Born Cassilis, New South Wales, 31 October 1923
Died Nabiac, New South Wales, 5 September 1983
By Lindsay Foyle
Lloyd Piper had put on a little weight as he got older, and with his height looked a big man. But he had a very gentle nature and never used his size to intimidate people the way some large men do. “Some people thought Piper a bit standoffish,” said fellow cartoonist Ken Emerson. “But he wasn’t. He was just shy. When you got to know him, he was a really nice fellow.”
Just how gentle he was, was demonstrated one day when he was rung by a Ginger Meggs fan who wanted to come to his house and see how he worked. The caller was about 18 years old and arrived at Piper’s home at about 11 in the morning. Piper showed him the studio and how he worked. When there was nothing more to show him there he showed him the large model train set in the garage. By this time, it was mid-afternoon and the visitor was showing no signs of leaving. Piper then showed him some of his books and a few other things he had collected. Piper was getting embarrassed about the length of the visit, but couldn’t bring himself to suggest it was time to go. Eventually just after it started to get dark, the visitor thanked Piper for his hospitality and left.
After the death of Ron Vivian in 1973, Piper became the third artist to draw Ginger Meggs. There were four artists who were each asked to submit three episodes of Ginger Meggs. Ken Emmerson, Stuart McCrae, Dan Russell as well as Piper. After considering all the drawing Piper was given the job. At the time he was drawing a comic for The Sunday Telegraph called Wolf, which had started in 1972.
Piper’s background in comics had started in the 1940s when he drew for a number of comic books. He had also spent many years as an advertising layout artist and drew the Tiger in your tank advertisements in the 1960’s for Esso petrol. From 1971 to 1983 he was a part time graphic design teacher at Randwick Technical Collage.
Like Vivian, Piper was not allowed to put his name to Ginger Meggs. Later he approached the Bancks family about putting his name on his work. He was given a small concession and allowed to put his initials in the bottom right hand panel. Further on he was permitted to sign his name. Piper did not sign all his work the same way. Sometimes he used his full name Lloyd Piper as on Ginger Meggs, he signed Wolf as Lloyd. Pete Down one of his early comics he signed as Piper while he signed Steel Barr’s Jungle Justice drawn in the 1940s as Lloyd Piper.
Piper was born in 1923 in Cassilis a small country town in New South Wales north of Mudgee and west of Muswellbrook. There were three children in the family but the other two, a boy and a girl both died in infancy. He had a quiet time in Cassilis and for all practical purposes grew up as an only child. He grew to a height of about 6'2" and was what he described as “a long streak of pelican shit.” He went to school in the town and was in the local boy scouts. But, again was on his own as he was the only scout in the troop. He only left Cassilis when he signed up to fight in the Second World War. He served in a variety of areas and spent some time in New Guinea.
It was while in New Guinea that he started to develop his drawing talents which had always been a passion. When sending letters back to his family he would draw pictures for them to illustrate his words. When he was discharged he took on art in a Rehabilitation Training Course in Sydney. To supplement his income, he drew comics in the local comic book industry, under what he described as “treadmill conditions.” Some of the comics he drew included Pete Down, Catman and Kit, Planetman, and Steel Barr’s Jungle Justice. He also designed some colour patches and badges for the Army.
Following the down turn in the Australian comic book industry in the early fifties Piper turned his attention to the advertising industry. He said in 1983 “I look back with a shudder at the product of this period which I left behind when I went into advertising.”
Piper married in the early fifties and in 1956 they adopted their son, John. Piper’s wife was also an artist with a background in advertising. For a time, she drew fashion advertisements for the daily papers and later worked in the greeting card industry. The marriage was a happy one but his wife kept a secret from him. When they first met she realised there was an age difference and did not tell Lloyd her age. She never did, and it was not until after his father’s death that John was told by his mother she was almost 10 years older than his father.
In advertising Piper mainly worked as a freelance layout artist while also drawing the occasional illustration. Eventually he took a job with Fortune Advertising and stayed with them for many years. In the late 1970s Piper moved to Townsville to help establish an office for Fortune Advertising. When he returned to Sydney he mainly worked out of his home in Wallis Avenue, Strathfield. The family had a three-bedroom home there and the third bedroom became his studio. In the two-car garage was kept the family car and his collection of electric trains. Piper was building a large track to run his model trains on, but it was one of those things he never quit got around to finishing. Apart from collecting trains he also had a collection of red wine. He was not a heavy drinker, but had a passion for red wine and had about 35 dozen bottles. There was also a large collection of jazz and classical records along with an extensive collection of Playboys.
In what may seem to be a totally unconnected event to Ginger Meggs, the death of Syd Nicholls was reported on June 3 1977. Nicholls had started Fatty Finn in 1923 for The Sunday News to compete with The Sunday Sun’s Ginger Meggs. In December 1951 The Sunday Herald started to run Fatty Finn. Again, as a competitor to Ginger Meggs, Fatty Finn had continued with in The Sun-Herald when The Sunday Herald was merged with The Sunday Sun in October 1953.
The merger of the two newspapers had left The Sun-Herald with a very strong comic section. But over the years the section had lost some of the better comics, early in 1977 some effort was put into revamping the section and in May a number of new comics were introduced. All this activity had caused some rethinking on The Sunday Telegraph too, and about the future of Ginger Meggs. While there was almost still a year to run on the Meggs contract the decision was made not to renew it. Piper was not told about this. In fact, few people were.
The first hint of trouble Piper had was the sudden dropping of his second comic Wolf from The Sunday Telegraph on May 14, 1978. It was a surprise to him and probably to the readers too. Wolf was in the middle of an adventure and the previous week had carried a continued next week line. Piper said Wolf was “…shot down by a high-flying super hero from the U.S. of A.” He added, “Not the first Australian strip to succumb to the American way.”
The reality was Wolf was shot down by Tarzan a comic based on Edgar Rice Burroughs 1912 novel and could claim to be one of the oldest adventure comic strips in the world.
The real reason that Wolf was dropped was not that the paper wanted to run Tarzan — it was because Ginger Meggs was to move to The Sun-Herald, and at The Sunday Telegraph they did not want to run a comic drawn by someone who was drawing a comic for the competition.
Across town in the offices of The Sun-Herald where they had been wondering what to do about losing Fatty Finn, Ginger Meggs looked like the answer. The editor, Lew Kepert, had been contacted and asked if he was interested in taking Meggs from The Sunday Telegraph. He was told there was still some months left on the Meggs contract but was not told contract was not going to be renewed. Kepert decided he wanted Ginger for The Sun-Herald. Ginger Meggs made his first appearance in The Sun-Herald on August 27, 1978.
When Piper took over to comic he was being paid three days casual rate for a newspaper artist. In the early 1970s that wasn’t bad money. But as the decade wore on inflation, wage freezes and award restrictions meant that the spending power of the money he was getting halved. He wanted to be paid more for his efforts but hadn’t been able to convince anyone he should. He told friends it was, “just a job” and that, “they don’t pay me much and they get what they pay for.” He also said, “If I had been doing this work in America I would be a millionaire.”
Piper also said “Australian newspapers were never going to pay Australian artists a reasonable fee for their efforts, as long as they could import syndicated comics from America as cheap as chips.”
The death of Nicholls jogged the memory of Bob Ellis of the fist Fatty Finn movie made almost sixties years earlier. He became interested in writing a script for a new Fatty Finn movie. He wanted it to be a continuation of the 1927 silent movie The Kid Stakes that involved Fatty Finn in a Billy Cart race. Eventually he finished it and a movie was made directed by John Sexton and released in 1980. While the film didn’t end up as Ellis had thought it might, it did prove popular and stirred an interest with Michael Latimer about making a Ginger Meggs film. There had always been a rivalry between Fatty Finn and Ginger Meggs in the newspapers so why not in the cinemas too. Latimer was married to Sheena Bancks and had worked in the industry for some years.
Latimer contacted Sexton and in 1980, 66 years after the first Ginger Meggs film the second Ginger Meggs movie was made in Bowral New South Wales. The film was released at a time there was a big push for the American Film Annie, based on Little Orphan Annie and many thought it didn’t get the crowds it deserved. There were others who thought the film well-made but lacked in a few areas. Whatever the problems it didn’t have the box office success that had been expected.
But there was something else about the film that rankled with Piper. Nobody discussed it with him. Nobody told him it was being made, he wasn’t asked to have any input into the script and he wasn’t even asked to the launch of the film. He didn’t even get a free ticket to go and see the movie.
In the early eighties Piper decided to get out of Sydney and to live and work from a small town on the New South Wales mid-north coast. He bought a block of land in Port Macquarie and set about having a house built on it. He traveled up to the property at regular intervals for inspections of the progress. It was a prelude to how he planned to live the rest of his life. Only in reverse. Working in Port Macquarie and driving down to Sydney about once a month to deliver the Ginger Meggs art work. One wet morning in September 1983 he set out to make the drive to Port Macquarie. He was to make a final inspection on the building of his house. Near the small town of Nabiac, a little south of Taree, a car traveling in the opposite direction pulled out from behind a truck and onto the wrong side of the road. Piper wasn’t able to avoid the car and was killed instantly in the accident.
Lloyd Piper had only been drawing Ginger for 10 years when he died in September 1983.