BANKSY THE MASKED MARAUDER
12 December 2006 - Bristol-born Damien Hirst may be the city's most famous artist but Banksy remains our most controversial. We find out more about the mysterious graffiti man Guerilla tactics: Banksy's work in Bristol includes a couple having an affair and being caught in the act on the wall of a council sexual health counselling service in Park Street, above, and another image on the side of the Thekla, lets ask a group of cool young people to name a famous Bristolian and very quickly the name of Banksy comes to the fore.
The controversial graffiti artist, who works in spray paints and stencils, frequently grabs the headlines with his creations, which often appear overnight to shock and entertain passers-by, while the identity of Banksy himself remains shrouded in mystery.
In the last year he has added his own special touch to an exhibit at the British Museum, hijacked the launch of a Paris Hilton CD with his own self-styled cover, and caused a storm among animal rights campaigners by painting an elephant.
Of course, his native Bristol has not been ignored, and the depiction of a naked man hanging by one hand from a window near the bottom of Park Street sent the city council into a debate on whether it was art or vandalism.
But can any of Banksy's admirers name the little fellow that appeared all over the UK just after World War Two and whose fame lived on throughout the Sixties and into the Seventies, when he then mysteriously disappeared as fast as he arrived? He was Britain's most famous and widespread graffiti character, and was a distinctive little chap.
With his long nose and appealing eyes he was always drawn peeping his head over a wall. He popped up illustrating many of those 'Bristol Education' exercise books, with their maps on the back of '50 miles around Bristol', as schoolchildren doodled their way through double science.
His name was Chad. With his small round head peeping up over a wall he first started to appear around the time of World War Two - unless anyone can remember earlier incarnations?
Chad is the nearest the stiff-upper-lipped British of those days got to a protest, as alongside Chad were often the words 'Wot no cheese?' or 'Wot no bananas', to point out the shortages hitting the country. Today's text- spelling generation would have been proud.
Chad was also a way for typical understated British humour to be manifested. A glider used by the British 1st Airborne division, as part of Operation Market Garden to attack bridges in the Netherlands controlled by Nazi forces had a Chad drawn on it and the slogan 'Wot No Engines?'. Walls in blitz-damaged Britain could be seen with 'Wot no house?' alongside a sad-faced Chad.
The origins of Chad - or even why he is called that - are lost in obscurity, although the Oxford English Dictionary credits a cartoonist called George Edward Chatterton, whose pen-name was 'Chat' as a possible source of the first Chad to peep over a wall.
As more and more shortages hit home in the immediate post-war years the 'Wot no ...' slogans could be extended but Chad - like so much of the UK - had also succumbed by then to an American influence.
Some people were now drawing Chad with a new slogan, because our transatlantic allies had a graffiti mystery of their own. It seems the British Chad and the American words were combined with the new worldwide slogan - 'Kilroy was here'.
The legend of Kilroy, the super-GI, had grown up among American servicemen, who reported his mark and famous phrase everywhere they went. Stories claim the first Americans to land on remote Pacific Islands in battles against the Japanese found the phrase chalked up on enemy pillboxes.
In 1946, an American radio programme attempted to get to the bottom of the mystery. They found that a man named James J Kilroy of Massachusetts had used the phrase as a unique mark in yellow crayon to show that he had checked bits of steelwork while an inspector at Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Once the steel had been made into the hulls of ships and other vehicles for the war effort, the slogan was now appearing in all corners of the world, on inaccessible girders and deep in the holds of ships.
Copycats started using the phrase and soon it was a comforting reminder of home - that made it to the UK along with the GIs. Stories abound that 'Kilroy Was Here' can be found on top of Mount Everest, inside the torch of the Statue of Liberty and even scratched on equipment left on the moon by Appollo 11 astronauts. It makes Banksy look like an amateur.
Chad and his mate Kilroy seem to have all but disappeared from popular culture - gradually dying out in the 1970s - but maybe they were some inspiration for Banksy.
Or maybe he was inspired by a piece of graffiti that managed to stay on a wall in South Bristol for more than 20 years. The words 'Kick Out The Tories' appeared on a wall in Sheene Road , Bedminster, in the run-up to the 1964 General Election and may have helped Harold Wilson to victory.
In a Bristol Evening Post story in May 1983, as Margaret Thatcher went to the polls, I pointed out that it was still in place and had been giving its political message for no less than six General Elections.
The paint used to protest about the Government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home must have been pretty powerful stuff as it resisted all attempts to remove it. During the Premiership of James Callaghan, the words 'and look what happens' had been added by a Conservative sympathiser but this soon wore off leaving the original slogan still readable in the 1980s.
The graffiti eventually disappeared as a landmark when the wall was demolished. Will any of Banksy's work break the record of 20-plus years set by the Sheen Road dauber or gather the worldwide momentum that was Chad and Kilroy?
Chad was an ubiquitous piece of popular culture graffiti often seen in the United Kingdom during and shortly after World War II.
The graffiti consisted of a cartoon of a small, round head with a long nose poking over the top of a wall, with a complaint about shortages written underneath; the cartoon itself is better known to many as 'Kilroy', since it often accompanied the slogan 'Kilroy was here'.
The origin may well date back to World War I and an Australian graffiti usually captioned 'Foo was here'.
Another origin may be the cartoonist George Edward Chatterton (or 'Chat') in 1938, although it is unclear how it gained widespread popularity or became conflated with Kilroy. It was, however, widely in use by the late part of the war and in the immediate post-war years, with slogans ranging from the simple 'What, no bread?' or 'Wot, no char?'.
As rationing became less common, so did the joke; while the cartoon is occasionally sighted today as 'Kilroy', 'Chad' and his complaints have long fallen from popular use.
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