Colonel Blimp

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The cartoonist David Low first drew Colonel Blimp for Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard in the 1930s: pompous, irascible, jingoistic and stereotypically English.

"Gad, Sir", Blimp would proclaim from the Turkish bath, wrapped in his towel and brandishing some mundane weapon to emphasize his passion on some issue of current affairs.

His phrasing often includes direct contradiction, as though the first part of a sentence of his did not know what it was leading to, with the conclusion being part of an emotional catchphrase.

Blimp was a satire on the reactionary opinions of the British establishment of the 1930s and 1940s. Low described him as "a symbol of stupidity, and stupid people are quite nice."

George Orwell and Tom Wintringham made especially extensive use of the term "blimps", Orwell in his articles, ("The Home Guard is (...) an astonishing phenomenon, a sort of People's Army officered by Blimps" - from Partisan Review, April 15, 1941.) and Wintringham in his books How to Reform the Army and People's War, with exactly the above meaning in mind.

A more sympathetic version of Blimp appeared in the classic British film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which begins with the Blimp character in the steam room. The character drawn in the film by Powell and Pressburger, whose name is Clive Candy, is not actually called Blimp other than in the title, and despite its sympathetic portrayal Winston Churchill sought to ban the film.

The character has survived in the form of a clichéd phrase - that highly conservative opinions, are characterised as 'Colonel Blimp' statements.