Joseph Morewood Staniforth was born at Gloucester on 16 May 1863 to a saw repairer/cutler and his wife. Staniforth grew up in Cardiff, and left school at 15 to become a printer’s apprentice with the Western Mail.2 His emerging talent as an illustrator led to his transfer to the paper’s editorial team and his employment as an occasional and then a regular cartoonist, both for the Western Mail and its sister paper the Evening Express and, from 1893 onwards, for the News of the World (NOTW). Although occasionally interrupted by illness (he suffered from tuberculosis and heart problems), Staniforth’s work appeared very regularly for both the Cardiff daily and the British Sunday until his death on 17 December 1921. Many cartoons were also republished in stand-alone volumes — examples include The General Election, 1895 (1895), Cartoons of the Welsh Coal Strike (1898), Cartoons of the Boer War (two volumes, 1900, 1902) and Cartoons of the War (seven volumes, 1914–15) — and other work appeared in the form of picture postcards and illustrations for magazines, pamphlets and books.