Ian Berwick Gammidge was born in Ashtead, Surrey, on 15 April 1916, the son of Francis Norton Gammidge, an accountant, and his wife Joan, née Curtis. He was educated at Malvern College in Worcestershire, and his early jobs included working as an insurance salesman and on a dairy farm. He was a member of the Territorial Army, and served in the Royal East Kent Regiment in the Second World War, serving in France, North Africa, Italy and Malta and rising to captain.
After demobilisation in 1946, he attended St Martin's School of Art in London, and started selling cartoons to magazines through an agent. His first cartoon appeared in Lilliput in May 1946. He was soon contributing to John Bull, Everybody's, London Opinion, Tatler and other magazines on a freelance basis. In early 1947 Philip Zec, art editor of the Daily Mirror, asked him to submit a script for The Flutters, a strip about a couple who liked to gamble, written by Jack Hargreaves and drawn by Len Gamblin. His script was accepted and he was hired as a staff scriptwriter. He eventually succeeded Hargreaves as the regular writer of The Flutters and wrote it until it ended in 1971.
Other strips he wrote included Steve Dowling's Ruggles, previously written by Frank Dowling and Bill O'Connor; Jack Dunkley's The Larks, which he took over from Brian Cooke in the late 1970s and wrote until it ended in 1985; the gardening strip Mr Digwell, also drawn by Dunkley; and the children's strip Little Joe, drawn by Bert Felstead. From 1985 to 1990 he wrote a revival of Jane, drawn by John M. Burns. He also drew cartoons for the Sunday Pictorial, later the Sunday Mirror, including the Gammidge's Bargain Basement series, from 1947 until he retired in 1981.
He married Grace Duffus in 1959. Reg Smythe, creator of Andy Capp, was his best man. Outside of comics and cartooning, he acted in amateur dramatic productions and sang bass in his local church choir in Pirbright, Surrey. He died in Frimley Green, Surrey, on 9 October 2005. His elder brother Henry was a cartoonist and scriptwriter for the Daily Express whose credits include the James Bond strip.
References[]
- Mark Bryant, Obituary: Ian Gammidge, The Independent, 16 December 2005