"Tuffy Our Puppy", Playbox, 1941
Bertram Osborn Wymer was born in Islington, London on 7 February 1891, the son of Henry Samuel Wymer, a lithographic designer, and his wife Caroline. He was home-schooled following a bout of rheumatic fever, and later studied at Dalmeney Art School and the Slade School of Art. He joined the Amalgamated Press as a staff artist about 1913.
Strips he drew for the AP's weeklies include "Uncle Paul Fry" (1921) for Chuckles, "Molly and Polly" (1922) for Comic Life and "Robin Goodfellow" (1936) for Puck. He occasionally ghosted for Herbert Foxwell on "Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys", and when Foxwell moved to the Daily Mail in 1933 he became the character's regular artist, in Tiger Tim's Weekly, Rainbow, Playbox and their annuals, until his retirement in the 1950s. He also took over "The Dolliwogs" in Ranbow from Foxwell, and drew "Tuffy Our Puppy" (1941) for Playbox.
In his spare time, along with his wife Lea, whom he married in 1921, and their son John, he participated in archaeological digs, including finding part of the "Swansome Skull", the remains of a 200,000-year-old young woman, the rest of which had been discovered by A. T. Marston in 1935. A feature on the Wymers' discoveries appeared in Time magazine in 1956, and Wymer wrote an article on his greatest find in the Commonwealth and Empire Annual in 1957. He died in Surrey on 11 August 1959.
References[]
- Alan Clarke, Dictionary of British Comic Artists, Writers and Editors, The British Library, 1998, p. 193
- Denis Gifford, Encyclopedia of Comic Characters, Longman, 1987, p. 68
