Bill Titcombe obituary
My friend Bill Titcombe, who has died aged 82, was an artist, illustrator and cartoonist who worked on more than 65 franchised cartoon characters, many of them for TV-related magazines such as Look-In and TV Comic during the 1960s and 70s. Among the characters he drew were Tom and Jerry and Scooby Doo, and he also created comic-based representations of characters from Dad’s Army and Charlie’s Angels.
Bill was born in Romford, Essex, to Stewart Titcombe, an artist, and his wife, Edith (nee Littler). Educated at various schools in London and South Africa, he secured his first job with Amalgamated Press in London, where, at the age of 16 and under an exceptional mentor, Nobby Clarke, he drew a cartoon strip called Our Ernie for the comic Knockout, progressing over the next five years to work on a variety of characters for the same publication, including Sinbad, Space Age Kit and Billy Bunter.
In his early 20s Bill secured a position as an artist at TV Comic, where he became best known for creating The TV Terrors and drawing many comic strips based on television shows, including The Telegoons, Dad’s Army and Ken Dodd’s Diddymen.
In the mid-60s he joined TV Century 21 comic, where he illustrated Bewitched, My Favourite Martian and Get Smart. His talent and versatility soon attracted the attention of Polystyle Publications, which contracted him on a freelance basis to draw Tom and Jerry for TV Comic, which he did for the next 20 years.
Bill went on to work for Look-In magazine in the late 70s and early 80s, drawing strips for Benny Hill, Charlie’s Angels and Cannon and Ball. It was during his time at Look-In that he first started to work in colour, most notably on Dogtanian and Scooby Doo.
Before retiring in the mid-90s to concentrate on painting, Bill accepted a job with the BBC’s Fast Forward magazine, regularly drawing famous faces such as David Jason, Dawn French and Anneka Rice. He also worked on style-guide drawings for Teletubbies and Tweenies – providing guidance for other artists on how to draw each character.
Although Bill generally drew strips of characters that already existed, there was one that he created himself from scratch, and that was The Perils of Page 3 Pauline, which appeared weekly in the News of the World from 1988 to 1995 and for which he created the characters, drew the illustrations and wrote the scripts.
Bill married Audrey Taylor in 1959, having met her on a bus going to Romford only six months before. The two of them collaborated on the Tat the Cat series of books which featured on the children’s television show Rainbow in the 70s, and also on another children’s book, Morgan, the Absent Minded Mallard – in both cases Audrey providing the written words.
Audrey died in 2010. He is survived by their daughters, Claire and Charlotte, grandchildren Daisy, Arthur, Felix and Florence, and great-granddaughters, Poppy and Mabel.
