Shropshire Magazine

Unmistakeable Norman Hood renderings of Andrew Flintoff, Laurel and Hardy, Fernando Torres and Frank Sinatra.

Neil Thomas meets an artist who is always prepared to go the extra smile

Norman at home with wife Doe.

Norman Hood was slung out of his art class at school for not taking it seriously enough. The talent was there, but so was the instinct to amuse.”If I did a landscape there would be a pair of eyes looking out of a tree, that kind of thing. The teacher would want a serious piece of work and I’d do something quirky,” he recalls with a smile.

It might not have amused his teacher at the time but Norman has amused a great many people since and made a hugely successful career out of that artistic quirkiness.

This year he celebrates his 25th anniversary as a professional cartoonist. His studio may be tucked away in a quiet corner of north Shropshire, but his work adorns walls in several parts of the world.

A member of the prestigious Cartoonists Club of Great Britain, Norman has produced thousands of sketches of celebrities and sporting stars  and even a smattering of royalty.

He is the ‘in house’ cartoonist for several large companies and organisations, which have established a tradition of presenting employees with a portrait to mark an achievement, promotion or retirement.

This diverse corporate portfolio ranges from accountancy giant KPMG, toolmaker Black and Decker, Cadbury Schweppes, brewer Carlsberg and Severn Trent Water, to Ebay, the Tower of London visitor centre, City of Hamilton in New Zealand and the Falkland Islands Government, no less.

Norman has also been resident cartoonist for the past 15 years at his beloved Aston Villa, the football club he has supported since boyhood. In the interests of second-city harmony, he works for Birmingham City too.

Norman is also in demand from individual customers looking for something a little different to help celebrate special occasions such as  weddings and birthdays.
Orders have come in from as far afield as Hong Kong and Texas.

Because he specialises in cartoon portraiture as opposed to the traditionally crueller caricature, he produces work that makes a safe gift  one that the giver can be reasonably confident will delight, flatter and amuse the recipient rather than offend.

His facial drawings aim for accuracy rather than accentuation, producing a proper likeness rather than an ill-dimensioned lampoon.

Fer-fer-f-fetch a cloth Granville! Norman’s take on Arkwright, as played by the late, great Ronnie Barker.

“I generally work from photographs. Because my drawings are very detailed, it can often take up to an hour to get them just right, which is far too long for someone to sit. I don’t pick on a particular feature and enlarge it, like nose or ears. I try to be kind. In fact, I once left a facial mark off a cartoon but the husband who had ordered it said that it was a birthmark that his wife quite liked and that it was a distinguishing feature, so I had to draw it in.

“As well as providing a photograph, I also ask the people to write down a few anecdotes, however silly, about the person I’m drawing so that I can build up a picture of their personality.”

While the faces capture the essence of the subject, the humour comes with the bodies  completely out of proportion to the head, with tiny torsoes, spindly arms and knobbly knees. For all that they look comical and absurd, there’s nothing mean-spirited about them.

“I’m good at bodies,” says Norman with a mischievous smile, as we chat in the comfortable lounge of the home near Market Drayton that he shares with wife Doe.

He recently turned 63 and has been drawing cartoons since he was a boy. “It was a case of copying, as kids do. I drew Andy Capp or Top Cat, something out of the paper, things like that. Then, over a period of years, it builds into your own style.”

Despite his obvious talent with pencil and pad, his early career path took a completely different route  in the music business.

“I’m not musical in any way, don’t know one end of a guitar from another, but I do love music. I had some friends who got a group going in the last few years at school, playing American blues mainly. I managed to arrange a concert or two for them and kind of managed them. In this band, The Levi Set, there was one nugget, the singer and guitarist Jeremy Spencer. He was standout, terrific.”

Influential

Norman got an influential music industry man to see the band, he recognised Jeremy’s talent and introduced him to Peter Green. The result was Spencer joining the original line-up of Fleetwood Mac, playing on hits like ‘Albatross’ and ‘Man of the World’.

Then, in the late 1960s Norman started his own blues club, The Poky Hole, in his home town Lichfield.

“It ran for about two years, based in three different pubs,” he recalls. As the progressive movement gathered pace, Norman introduced more rock and one of the bands which played at his club was Earth, featuring a certain Ozzy Osbourne. Norman became friends with the band and their manager Jim Simpson, travelling the motorways in the back of their van as they toured the country in their new guise as Black Sabbath.

Norman met many stars in the music industry and found most of them approachable and friendly. He was rarely starstruck, though he recalls one occasion when he was rendered speechless.

“I was sitting in at the Morgan Studios when they were recording the soundtrack for either That’ll Be The Day or Stardust, I can’t remember which one. David Essex was the star and he was a lovely chap and Adam Faith was there, who was in Stardust and Ringo Starr was around, who was in That’ll Be The Day. Adam Faith was great, everyone was friendly. Then I was introduced to The Beatle, a legend. Ringo shook my hand and said ‘hello mate’. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, I went as red as a tomato and all I could manage to say was ‘gloop’. It probably happened to him all the time and he was very nice about it but . . . ‘gloop’?!”

When Black Sabbath found fame and fortune, Norman opened an agency in Birmingham, TRAMP (later to become IMA), with his great friend, Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, and Ric Lee, drummer with Woodstock band Ten Years After. When Sabbath became US-based, Norman rejoined Jim Simpson and helped to promote Birmingham International Jazz Festival, working with the likes of Buddy Rich and the Count Basie Orchestra.

Epiphany

When he turned 30 in 1976, though, Norman had something of an epiphany. “I thought I ought to get a proper job,” he says with a chuckle.

He applied for a post as area sales manager with a brewery and, much to his own amazement, was offered it. He worked in the Burton-on-Trent area and made his home in Alrewas, Staffordshire.

Then, in 1980, he met Doe, who was working as a barmaid and is also a hospital nurse. After an initial mutual frostiness, which both laugh about now, they hit it off.

It was a pivotal meeting for Norman in several ways. Not only did the couple live together  eventually marrying in 1994  but Doe believed that Norman should make more of his talent as a cartoonist.

“I thought he was very good and said ‘why don’t you branch out on your own and have a go at making a living out of it?’,” she recalls.

Norman tends to work from photographs rather than real life.

In September 1984, Norman did just that when he and Doe opened a studio at their home, he working on cartoons and Doe on production of illustrated T-shirts.

Their first celebrity customer was Britain’s Olympic skier Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, who has become a firm friend.

“We used to take out a small advert in The Times which obviously worked because we got some high-profile clients,” says Norman. Verbal recommendations also proved fruitful, he says.

Among early celebrity fans was the late Bob Monkhouse, who at the time was a regular game-show host on prime-time television. He provided Doe with her own ‘gloop’ moment.

“The phone went and I was a little busy and answered it in a bit of a rush. He said very smoothly ‘it’s Bob Monkhouse’ and I just said ‘oh’, and my mouth went all dry. I clammed up completely then just hung up,” she says, chuckling heartily (they laugh a lot in the Hood household, by the way).

“Well, the next day he phoned back and apologised for making me feel uncomfortable. What a wonderful thing to do, to find time for that. He was absolutely lovely.”

Norman produced cartoons for Ronald Magill and Frederick Pyne, who were at the height of their fame as Amos Brearly and Matt Skilbeck in the ITV soap Emmerdale Farm (as it was in those days). He also received a delightful letter of thanks from Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson for T-shirts bearing their cartoon images that he had sent them as a wedding present.

Three years ago Norman and Doe returned from a trip to the United States. “I was feeling restless and wanted a change of scenery,” recalls Norman. The couple decided to sell their home in Alrewas  including Norman’s garden studio with most mod cons  and decamp to Wales. They were attracted to Llangollen and Welshpool but while waiting for something they liked to come on the market, lighted on a rented detached cottage in open countryside.

“It was initially to have been for a few months. Three years later here we are,” says Norman laughing.

“It’s lovely here. The neighbours are great,” says 62-year-old Doe.

“We’ve got a smashing local pub at Wistanswick  it’s a very nice little community,” adds Norman.

The couple found out just how nice earlier this year when Norman was rushed to hospital for emergency life-saving surgery.

“Basically I came within half an hour of the end, which is a little alarming,” he says with rather typical understatement.

He was unable to work for three months but customers were wonderfully patient and neighbours fantastically supportive, says Doe.

“The hospital staff were also brilliant,” says Norman, who now donates a percentage from each order he receives to the Princess Royal Hospital, Telford, as a ‘thank-you’.

He is back pretty much on full throttle and says his appetite for work, which often sees him spending long evenings in the studio, has not been diminished by his illness.

The company has been streamlined and split into two, with Norman Hood Cartoons producing cartoons and Cartoonstore Ltd handling merchandise sales. A product that is proving particularly popular is Supersub, where you can be drawn alongside your favourite sports players or as part of a team line-up.

Very few celebrities have taken exception to their cartoon images which have appeared on Norman’s website. In fact you can count them on the fingers of one hand.

“You have to be careful, though. You can’t be pictured with Mickey Mouse, that’s for sure!” he says laughing. “Disney are red hot on that sort of thing and could put us out on the street overnight. It would have to be a mouse that bears a vague resemblance . . .”

• For more information telephone 01630 638828, email admin@cartoonstore.co.uk or visit www.cartoonstore.co.uk or normanhood.co.uk

Commission a Norman Hood ‘Supersub’ cartoon and you can be pictured alongside your sporting heroes, as was this young football fan.