Norman Thelwell

Norman Thelwell was an English cartoonist well-known for his humorous illustrations of ponies and horses. A promising young student from Liverpool College of Art, he soon became a contributor to the satirical magazine Punch in the 1950s, and earned many lasting devotees by illustrating Chicko in the British boys' comic Eagle.Known to many only as Thelwell, he found his true comic niche with Pony Club girls and ponies refusing fences, a subject for which he became best-known. His cartoons and drawings delighted millions.For the last quarter of a century of his life he lived in the Test valley at Timsbury, near Romsey, gradually restoring a farm house and landscaping the grounds which gave rise to his first factual book, A Plank Bridge by a Pool, which detailed the first two lakes he dug there. A third lake was later featured on the BBC’s South Today programme. Written much earlier, but published three years later, A Millstone Round My Neck described his experiences in re-building a Cornish water mill (Addicroft Mill at Liskeard, which he called Penruin), that was sold before the book was published. He always loved old buildings, and in his auto-biography, Wrestling with a Pencil wrote about his joy in the beauty of old cottages.