Jack Kirkbride

Who was Jack Kirkbride?

Jack Kirkbride was an English cartoonist, and father to Anne Kirkbride, the actress who plays Deirdre Barlow in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street.

Kirkbride left school at the age of 14 to become an apprentice painter and decorator but was called up for the Army at age 18, when he started drawing cartoons. He served from 1942 as a transport driver with the Royal Army Service Corps. He fought in the Normandy Campaign in 1944 and was demobbed in 1946. He sold his first cartoon to a national paper in 1953, and has since sold to most national papers and magazines, including Punch and The Oldie. His work also appears in the German press under the name of Jacki.

He became the Oldham Evening Chronicle's regular cartoonist in 1958 and went full-time in the 1970s.

He was a founder member of the Cartoonist's Club of Great Britain and his work was published across Europe.

Kirkbride won first prize at the Waddingtons International Cartoon Festival. His hobbies included listening to classical music, renovating his 18th-century farmhouse on the edge of Saddleworth Moor and playing the pianola.