![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/specialcollections\/files\/2019\/09\/friell-5.jpg\")
<\/a>Cover of “Gabriel’s 1946 review in cartoons from the ‘Daily Worker'”, a compendium of his cartoons published that year.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cSo you became a cartoonist, but why a political cartoonist? The answer to that was that I grew up in Glasgow in the thirties and I still can\u2019t understand anyone who grew up anywhere in the thirties not being political.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n James Friell (1912-1997), also known by Jimmy Friell, Gabriel, and Field, was a political cartoonist for various British newspapers and television programmes between 1936 and 1988. Born in 1912 in Glasgow to a large Irish Catholic family, Friell showed artistic talent from an early age. He was a bright boy who was offered a scholarship for an academy, which would have led to university, but his father made him turn it down in favour of work. He worked in a solicitor\u2019s office, where he sold a few cartoons to Glaswegian and London newspapers, before pursuing a cartoonist career full-time.<\/p>\n Friell\u2019s first position began in 1936 at The Daily Worker<\/em>, a Communist party-owned weekly paper whose views fell in line with his own. Here, he took the pen name \u2018Gabriel\u2019, after the archangel, and joined the Communist party in 1937. During his time at the paper, Gabriel\u2019s main targets were Churchill, Mussolini, and Hitler, with a good few jabs at the Labour and Tory parties. He was called up to the Royal Artillery during the Second World War but served his time in a factory, due to his known ties to the Communist party. He worked for The Daily Worker<\/em> until 1956, leaving when he felt he could no longer work for a Communist paper who condemned the evils of capitalism whilst praising the \u201cacknowledged evils\u201d of Communism in Russia.<\/p>\n