Before the great Carl Giles was employed to entertain and delight readers with his cartoons in the Daily Express, his predecessor at the paper had been just as prodigious in the years preceding him. Sidney Strube first joined the Express in 1912 and would remain one of its superstars for more than 35 years. He became so popular that, in 1931, he would become the highest paid journalist in Fleet Street on a salary of £10,000 a year. When the First World War broke out, Strube’s cartoons highlighted the alleged atrocities to women and children by the invading German army in Belgium. German barbarism was symbolised by the figure of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Strube produced a morale-boosting cartoon calendar for the following year, which focused on the misfortunes of the Kaiser, who was depicted as an arrogant, militaristic but inept autocrat.
The calendar was entitled The Kaisers Kalendar for 1915 or the Dizzy Dream of Demented Willie. Although it proved popular with the Daily Express readership, there was one drawback, the paper felt it necessary to print a pertinent warning on the back of the calendar: “The Daily Express warns purchasers not to send these calendars to troops at the Front as the Germans have been known to kill prisoners on whom they have found caricatures of the Kaiser.”
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