Unsolicited Food Parcel

This cartoon by John Verney was the cover design for the February 1955 issue of the ‘Young Elizabethan’, a monthly magazine for children. It purports to show a delivery of mail and supplies arriving at an unspecified location in Africa. The representation of both the local people and their environment draws heavily on racial stereotypes. The supplies include a box labelled “Unsolicited Food Parcel”, which contains two white children.

The image was supposed to be humorous, satirising British foreign aid policy in a post-colonial era. It is based upon an older tradition of cannibal imagery. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British writers and artists associated African people with cannibalism in order to make them appear dangerous, providing a pretext for imperial conquest and missionary work. Later nineteenth-century depictions took on a more comical and less threatening aspect, framing African people, who were now colonial subjects, as curiosities and objects of derision. Verney’s cartoon updates this Victorian trope with references to 1950s popular culture. The supply ship in the background is named ‘African Queen’, a reference to the 1951 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. The sign for ‘Kardomah’ refers to what was at the time a well-known chain of British coffee shops. The figure beside the cooking pot is a caricature of British television chef Philip Harben. Finally, a seated figure holds a copy of the ‘Young Elizabethan’ magazine.

Artist and writer Sir John Verney, Bt. (1913–1993) provided over 100 cover designs for the ‘The Young Elizabethan’. His covers, including this one, were usually standalone images, designed to tell their own story rather than illustrating one inside the magazine. He worked in the film industry and served in the Territorial Army, the SAS and the Royal Armoured Corps during the Second World War before becoming a full-time artist and illustrator.

‘The Young Elizabethan’ serialised novels and published short stories, book reviews, poems, puzzles and drawings for an intended audience of grammar school students. It was founded as ‘Collins’ Magazine for Boys and Girls’ in 1948. It was renamed ‘Collins’ Young Elizabethan’ in April 1953, ‘The Young Elizabethan’ in January 1955 and ‘The Elizabethan’ in 1958, before it ceased publication in 1973. The magazine ran a Young Elizabethan Club for readers, Vice-Presidents of this club included celebrities such as Sir John Hunt (leader of the ascent of Everest in 1953), Squadron-Leader Neville Duke (a famous test pilot) and Pat Smythe (an Olympic showjumper).

The two children in this cartoon echo Verney’s depictions of Young Elizabethan readers in his other cover designs. The magazine’s readers were thus invited to identify with these figures and to regard the African people as foreign or Other. The fact that this satire of colonialism and foreign policy appeared in a magazine aimed at children tells us something about widespread public attitudes to racial difference in mid-twentieth-century Britain.