Behold London Forever; Peter Jackson (1922-2003) Highgate West Cemetery

Surely the eye-catching headstone of illustrator Peter Jackson in Highgate Cemetery was designed by himself? The author of “London Is Stranger Than Fiction”, a comic strip which ran in the London Evening News every Wednesday from 1949 to 1980, was, according to his obituary in the Independent “a man of many talents – antiquarian, artist, author, bookbinder, broadcaster, sculptor – but his passion was London. For more than 50 years he was a magpie pecking away in antiquarian bookshops and salerooms. Prints, maps, drawings, books, ceramics, medals, playbills and ephemera associated with London were bought, catalogued and put in files or carefully mounted and stored in cabinets in his large house in west London.”

Peter Jackson at home with his collection in 1991, from the Illustrated London News

His biography makes him sound like a character from Michael Moorcock’s ‘Mother London’; he was born in Brighton on the 4th March 1922, where his father was the manager of the local Gaumont picture house. He was educated at Hove High School which he left at the age of 16 to move to London, working as a messenger boy for Gaumont British. When called up for the army in World War II he was rejected as medically unfit because of his poor eyesight. Instead, he worked by day as a window dresser for British Home Store and at night as an air raid warden for Civil Defence. Somehow he still managed to find time to study at the Willesden School of Art (and to become the last pupil of the great Italian illustrator Fortunino Matania). After the war he became a full-time illustrator, adapting classic novels, Ivanhoe, The Three Musketeers and the Hunchback of Notre Dame amongst others, as comic strips for serial publication in newspapers.  In 1948 the editor of the Evening News was looking for someone to produce a cartoon strip in the style of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, based on curious and little known facts about London. Jackson sent in a few drawings and was summoned to Carmelite House to see the editor. He was asked if he knew anything about London history and he responded with disarming candour "Erm, nothing at all, I'm afraid." Despite this he was given the job on a three week trial  that turned into a 31 year run and which made London into a lifetime’s obsession. In an interview with the Fulham Chronicle he told them that “when I started I knew nothing about London. I ransacked the shelves of public libraries to learn about the strange and curious in London. Then they put a piece in the paper asking people to send in their London stories and I was given the job of sorting through them.” Things changed quickly; when his first collection of ‘London Is Stranger than Fiction’ strips were published in book form in 1951 the introduction claimed that “He will work for days on research into a single cartoon incident, poring over old books in the British Museum or following a trail on an ancient map through the labyrinth of modern London.”

London is stranger than fiction for 5 July 1950 included the mummified head of Holy Trinity Minories

Jackson became a great collector of London related material. In an article in the Illustrated London News of 01 September 1991, his friend Denise Silvester-Carr said that “for 40 years he has been a magpie pecking away in antiquarian bookshops and salerooms. Prints, maps, drawings, books, ceramics, medals, playbills and ephemera associated with the history and topography of London have been bought, catalogued and now mellow in files, yellow on bookshelves or are carefully mounted and stored in cabinets on four storeys of his ivy-clad Victorian house…. Very little has escaped his attention or collection. Curators and department heads from national museums cast covetous eyes at the 25,000 prints when they come to inquire about missing links in their holdings.” His collections yielded several books on London, two of them produced in collaboration with an old colleague, Felix Barker the theatre critic of the Evening News; London: 2,000 years of a city and its people (1974) and A History of London in Maps (1990). Alone he authored books on London Bridge, Walks in Old London and George Scharf's London.

After a lifetime as a bachelor, he unexpectedly married Valerie Harris in 1995 at the age of 73. He died on 2nd May 2003.

And on 20 September 1950 we get a quiz about the Bligh memorial