Ralph Steadman

Steadman lives with his wife in Kent, England, where he has his own vineyard in his garden.

Ralph Steadman was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, in a lower-middle class background to Lionel Raphael Steadman, who was a commercial traveler selling women’s clothing. His mother was a shop assistant.

Steadman attended the Abergele Grammar School but by the time he turned 16, he left the school as he could not take the excessive authority enforced on him by his headmaster. He joined De Havilland, an aircraft company.

In a matter of few months, Steadman started getting tired of the factory life so he joined Woolworth’s as a trainee manager. In 1954, McConnell’s Advertising Agency in Colwyn Bay hired him.

From 1954-56, Steadman spent time in National Service in RAF in Britain and alongside continued to take Percy V. Bradshaw’s correspondence course in cartooning as by now his interest in illustration had grown. His parents paid for the course.

He started drawing from 1955 and sent his work to ‘Punch’ every week but his first cartoon was published in the Manchester Evening Chronicle in the following year. The cartoon was related to ‘Nasser and the Suez crisis’.

In 1959, Steadman joined the Kemsley Newspaper Group and worked there as a cartoonist. He contributed editorial cartoons there and a weekly panel about a fictitious teenage girl character named ‘Teeny’. 8During the same time he also studied art part-time from Leslie Richardson at East Ham Technical College. He used to start work at Kemsley at 10 o’clock and finish by 3 in the afternoon and then attended his college.

After getting sacked from Kemsley, Steadman started freelancing, contributed his cartoons to Punch, the Daily Sketch and the Daily Telegraph.

Steadman submitted a drawing to Private Eye entitled ‘Plastic People’, for which the head of the publication, sent him �5 and a note saying "More power to your elbow." It was published with a double page spread in the issue.

Steadman’s work with the American journalist Hunter S. Thompson is considered to be his most popular work: ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72’, ‘Kentucky Derby’ for Scanlan and ‘Honolulu Marathon’ for Running.