Background
Harry Hargreaves was born on February 9, 1922, in Manchester, United Kingdom.
Harry Hargreaves attended Chorlton High School. He also attended the Manchester School of Art.
Harry Hargreaves was born on February 9, 1922, in Manchester, United Kingdom.
Harry Hargreaves attended Chorlton High School. He also attended the Manchester School of Art.
Hargreaves started his career at Chorlton high school, where he contributed cartoons to the Arrow, the school magazine. He was 14 when the Manchester Evening News published his first cartoon. Leaving school at 16, Hargreaves worked for an interior design firm. In his spare time, he studied architecture, mechanical drawing and furniture design at Manchester School of Art.
In 1939, Harry was hired by the Manchester art agency Kayebon Press and began assisting Hugh McNeill with his 1938 creation Pansy Potter and his other strips for the Dandy and the Beano comics. Dundee publishers DC Thomson offered Hargreaves full-time freelance work, but instead, he trained as an engineer. From 1940 to 1945 he served in Royal Air Force signals, mostly in the far east, drawing for Blighty and other magazines and illustrating Royal Air Force Ceylon's Christmas cards.
In 1946, Hargreaves became a trainee animator at J. Arthur Rank's new Gaumont British Animation - headed by ex-Disney director David Hand - one of 200 recruits in Nissen huts at Moor Park, Cookham, Kent. He contributed to Musical Paintbox, Animal and other screen projects. After Gaumont British Animation closed in 1950, Hargreaves freelanced. He created the ginger dog Scamp for Comet in January 1950 and the long-running Harold Hare for Sun that July. Ollie The Alley Cat was on the front page of Sun from 1951, the 1952 Knockout Fun Book featured the Don Quixote pastiche Don Quickshot, and Terry the Troubador was in TV Comic from 1954.
From 1953 to 1954 Hargreaves was based at the Amsterdam cartoon and comics studios of Martin Toonder, hailed as the "Dutch Disney." One of Toonder's characters, created in 1946, was the daily strip Panda. Hargreaves took over the drawing in 1953 and continued the strip - syndicated to 150 European papers, including the London Evening News. His other cartoon creatures included Go-Go The Fox, animated for television and exported across Europe from 1961 to 1965, and the Crater Critters, eight plastic toy aliens. More than 150 million of these were given away with breakfast cereals. In 1974, the Hayseeds were unceremoniously dropped after the News's switch to tabloid format. Two months later, they were restored - due to demands from readers. The strip sold internationally and was reprinted in paperback collections. It ended in 1980, shortly before the paper shut down.
From 1968, Hargreaves produced The Hayseeds, a daily strip for the London Evening News about a menagerie of talking animals. Although inspired by the American Walt Kelly's strip Pogo - about a big-hearted possum - Hargreaves played with a larger ensemble cast and lighter, less political humor. No single character dominated the strip, but regulars emerged, the ever-hungry crane Braithwaite, extrovert snail Homer, bemused badger Toby and Ern, not always the wisest of owls.
In the 1980s, Hargreaves began donating his work to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. His images still adorn some Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust flamingo houses and his humorous takes on the migration of Bewick's Swans from Siberia to Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust's centers are still being used.
In 1948 Harry Hargreaves married painter and inker Penny Vickery. They had two daughters.