Frank Brown [Eccles]

About

Frank Brown was born on 8 May 1926 in Forest Gate, London. He was the son of Sidney Brown, a toolmaker, and was educated at the Beal Modern School, Ilford, Essex. He began cartooning during the Second World War while serving as a cartographer with the Royal Engineers in Ceylon, drawing for SEAC Radio Times in 1945, and for the Indian Listener. After the war Brown studied architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic from 1947, and on qualifying in 1953 joined the LCC Housing Department.

When Brown’s twin brother Sidney was demobbed in 1948, they worked together as cartoonists, submitting drawings to a number of rank-and-file journals such as The Metalworker and The Portworker. In 1952 Brown began working part-time on the Daily Worker and two years later began contributing pocket cartoons. As his twin brother recalled, “he would go into the paper in the evening and worked alongside Gabriel”: “I helped out with the Factory Friday jokes.”

In 1956 Brown took over from Gabriel as the Daily Worker staff cartoonist, signing himself “Eccles.” His brother remembered that “when Gabriel left, there was no money in the kitty for a full-time cartoonist – the job didn’t exist”: “Frank and I journeyed into the paper two evenings a week and on Sunday afternoons. We just got on with the job – filling the hole left by Gabriel.”

On 1 January 1959 Frank Brown became a full-time cartoonist on the Daily Worker -renamed the Morning Star in 1966. He worked with pen and brush. With his brother he also continued to submit cartoons to a number of papers (including the Daily Mirror), and trade union journals (such as TGWU Record and ASTMS Journal), using the pen name “Hilton”. Frank Brown died in London on 18 September 1986.

Holdings

11 boxes, 1 loose folder (uncatalogued)

References used in biography

• CSCC Archive.
• Mark Bryant Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000), p.40.
• Sid Brown “Putting the picture straight”, Morning Star, 23 November 2002, p.10.

Active Period

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Cartoon style