One of our tasks during the course of this project is to trace people who wrote letters to Giles. We’re doing this because copyright clearance will be needed before such material can be digitised and displayed on our website. This is going to be a long process in some cases because someone may have written a letter to Giles in 1955, and we have no idea if that person is still alive or at the same address. We may have to find relatives or others who are now the copyright (or IPR) owners of the material.
Some correspondents who were in the public eye or well known will be easier to find and one example is the cartoonist Brian Adcock. He wrote to Giles (using the name Brian Odcack – which didn’t help when trying to find him) asking for advice and included with his letter one of his drawings. His letter is typical of the sort received from people wanting tips on how to become a cartoonist and Giles received so many that he had standard reply letters for the different types of enquiry (to be covered in a future blog post). The template letter in this case was known as ‘My boy draws’.
We don’t know if Giles used this stock letter for his reply but there is a note on Brian’s letter which says ‘Monkey auto card sent with letter’. Brian has given us permission to digitise his drawing and he said this when we got in touch:
“Wow, I haven’t seen that for a long time! Yes it was I who was responsible for that cartoon and letter and of course you can use them in any way you like. Giles was a big inspiration to me and was kind enough to reply to my letter. He sent a picture of one if his famous characters and signed it. He also sent a note saying something along the lines of ‘cartooning takes lots of hard work and endless research!’ I am now the editorial cartoonist for the Scotland on Sunday and his words proved correct!”
