Famous cartoon discovered in Thornton Hough home

Sep 10 2008 by Carrie Catterall, Bromborough and Bebington News

THE cartoon which launched the career of Norman Thelwell has been hanging in a Wirral home after being feared lost.

Marla Johnson, of Thornton Hough, has had the 1952 drawing - showing a blacksmith asking “Ow do they feel then?” as a girl tries out the shoes he has just fitted to her pony - hanging on her living room wall.

The picture was the first of 1,500 of Thelwell’s cartoons published in the magazine Punch and was the start of his career in books, newspapers and magazines which lasted until 1976.

However, when a retrospective of his work was shown to mark his 80th birthday, the cartoon was not shown and it was feared lost because the artist had kept his original artwork and sold very few.

But it was rediscovered after horse- lover Marla, 71, who lived five miles away from Thelwell’s birthplace, decided to sell the cartoon, which had been given to her more than 30 years ago by a friend who bought it at a shop in the Cotswolds.

It is expected to fetch around £3,000 at an auction held by Wright Manley in Beeston, Cheshire, on September 25.

Thelwell, whose first book, a collection entitled Angels on Horseback, was published in 1957, died in 2004, aged 80.