EXTRACTS: Illustrators Issue 6 © 2013 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

81 a foreword by James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, was made into a television series. Laurence Fish began sketching anything and everything from an early age. As a teenager, a chance meeting in the Alvis car showrooms in London’sMayfair, led the budding artist to design some of the most elegant and sought after designs for bespoke coachwork car bodies for Carlton Carriage Company, and its sister firm the Mayfair Carriage Company. Three cars for which he had designed the bodies were on show at the 1938 Motor Show at Olympia—the last before WWII signalled the end of the bespoke luxury car market. Luckily there came a chance for Fish to join Max Millar’s studio at the publishers Iliffe & Sons. Max Millar who had headed Iliffe’s Art Department since 1920, producing the artwork for their magazines, Flight, Autocar and Yachting World , was renowned as a master of technical cutaway drawings. When people asked, as they always do of artists, which art college he went to, Fish replied that he was self-taught—yet the nine months he spent working under Max Millar undoubtedly helped to give him the meticulous draughtsmanship, which was to prove so valuable in the next phase of his life, and always lay beneath the freedom of brushwork in his later fine art paintings. Aircraft, yachts and, of course, cars became his particular métier. At the onset of WWII, Laurence Fish, who had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve with the intention of becoming a pilot, was devastated when his short sight prevented him from fulfilling his greatest ambition. In the end it was his pencil that was to prove so valuable during the war. His drawing skills soon became much in demand. Aircraft factories and engineering works were mainly staffed by laypeople not used to working from blueprints, and they needed his artistry to interpret them. Included among his papers are letters from Vickers-Armstrong Supermarine works asking him to make them two very important isometric drawings, and another from the War Office Experimental Station 6, trying to get him transferred to their station. He also worked regularly for the Ministry of Aircraft Production. However, his most interesting and exciting wartime