cartoonist, caricaturist illustrator and writer, was born in Alfredtown near Ballarat, Victoria on 3 September 1880, ninth of the 11 children of George Dyson and Jane, née Mayall (see ADB ), three of whom died in infancy. Self-taught as an artist, apart from some possible assistance from the Bulletin’s permanent Melbourne cartoonist Tom Durkin , who encouraged brother Ambrose Dyson , Will started contributing drawings to the Bulletin during his late teens. William Moore states: 'One day his [elder] brother Edward picked up one of his sketches, and sent it to the “Bulletin”; it was accepted by the Editor Archibald, who forwarded a cheque for three guineas.’ He certainly had cartoons accepted by the Adelaide Gadfly in 1897 and had work in that year’s inaugural exhibition of the NSW Society of Artists.
Initially, Will Dyson contributed to the Bulletin under the pseudonym 'Asa Dane’, including good art-nouveauish 'Spook School’ drawings such as McDougal’s Hell (illustration to poem about nagging wife in Hell) 3 February 1900; The Deliverer (illustrating a poem about plants by Ted Dyson) 21 April 1900; The Boer at Heaven’s Gate 11 August 1900 (for which he was to be paid three guineas: Joan Kerr papers). 'Asa Dane’ (verso W.H. Dyson, 64 St Vincent St, Albert Park [Vic]) also drew The Truth of the Matter… is the Missionary now eats up the [black crossed out] heathen (original ML), published – with the caption replaced by a crudely obvious verse – on 19 January 1901.
In 1903 Will Dyson (always known as Bill to family and friends) encouraged Lionel Lindsay, who had just become engaged to his sister Jean, to apply for the job of cartoonist at Sydney’s Evening News . Dyson was at that time besotted with the artist’s model, Rose Soady, a passion he shared with Norman Lindsay . After Rose chose Norman, Dyson went to Adelaide where he succeeded Ambrose as artist on the Adelaide Critic , for which he drew Australia’s first coloured caricatures (Moore, SAA ii, 122). Cartoons include Vic’s generosity (about fashionable lady Victoria syphoning Murray River water away from poor little boy South Australia, a continuing SA grievance) 5 October 1904 (ill. M. Anderson et al., When Australia Was A Woman , WAM 1998, cat. 62, probably coloured). Dyson did not stay long in Adelaide but spent the following years moving between Melbourne and Sydney depending on where he could find work. He drew most of the multi-coloured covers for the Clarion (1897-1909) and did other cartoons for it, including his first efforts in political cartooning in 1908. He contributed to the Native Companion and Lone Hand in 1907; the Mornington Peninsula Arts Centre holds The Poet , a charcoal and wash drawing done for the latter. Les Tanner commented, 'Did we ever produce by world standards an enduringly great cartoonist? The writer thinks so in Will Dyson.’( CAB , 1963, 47) Yet the most he was ever paid for a caricature in Australia was 10 shillings. Dyson was able to move between the cities as he had a home base with his family in Melbourne, and in Sydney could stay with his sister Jean and brother-in-law Lionel Lindsay. In Melbourne he was increasingly attracted to his young sister-in-law Ruby Lind (Lindsay), who was attempting to carve out an independent career as a black-and-white artist. She was however wary of his attempts at chivalry, and it was some years before he persuaded her to marry him.
In May 1909 he held an exhibition of his caricatures at Furlong’s Rooms in Bourke Street, Melbourne, before marrying Ruby at Creswick on 30 September . The couple left for London soon afterwards, accompanied by the bride’s brother Norman Lindsay, who used the journey as an excuse to leave his first family. When Norman was joined by Rose Soady in London, there was a bitter irrevocable quarrel, caused in part by Ruby’s refusal to know a person she regarded as socially undesirable and Will’s previous relationship with Rose. In addition Norman resented Will’s growing success as his cartoons and caricatures soon became the toast of London intelligensia while Norman could not get his drawings published.
Dyson got his break on the New Age . He also worked on the Weekly Despatch and World , but he became widely known in 1912-16 when he was cartoonist-in-chief on the new Labour newspaper – or 'Socialist rag’ – the Daily Herald . His drawings occupied its entire back page. As a lifelong socialist he inevitably drew the working-man as a young militant figure fighting 'Fat’ (Capitalism) – the latter a figure he created in Australia and gave (or lost) to the world, according to Jensen ('Curious’ p.42), but more likely took over from the Sydney Bulletin (see Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald Paradox ). He was in favour of literary and artistic freedom of expression generally. After initial repulsion he supported the suffrage movement – probably thanks to the influence of Ruby who drew cartoons for the militant Suffragette edited by Christobel Pankhurst – dramatising the death of Emily Davison at the 1914 Derby, for example, in The New Advocate , a skeleton wearing a sandwich board labelled 'Votes for Women’.
Cartoons sent out from England appeared in the Bulletin in 1914-15, e.g. Qualified , 24 November 1914, 11, on a British actress returning to England as a 'celebrated Australian actress’, and “The New Turpin” – a Will Dyson exhibition cartoon , 26 August 1915, 9. At the outbreak of war he exhibited cartoons at Leicester Galleries and published his 1914 anti-German Kultur Cartoons from the Daily Herald in book form (London, 1915). They appealed to a larger audience than any of his previous work. Although The Times reviewer found two of the illustrations, Honour is Satisfied and Circe (original sold by David Alexander in 1978), 'almost too horrible for public exhibition’ (Jensen, 'Curious’ p.48), all were successfully exhibited throughout Britain and later in Australia (AWM holds 3 originals, acq. 1984). A further collection, War Cartoons , followed in 1916.
In December 1916 Dyson was appointed an official Australian war artist and attached to the AIF (Australian Infantry Force) with the rank of lieutenant. On 31 December that year, his brother-in-law, Reg Lindsay, was killed in the second battle of the Somme. Dyson swiftly arranged for the other Lindsay brother, serving at the front, Daryl , to become his batman. He then mentored Daryl towards his own career as an artist. Will Dyson was twice wounded sketching Australian soldiers in action (at Messines, 1917 and Zonnebeke, Belgium). Approximately 232 Dyson drawings and lithographs are in the Australian War Memorial (AWM), all produced in the final 18 months of the war, including the originals for Australia at War (1918), a book of Dyson’s verse, prose and drawings. His prophetic cartoon deriding the Treaty of Versailles, The Tiger : “Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping” (with child labelled ’1940 class’), first published in London’s Daily Herald on 17 May 1919 and since widely reproduced, is perhaps the most famous of all images resulting from WWI, at least in the English-speaking world (original lost). At the end of the War Ruby died in the Influenza pandemic. Will wrote Poems in Memory of a Wife , which he published in 1919 and worked to ensure that her career as an artist was not forgotten.
In 1922 when the Daily Herald was taken over by the TUC, Dyson resigned. He then experimented with puppets and animated films until induced to return to Australia and cartooning by Keith (later Sir Keith) Murdoch, owner of the re-vamped Melbourne Punch . He arrived at Melbourne in 1925 with his teenage daughter Betty , also an artist. The cartoons Will drew for Melbourne Punch include: At The – Theatre : 'The Lady: “What sort of seat did you have?”/ The Misanthrope: “Best in the house – couldn’t hear a word!” (ill. Lindesay WWW , 116). When Melbourne Punch was incorporated into Table Talk , Dyson drew for it until it also folded, in 1930, eg. Traveller entertaining friends with travel talk c.1925, ink and pencil original (Vane Lindesay collection). He also contributed to the Melbourne Herald , gave lectures, drew caricatures of visiting celebrities, attended life classes conducted by Clive Stephen, painted, and held an exhibition of his work at the Melbourne Athenaeum Club. He and Jimmy Bancks were close friends.
In the late 1920s Dyson became interested in drypoint etching (taught by Cyril Dillon when he was working on the Herald , acc. Dow, 80). He did several outstanding series of etchings, eg. Our Psycho Analysts late 1920s, which includes Dr Freud: “Naughty! Naughty! Who’s been thinking pure thoughts again?” (Vane Lindsay collection, NGA) and Dr. Freud introduces a patient to her subconscious (AGNSW, NGA). Our Dealers notes the dominance of emigrant artists in Melbourne at the time in “Sorry Mr Smith, but we only handle artists whose names are difficult to pronounce” (NGA), while Our Immortals includes the drypoints Count Leo Tolstoy suspecting sensuality in the heavenly choir (AGNSW, acq. 1963, NGA) and Thomas Hardy in the fields of Aspodel finds evidence of canker (AGNSW, acq. 1963). Jensen ('Curious’ p.53) labels him at this time 'a Beerbohm with muscles’.
He returned to London via America c.1930, exhibiting a series of satirical drypoints, Our Moderns , in New York, St Louis and London to great acclaim, though one of the series, White Trash , caused some controversy. Many of his etchings were printed in the New York studio of Frank A. Nankivell , an Australian artist long resident there.
Back at London Dyson rejoined the Daily Herald , now a 'popular’ newspaper wary of offending advertisers. The National Trust (NSW) owns Noted economist explaining the moral beauties of high prices (to a poor woman and child), an ink Depression drawing evidently published there c.1930. Lonely and disillusioned with cartooning and society (states Jensen), he remained with the Herald until he died, on 21 January 1938, aged 58. He was buried in Hendon Park Cemetery, London (Plot D10, Grave No. 24863), where Ruby is also buried. His final cartoon was a reaction to the killing of 400 people in Barcelona in a fascist air raid during the Spanish Civil War. Drawn on the day of his death, it shows two vultures watching the distant aerial bombardment. The caption (pasted over Dyson’s original hand-written one and perhaps more heavy-handed than his would have been) is: Once WE were the most loathsome things that flew (original John Jensen collection, London).
Dyson is probably best known in Australia for his war drawings, his 50 illustrations to brother Edward’s Fact’ry 'Ands (1907) and his caricatures in the Bulletin and Lone Hand , but his work covers every genre of black-and-white-art, even the traditional Bulletin -style bushie joke: the AGNSW holds a brush, ink and pencil drawing of a threatening male cook wielding a club in a bush kitchen and saying: “Anyone else got anything to say after my cookin’?” According to the AGNSW catalogue, it was published in the Daily Herald , London, c.1935 (possible a reworking of an earlier theme). In 1927 the Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, held an exhibition of original Melbourne Punch drawings by Percy Leason (over 200 works) and Will Dyson (80 works), plus a few b/w caricatures by Len Reynolds and illustrations by Claire Scott (1924-25). Several Dyson cartoons and three Leasons were purchased from the exhibition for the NGV.
Vane Lindsay also owns the undated ink and watercolour original, Meeting of the Society for the Suppression of Bad Language in the Army . Bendigo Art Gallery held an exhibition of Dyson’s work in 1980 (curated by Doug Hall). In 1995 a collection containing some 300 of his cartoons was discovered by the Australian cartoonist and cartoon historian John Jensen in the London attic of Baroness Yves Chanteau (a daughter of Betty Dyson’s first husband and his second wife). Lots of Dyson caricatures of other artists were done for Society of Artists’ catalogue in 1907, e.g. Alice Muskett .
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