If you are a motoring enthusiast and of a certain age, it is likely you will have a favourite Brockbank cartoon. Except, how do you decide between the hundreds of his wonderfully simple yet astute sketches that so easily provoke open laughter?
Among the diverse assortment that have amused my curiosity and delighted my sense of humour are a few so sublime they still elicit a broad grin more than 50 years after first sighting. There’s ‘Citron Pressé’, with a vintage supercharged Bentley looming large behind a Traction Avant Citroën as both drift through a corner at the limit, bodies and tyres at all angles.
Brockbank’s cars always seem to be leaning dramatically, few more so than these two. You can almost hear the engines above the tyre squeal, the gasp of the beret-wearing Citroën driver over the roar of the extravagantly moustachioed Bentley helmsman. Among Brockbank’s most popular cartoons, it invoked much correspondence, ending, the story goes, with a challenge issued by a Bentley driver to meet the offending Citroëniste at dawn at the Hogs Back (a hilly ridge in Surrey) with their respective cars.
