Item #117190 The Billy Book. Hughes Abroad. Cartoons by Low. [50 New Drawings by Low (cover title)]. David Alexander Cecil LOW.
The Billy Book. Hughes Abroad. Cartoons by Low. [50 New Drawings by Low (cover title)]
The Billy Book. Hughes Abroad. Cartoons by Low. [50 New Drawings by Low (cover title)]
The Billy Book. Hughes Abroad. Cartoons by Low. [50 New Drawings by Low (cover title)]

The Billy Book. Hughes Abroad. Cartoons by Low. [50 New Drawings by Low (cover title)]

Sydney, NSW Bookstall Co. Ltd., 1918.

Quarto, [40] pages with all but two of them illustrated by Low.

Overlapping colour-pictorial wrappers chipped and a little creased; ownership details erased from the front cover and blacked-out on the title page; overall a very good copy.

William Morris Hughes (1862-1952) became prime minister of Australia in October 1915. He travelled to England, arriving there 'on 7 March 1916. His public activity, in which he urged greater economic pressure on Germany and more co-operation with the dominions, was strenuous. Coming at a time of apparent stalemate these speeches ... were electrifying and widely reported. Some even thought Hughes might be the leader the country needed to replace Asquith. That this flamboyant rhetoric should have had such an effect now seems incredible, but at the time Hughes swept his hearers off their feet. More important was the incessant round of interviews with politicians, generals and public servants by which he sought to know at first hand the men responsible for directing the war and to find out how to make Australia's voice heard'. It was in this context that David Low (an expatriate New Zealander who later settled in England and was knighted for his work) produced this 'collection of satirical drawings of the imagined capers of Hughes in London' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography').

Item #117190

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