A HORNET'S NEST - an original printed appearance of this cartoon featuring Winston S. Churchill from the 16 December 1936 edition of the magazine Punch, or The London Charivari: Portraying Churchill as A. A. Milne's hapless Pooh-Bear over his politically nettlesome support for Edward VIII during the Abdication crisis

London: Punch, 1936. This original printed appearance of a Punch cartoon featuring Winston S. Churchill comes from the personal collection of Gary L. Stiles, author of Churchill in Punch (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2022). His book is the first ever effort to definitively catalog, describe, and contextualize all of the many Punch cartoons featuring Churchill.

This cartoon titled "A HORNET'S NEST" appeared thus on p.689 of the 16 December 1936 issue of Punch. The artist is A. W. Lloyd. The carton is captioned "Poor Winnie-The-Pooh!" Winston Churchill became A. A. Milne's Pooh-Bear in this, the first Punch cartoon on the Abdication of King Edward VIII on 10 December 1936. This traumatic event occurred after the Baldwin government refused the King's proposal for a morganatic marriage (spouse, but not Queen) with the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. The House strongly supported Baldwin, and when Churchill rose to urge patience, he was shouted down - temporarily losing all the political stock he had gained in recent debates over rearmament.

Punch or The London Charivari began featuring Churchill cartoons in 1900, when his political career was just beginning. That political career would last two thirds of a century, see him occupy Cabinet office during each of the first six decades of the twentieth century, carry him twice to the premiership and, further still, into the annals of history as a preeminent statesman. And throughout that time, Punch satirized Churchill in cartoons – more than 600 of them, the work of more than 50 different artists.

It was a near-perfect relationship between satirists and subject. That Churchill was distinctive in both persona and physical appearance helped make him easy to caricature. To his persona and appearance he added myriad additional satirical temptations, not just props, like his cigars, siren suits, V-sign, and hats, but also a variety of ancillary avocations and vocations, like polo, painting, brick-laying, and writing. All these were skewered as well.

Some Punch cartoons were laudatory, some critical, and many humorous, like the man himself. Nearly always, Churchill was distinctly recognizable, a larger-than-life character whose presence caricature served only to magnify.