WFT drawn by Tom Downey
William Fletcher Thomas, was born at 4 St John's Place, Broughton, Salford, Lancashire in 1863, son of James Thomas, a cotton yarn agent, and his wife Louisa née Kershaw, who married at Wakefield in 1859.
By 1881, his father James, now a machinery agent, had moved to 69 Shrewsbury Road, Stretford when young William is described as 'apprentice'. William married at Altrincham, Cheshire in 1887, Emily Parkinson and in 1891, an 'artist', living at 'Primrose', Brunswick Road, Sutton, Surrey where their son Gilbert had been born the previous year.
A landscape painter who exhibited a view of Walberswick at the Royal Academy in 1901 from Lydstep House, 3 South End, Southwold, Suffolk. In 1911, 'an artist in black & white', living at 124 Edenbridge Road, Bush Hill Park, Edmonton, London with his wife and 20 year old son Gilbert Eric Thomas, an unemployed electrical engineer.
His gift for caricature was deployed from 1888 on weekly drawings relating the inept antics of 'Ally Sloper', the world's first comic strip character, when launched in 'Judy Magazine'. The character was 'killed off' in 1916, but not before the Army Service Corps had been nicknamed 'Ally Sloper's Cavalry'.
He died at Edmonton in 1938, aged 76.
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