Bird, Kenneth

Kenneth Bird, pseudonym Fougasse, (born Dec. 17, 1887, London—died June 11, 1965, London), British cartoonist who, particularly in Punch, created warmhearted social comedies, using little stick figures to convey his point.

Originally a civil engineer, Bird was with the Royal Engineers during World War I. He decided on a drawing career after a shell fractured his spine at Gallipoli, Turkey, in 1915, when it appeared that he would not walk again. He contributed his first cartoon to Punch in 1916 and became art director for the publication in 1937 and editor in 1949, a position he held until 1953.

Bird decided to use a pseudonym to avoid confusion with another Punch artist, later explaining that “fougasse” was an old technical term used by sappers for a rough-and-ready land mine that might or might not go off. He gained widespread fame during World War II for a series of posters in behalf of various national causes. Particularly notable were those captioned “Careless talk costs lives,” in which Adolf Hitler was portrayed listening in on conversations in public places. From the 1920s through the 1950s his drawings were collected in a succession of books.