'Jolly Jinks' (1915).
S.J. Cash was an early British 20th-century comic artist and children's book illustrator, mostly known for his nursery comics published by the Amalgamated Press.
Early life and career
Stavert Johnstone Cash was born in 1884 in Chorlton, Lancashire, as the son of a journalist. In 1906, he started illustrating for Boy's Own Paper, a moralistic Christian story paper published by the Religious Tract Society. In one of his 1914 drawings, 'A Vision of the Future', a character uses a "pocket marconigraph" to send a message while stranded on an island. It's an unintentional prediction of the invention of mobile phones, many decades later. During the 1910s, Cash also made illustrations for the children's magazine Little Folks, published by Cassell.
Illustration for Little Folks (1912).
Amalgamated Press
In the late 1900s, S.J. Cash began his association with Alfred Harmsworth's Amalgamated Press (AP), where he became a regular artist for their nursery comics. He appeared in the magazine The Playbox, alongside fellow illustrators Mabel Lucie Attwell, Mabel Francis Taylor and Julius Stafford Baker II. In its pages, he created picture story features like 'The Furry Fluffkins' (1909), about a group of mischievous anthropomorphic kittens.
For The Rainbow, the newly launched color supplement of the AP's newspaper The Daily Mirror, Cash drew 'Rainbow Cats' Colony' (1914). He additionally made 'Jolly Jinks in Jungle Land' (1915) and 'Fairy Farm' (1921) for Puck magazine. Another comic strip about a farm, 'Funland Farm' (1928) could be found in Little Sparks, while 'Billy and Bobby Blackbird' (1921) livened up pages in Bubbles and the Children's Fairy.
Cash's work additionally appeared in Tiger Tim's Weekly, where his 'The Merry Mice' (1921) and 'Dr. Grunter and his Scholars' (1935) ran. Years later, he also joined the new version of Playbox, this time as the continuation of Jungle Jinks. For this publication, he created 'The Tiny Tots of Sleepy Town' (1925), 'Tiny Tim' (1928), 'The Animal Alphabet' (1929) and 'Puss in Boots' (1936). Later in his career, Cash drew the comic strip 'Jolly Farmer Field' (1939) in Happy Days.
Death
Stavert Johnstone Cash passed away in 1958 in Bucklow, Cheshire.
'A Vision of the future. The Pocket Marconigraph. Tapping off a Message for Help' (The Boy's Own Paper, 1914). Note how this "pocket marconigraph" seems to have predicted our modern-day cellphones, invented in the late 1970s.