George Worsley Adamson (7 February 1913, The Bronx, New York—5 March 2005, Exeter, Devon) was a book illustrator, author and cartoonist who from 1931 held American and British dual citizenship.
George Adamson was educated at Wigan and Leigh College, Oxford University, and the Liverpool College of Art.[1] He exhibited at the Royal Academy, and contributed to Punch from 1939 to 1988.[1][2] From the mid 1960s, he illustrated Norman Hunter's Professor Branestawm books, providing a suitably zany continuity with W. Heath Robinson's illustrations from the 1930s.[3]
During World War II,[1][4] Adamson served with the RAF Coastal Command as a navigator in Catalina flying boats on the Western Approaches and trained on B-24 Liberators in the Bahamas. After he illustrated a feature on transatlantic flights for the Illustrated London News, he was appointed an official war artist for the Coastal Command. Some of Adamson's drawings are now in the Imperial War Museum and the RAF Museum.[3]
In the 1980s, he illustrated five of the Richard Ingrams and John Wells Dear Bill books for Private Eye.[1]
George Adamson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in 1987.
One of the last things that happened under Hollowood’s editorship was that Punch accepted a cover by George Adamson which showed Mr Punch sitting at an easel in the middle of a stretch of English countryside. Beside him was a book called How to Paint Like the Great Masters, and the landscape which Mr Punch was trying to paint was in fact modelled on the great masters… the Van Gogh trees on the right merged into a Samuel Palmer hillside, then into a Gainsborough or Constable field.
To make the landscape itself look like a collaboration between the masters was a brilliant idea. George did it brilliantly and we all thought it was a brilliant cover. One of the first actions by the new editor, William Davis, was to reject the cover. He didn’t understand it. Or, if he did understand it, he didn’t think it was funny. Or, if he thought it was funny, he didn’t think enough other people would find it was funny. No, let’s face it; he didn’t understand it.— Miles Kington, The Punch Cartoon Album: 150 Years of Classic Cartoons.[5]
George Adamson's parents[3][6] were George William Adamson, a master car builder for the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, and Mary Lydia (Lily, née Howard). His father, born in Glasgow, Scotland, and his mother, born in Wigan, Lancashire, had moved to New York City from Bombay, India in 1910.