George Adamson was born in New York City on 7 February 1913, the son of George William Adamson, an engineer. He studied art at Wigan Art School and then at Liverpool City Art School, where he specialized in aquatint and drypoint. Adamson contributed Punch covers, starting in 1939 under Fougasse’s editorship, and ending in 1992. Between 1940 and 1946 he served in the RAFVR as a navigator in 210 Coastal Command, flying Catalinas and Liberators, and was for a short while Official War Artist to Coastal Command.
From 1946 to 1953 Adamson was a lecturer in engraving and illustration at Exeter School of Art. He then turned freelance, and has contributed cartoons to the Daily Telegraph’s “Peterborough” column as well as supplying drawings and decorations. Other freelance work has been for Nursing Times, The Countryman, New Scientist, Young Elizabethan, Country Fair, Time & Tide, Illustrated London News, Listener, Daily Sketch, Tatler, Radio Times and Private Eye. A Member of the Chartered Society of Designers since 1954, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in 1987.
Adamson died in 2005.