In the beginning there was a car. And young Mr. Dickens, moved to write a cartoon strip about it, hit on the idea of giving it a driver. An inexpert, clumsy driver with no time to look after it properly. Thus was born a strip about car maintenance.

Except, of course, that the driver was much more interesting than the car. Here is strip no 1, published in the Evening Standard in 1962. (sorry about the quality but old newspaper does not keep very well). Already the car is in the background. We meet Bristow and Fudge and their entire relationship is encapsulated in a single frame.

In The Big Big Big Bristow Book, published in 2001 by Little, Brown, Dickens tells the story of how he began to write about Bristow. He has also redrawn the strip but I prefer the original. After all, the theme of so many strips is Bristow glorying in being late, in being a regular signer of the late book in reception, of travelling into town with the insouciant idlers known as the late-late crowd. He has learned much in his eight and two thirds years with Chester-Perry.

As to why a buying clerk, Dickens drew on his rather limited experience of office life. To him, only a post-boy was lower. Even in late 1950s London there were brutally large, dominating office blocks where faceless men and women toiled in the mysterious depths. The Chester-Perry company, drunken salesmen, gabby tea-ladies, ranting managers, oppressed clerks, dreaming typists and plotting post-boys emerged smoothly, fully-formed, the perfect receptacle in which to dump the laziest office worker ever depicted.

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