Norman Herod

While trying to find some information on an artist named Kenton, I stumbled across another name that I didn't recognise, but who has a number of comic connections. This was cartoonist Norman Herod, pictured above in early 1945 with Joan Baker at Moor Hall, home of David Hand's GB Animation studio where hundreds of creative talents animated the adventures of Ginger Nutt and his Animaland chums.

Richard Norman Herod was born in Derby on 4 November 1907, the son of Edward James Herod (1873-1925), a railway clerk, and his wife Annie (nee Crowder, 1874-1967). He was the last of five children, raised in Derby and remained in that area until his twenties. Although I know nothing about his training, he was clearly a caricaturist of some talent as in 1931 he was given permission to exhibit a number of caricatures of local persons at the Central Art Gallery, Willington, by the Free Library and Art Gallery Committee. (Willington is a village some six miles southwest of Derby.)

By the end of the 1930s, Herod was earning a living as a commercial artist and cartoons, and was living at Bushey, Hertfordshire. I know nothing about his war service (he would have been in his early thirties when war was declared) but we know he was an early member of staff at GB Animation, working alongside Reg Parlett, Mike Western, Eric Bradbury, and countless other artists who would later turn to comics.

In the late 1940s, Herod was living in the Uxbridge area, where he married Lena Hannah Moore in 3Q 1949. Born 13 February 1919, Lena, a shorthand typist, had previously been married in 1939 to Sydney Hope Pellatt (1916-1988), a commercial traveller. They subsequently divorced and both remarried.

Herod was a member of the Colne Group of Artists and exhibited alongside other members, which included Gerald Palmer and his son, James, John Thirtle, Ruth Sudbury-Palmer, Cyril Randell, Joan Scott, Kathleen Richardson and John Topham. The Group was formed in early 1948 and staged a travelling exhibition in time for the Festival of Britain (June/August 1951), showing original art at Unxbridge, Cowley and Harefield. Herod exhibited paintings and cartoons at the Group’s various shows held at Uxbridge Library and the King’s Arms Hotel, Uxbridge.

In 1953, Herod teamed up with Douglas Kenton to produce a puppet show for children's television. "Professor Doodle and Lefty look like spaniels; but the professor behaves like an absent-minded teacher, and Lefty like any schoolboy trying to take a rise out of him," reported one newspaper. One unique talent that both puppets had was an ability to draw and they were to make funny drawings as they talked.

The glove puppets "would be lost without Norman Herod and Douglas Kenton, who not only have a good deal to do with the drawings which appear, but who also made and manipulate the puppets and write the script."

I have only discovered a single appearance of the two puppets on the BBC's Children's Television on 16 April 1953 where they appeared alongside a report by Duncan Carse on a expedition to the Antarctic island of South Georgia.

Herod and Kenton were also behind what was billed as "The First 3-D Art Exhibition in the World", held at Artists House, Manette Street, Soho, in October 1953. The exhibition was of a dozen watercolour pictures which "come gently or fiercely from their frames as you look through special glasses. Charles Laughton's nose, chin and lips emerge formidably from this treatment."

The syndicated "London Diary" column noted: "The two young artists have spent twelve months on their 3-D experiment and are proud to have found colours that come remarkably accurately through the red and green lenses. Which pictures are whose they cannot say. They have worked together as closely on each one as Disney's team of animators on a cartoon film."

Herod died in 3Q 1966, aged 58, his death registered in Hillingdon, Middlesex. He was survived by Lena, who died over 35 years later in 2002.