George Worsley Adamson

Who was George Worsley Adamson?

George Worsley Adamson was a book illustrator, author and cartoonist who from 1931 held American and British dual citizenship.

George Adamson was educated at Wigan and Leigh College, Oxford University, and the Liverpool College of Art. He exhibited at the Royal Academy, and contributed to Punch from 1939 to 1988. From the mid-1960s, he illustrated Norman Hunter's Professor Branestawm books, providing a suitably zany continuity with W. Heath Robinson's illustrations from the 1930s.

During World War II, Adamson served with the RAF Coastal Command as a navigator in Catalina flying boats on the Western Approaches and trained on B-24 Liberators in the Bahamas. After he illustrated a feature on transatlantic flights for the Illustrated London News, he was appointed an official war artist for the Coastal Command. Some of Adamson's drawings are now in the Imperial War Museum and the RAF Museum.

In the 1980s, he illustrated five of the Richard Ingrams and John Wells Dear Bill books for Private Eye.

George Adamson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in 1987.