Born Paddington, New South Wales, 15 November 1948
Died Bowral, New South Wales, 3 December 2007
By Lindsay Foyle
When James Kemsley started drawing Ginger Meggs in 1984, it was agreed between him and Sheena Bancks (who had inherited the Meggs copyright from her father Jimmy Bancks), that James would take full control of Ginger Meggs. Including the drawing, the marketing and any other business which might involve Ginger. While James would retain his own copyright, he would pay a fee to Sheena as the money rolled in, assuming there was any. At the time there was very little and nowhere near enough for Kemsley to live on. He immediately set building the syndication of the comic while moving Ginger into the present, with new clothes and new friends. Many of the changes did not please the purists, but Meggs was soon enjoying a level of popularity he had not enjoyed for years.
Kemsley had got the job following Lloyd Piper’s death in 1983. A number of artists were considered to take over the drawing of the comic, but for various reasons, none suited. Kemsley was forth artist on the list for the job. When the editor of The Sun-Herald, Peter Allen first saw Kemsley’s drawings, he was apprehensive, but agreed to give given him a try while thinking if it did not work then he would have to look elsewhere. What Allen did not tell Kemsley at the time, was the “elsewhere” was not for another artist but another comic.
It had been Michael Latimer who originally pushed for Kemsley to get the job of drawing Ginger. Latimer was married to Sheena and they had been friends with Kemsley for years. Latimer and Kemsley first met in 1969 when both were working at Channel Nine in Sydney. Kemsley was working on the Today Show compared by Diana Ward. One of the reasons he got the job was because he could draw cartoons and caricatures quickly. He had honed the skill at the Traralgon Journal when growing up in Victoria, only leaving town when he got my job at Nine. Soon after the Today Show faded Kemsley moved onto The Super Flying Fun Show. It was a morning show and it worked well for him, as it left his evenings free for drama classes.
Latimer had started working at Channel Nine as a producer on a television series called The Link Men. He was English and had met Sheena in London in 1965 when she was studying art and he was working in the film industry. They had moved to Australia in 1969. Kemsley said he met Latimer when both came around a corner going in opposite directions looking for the canteen at Nine.
Kemsley was getting some small parts in The Super Flying Fun Show. One part was a character called Skeeter the Paper Boy. It proved popular and soon evolved into a bigger part of the show.
In 1977 Kemsley went to see Des Condon, the head artist at News Limited, offering him some cartoons. Condon like what Kemsley showed him and used some. Condon then suggested Kemsley for some jobs at News Limited. Kemsley found out later one of them was for three months stint as the cartoonist on The Daily Telegraph in 1978. The job went to Alan Moir who had been working on The Bulletin.
While he was getting the odd cartoon published Kemsley started to get work on cruise ships with CTC Lines. Originally entertaining holidaymakers as they sailed around the Pacific, and soon working his way up to entertainments officer. Eventually he became the assistant cruise director. He was then asked if he would like to go to England working as the purser while being involved with the entertainment.
When Kemsley got to London he visited the Punch office intending to sell them some cartoons. He showed his best cartoons to Geoffrey Dickerson, who just sat expressionless while looking at them. Eventually saying nothing offered suited, but did suggest Men Only might buy one or two.
While in London, Kemsley became a regular at one of the local pubs. This evolved into a Wednesday night job, behind the bar. Soon after at a party he met an Australian who was working as a guide on European bus tours. Kemsley was told the money was not great, but he’d get to travel around Europe while being paid. So, he contacted Top Deck Travel and the next thing he knew he was driving busses around Morocco, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia all over Europe and then USA, Mexico and Canada and getting paid for it.
Kemsley was eventually offered a job in London as manager of Top Deck’s promotions worldwide. He started a quarterly travel magazine called The Decker and drew a comic strip for it called Frogin’. He was then approached by the Australasian Express to run the comic weekly.
One day Latimer mentioned Sheena’s father was Jimmy Bancks. Kemsley had known them both for years but had never known this. In January 1980 Latimer and Sheena moved back to Australia to work on some projects. Ginger Meggs was not one of them. Soon after Latimer contacted Kemsley again, saying he had been to see John Sexton - who was making a movie about Fatty Finn - and suggested he make a Ginger Meggs movie next.
Latimer asked Kemsley to play Tiger Kelly in the film. The production schedule was 15 weeks. Kemsley liked the idea while pointing out it was not possible as he could only get 6 weeks off at Top Deck. In the end Latimer told him if he found a way to get there, then there would be something for him to do on the movie.
Production started in December 1981 and finished in January 1982, Kemsley spent four weeks working on the film.
While Kemsley was in Australia he was offered some work writing storylines for Grundy soaps, the main one being Starting Out. He took the job and resigned from Top Deck. It did not last, in February 1983 the show was cancelled. Then in September, Latimer rang Kemsley again and told him Lloyd Piper who had been drawing Ginger Meggs had been killed and he wanted to submit Kemsley for the job.
It took Kemsley about 10 days to draw the first episode and on March 18, 1984 it appeared on the front page of The Sun-Herald’s comic section.
It was the same year Kemsley jointed the Black and White Artists Club which at the time had a membership of about 20. He suggested the club should start a national cartooning award. The idea was put to Trevor Kennedy, the editor of The Bulletin and he took up the idea and established The Bulletin Black and White Artist Awards in 1985. In 1994 the awards became the Stanley Awards after The Bulletin withdrew.
By the time of the first awards night, membership of the Australian Black and While Artists’ Club was over 200 with cartoonist from all over Australia having joined. At the Black and White Artists’ Club AGM following the 1988 awards Kemsley took over the presidency, a position he held till the pressure of work forced him to give it up in 1990.
In 1991 Kemsley wrote Ginger Meggs at Large - his first book which sold over 200,000 copies. Two others followed, It’s Sunday Ginger Meggs and Wakeup Ginger Meggs, both selling over 20,000 copies. Five collections of the comics were soon published too, with the first selling over 330,000 copies, the second almost 90,000.
In 1993 - 72 years after Ginger Meggs’ debut as a Sunday comic - Kemsley did what Bancks never did; he began a daily version of Ginger Meggs. Bancks had always thought there was too much work involved in a daily comic and would never have contemplated doing it while working on his own. However hard work also seemed to inspire Kemsley, the more he took on the more he wanted to do. The new daily comic first appeared in The Illawarra Mercury and was soon running in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Courier-Mail in Brisbane followed. The West Australian in Perth was next. Then in October 1997 The Express in London started running Ginger, making it the first Australian daily comic to run in a British national daily paper.
In 1997 Kemsley and Michael Latimer discuss the problem of what was to happen when the Bancks copyright on Ginger Meggs ran out in 2002, fifty years after Bancks’ death. As it was not possible to extend the copyright so they registered a trademark using the Ginger Meggs name and 1948 face of Ginger.
In 2000 Kemsley travelled to Brazil to attend a cartoon conference in Rio and presented a paper of Australian cartooning. While there he met some people from Atlantic Syndications and signed up with them. Ginger Meggs was soon being run in over 120 newspapers and read in Australia, Fiji, the USA, Antigua, Barbados, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, India, Venezuela, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Canada, Brunei, Sweden, the Netherlands, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica and Thailand.
The 17th Stanley Awards in 2001 were held in Canberra at the National Museum and coincided with the Museum’s Bring the House Down exhibition of cartoons. It was a big weekend for the Club and a report of the event in club’s magazine Inkspot stated, “It’s not that often James Kemsley is lost for words. Ginger Meggs would have had something witty to say had he known that Kemsley was to be awarded the Gold Stanley for Artist of the Year.” It was not an honour bestowed lightly by the members of the club and it reflected the impact the daily version of Ginger Meggs had had.
The members of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club voted at a special meeting in March 2002 to do some window dressing and changed the name of the club to the Australian Cartoonists’ Association. It was a close call 67 to 8.
Kemsley accepted the presidency of the ACA for the second time in May
2003. On taking over at the ACA Kemsley said, “It’s twelve years since I was last president of the ACA or ABWAC as it was then. I thought that last time would see me out. It looks now as if I qualify for the Lazarus Foundation complete with a triple bi-pass.”
In the months before the Bowral Stanley Awards in 2004 Peter Broelman came up to Bowral from Adelaide to help with the organising. He regularly attended a gym at home and was glad Kemsley was on a fitness campaign and attending a gym several times a week. The two went to gym to work-out where Broelman noticed Kemsley was a little uncoordinated. He thought it was strange for someone who had been as involved in sport as much as Kemsley had.
In January 2005 during the early days of planning the Stanley Awards to be held in Leura, Kemsley was on the phone organising things. To the observant it was possible to detect a slight inflection in his voice. It was barely noticeable but when it was it did give the impression he had had the one too many glasses of wine. James put it down to stress, hard work and probably a virus.
Stress has a way of following cartoonists. In May the readers of The Sydney Morning Herald were introduced to Sudoku. To make room for it the comic section was rejigged. One casualty was Ginger Meggs, which was dropped. No sooner had that happened than Kemsley was approached to place Meggs in The Daily Telegraph.
Soon after Kemsley took holidays. He went to England to watch the Test cricket between England and Australia. By then his speech inflection had evolved to the point it was becoming noticeable to strangers and his friends were starting to worry about the problem. There were occasions when he sounded a little drunk, when, in fact, he was totally sober and it was becoming necessary to look for another explanation, but nobody knew what.
By November when the Stanley Awards were held in Leura the speech inflection had become quite noticeable. Early in December, after the Stanley’s weekend was over and the attending cartoonists had returned to their studios all over Australia, the Media and Entertainment Alliance held their annual Walkley Awards in Sydney - at Luna Park. It was the 50th time the Walkley Awards had been presented, and the Australian Cartoonists’ Association was awarded the Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Walkley.
Kemsley had been to see several doctors who had put him through what seemed like endless tests, but what was causing his problem still remained unidentified. While undergoing these exhaustive tests, Kemsley was still drawing Ginger Meggs and planning the 2006 Stanley awards which were to be held in Ballarat. With a question over his health Kemsley decided he could not do everything and resigned from the presidency of the ACA.
Kemsley was still involved in the background of the ACA and continued putting the ACA magazine, Inkspot together. In June one doctor told him that while he could not diagnose what was wrong with him, he suspected motor neurone disease and told James he “should prepare for the worst”. The suspicion turned out to be fact.
The stress was getting to Kemsley. There were days when he struggled to concentrate on drawing Ginger Meggs. Steve Panozzo was always at hand willing to do what he could. Gary Clark, who drew Swamp, was sending story ideas, as was Neil Matterson, the cartoonist for The Sunday Mail in Brisbane. Others too, including Alan Moir, editorial cartoonist for The Sydney Morning Herald, Allan Salisbury, who drew Snake, as well as Tony Lopes, who drew Insanity Streak, came to James’s assistance, as did Mick Horn in Perth. There were days when Kemsley was so worried about his health he could not get his mind around how to start a comic. Broelman came to his aid and sent a rough drawing to him. To someone outside the cartoon fraternity this support may have seemed coordinated, but it was not. It was just spontaneous gestures from individual cartoonists all over Australia wanting to do a little for a mate. Whenever Kemsley used someone’s help he would add their signature to that episode of Ginger. Kemsley was also thinking about who was to take over when he could no longer draw.
By July 2007 the speech inflection that Kemsley had increased to the point he could no longer be understood when he talked. He was keeping in contact with people by writing notes.
Kemsley was struggling and it became impossible for him to continue to draw Ginger Meggs so he asked Jason Chatfield to take it over.
Within days, James slipped into a coma and at 3.40pm on December 3, 2007 died in Bowral Hospital.