the British Cartoonists’ Association. From the mid-1950s, Adamson contributed illustrations to more than 140 books. He provided the pictures for Ted Hughes’s books of children’s poetry and succeeded Heath Robinson on Norman Hunter’s ‘Professor Branestawm’ series. Adamson was a contributor, from 1939 to 1988, to Punch. Miles Kington would write: ‘One of the last things that happened under Hollowood’s editorship was that Punch accepted a cover by George Adamson which showed Mr Punch sitting at an easel in the middle of a stretch of English countryside. Beside him was a book called How to Paint Like the Great Masters, and the landscape which Mr Punch was trying to paint was in fact modelled on the great masters… the Van Gogh trees on the right merged into a Samuel Palmer hillside, then into a Gainsborough or Constable field. To make the landscape itself look like a collaboration between the masters was a brilliant idea. George did it brilliantly and we all thought it was a brilliant cover. One of the first actions by the new editor, William Davis, was to reject the cover. He didn’t understand it. Or, if he did understand it, he didn’t think it was funny. Or, if he thought it was funny, he didn’t think enough other people would find it was funny. No, let’s face it; he didn’t understand it.’ Adamson died at the age of 92, on 5 March 2005.