Oleh Roland Fiddy
Penerbit Elex Media Komputindo 1995
About Roland Fiddy
"MEET PERCIVAL and Cedric, two lovable gentlemen of the road - you'll laugh with them, maybe sometimes shed a tear."
Thus the Sunday Express editor introduced a new weekly strip cartoon entitled "Tramps". The date was 29 May 1977 and the weekly strip was destined to run until 1985. But in fact the strip was already older than that: it had started off in the Daily Express on 6 September 1976 was already nine months old when it gave birth to its Sunday addition. This was something of a record in British comic strips, a run embracing every day of the seven-day week. Such was its swift rise in popularity, and although the series' byline went to its writer, Iain Reid, it was to the cartoon drawings of the man who scribbled a signature of sorts that the greater credit must go.
This was "Fiddy", a name which to me suggested a typical cartoonist's pen-name, and it was not until lately, when another Fiddy, name of Dick, emerged as a writer on the television of yesterday, that I realised that it was indeed a proper surname.
Roland Fiddy was born in Plymouth in 1931. His schooling was quality: first the Devonport High School, then four years at the Plymouth College of Art, and finally two years at the West of England College of Art in Bristol. This last stretch of study came after three years of National Service in the RAF from 1949 to 1951. He worked as an art teacher in Bristol for two years before turning full-time freelance cartoonist.
Fiddy's first cartoon sale was to the monthly pocket magazine Lilliput in July 1949. This, a best-seller of its day, combined bright articles, full-page cartoons and the occasional pin-up nude, a winning formula for a shilling (five pence). Fiddy next went further up-market to the weekly humorous magazine Punch, selling the first of many cartoon contributions to its editor, Malcolm Muggeridge, in 1952. Newspapers welcomed joke cartoons then, and soon Fiddy was contributing to the Daily Mail, the News Chronicle and the Daily Mirror.
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