My Gawd! My Wages - History and Analysis
Overview
My Gawd! My Wages is a British communist political cartoon dating to approximately 1937, originally associated with the pamphlet Communist Plan for Life in Hackney, published by the Hackney Communist Party and printed by Marston Printing Co. (T.U.) in London. The illustration depicts a working-class man desperately pursuing an enormous sea lion wearing a top hat and bearing the word "LANDLORD" across its body. His exclamation, "My Gawd! My Wages," expresses outrage at the loss of his earnings, while the exaggerated size of the animal emphasizes the economic power wielded by property owners over ordinary workers. The artist remains unidentified, and the original printing technique, dimensions, and print run have not been established. Its stark black-and-white composition, bold typography, and simplified caricature reflect the practical visual language of inexpensive political publications intended for mass circulation among working-class audiences.
Details
| Title | My Gawd! My Wages |
| Artist | Unknown |
| Artwork Type | Political cartoon, advertising parody |
| Artwork Medium | Unconfirmed; likely pen-and-ink or similar process |
| Original Publication | Communist Plan for Life In Hackney |
| Date | Likely 1937 |
| Place of Origin | Hackney, London, England (United Kingdom) |
| Issuing Organization | Hackney Communist Party |
| Printer | Marston Printing Co. (T.U.) |
The Pamphlet: Communist Plan for Life in Hackney
The pamphlet's surviving publication information identifies its publisher as the Hackney Communist Party, 280a Richmond Road, Hackney, E.8, and its printer as Marston Printing Co. (T.U.), Nelson Place, Cayton Street, London, E.C.1. The designation T.U. indicates a trade-union printing affiliation.
The pamphlet was a local political program, not simply a collection of cartoons, and was sold for one penny. It attempted to explain Hackney's economic difficulties through the framework of class politics while offering practical proposals for improving residents' living conditions.
Among its subjects were overcrowded housing, landlord exploitation, factory safety, low wages, unemployment, public health, childcare, transport, education, fascism, and the threat of another European war.
Its introduction, headed Who Owns Hackney?, specifically identifies wealthy families and institutions that controlled substantial local landholdings. These included the Tyssen family, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, St. Thomas' Hospital Estate, and the Spurstowe Trust. This lends particular significance to the cartoon's portrayal of the landlord as an oversized, privileged creature. The artwork was criticizing an identifiable economic relationship in the community, not merely an abstract stereotype.
These are documented details of the parent publication, not independent evidence that the cartoon was issued as a separate poster or leaflet. A post published by The Radical History of Hackney has been an invaluable resource for learning more about the historical context of this political cartoon, and I highly recommend reading it for yourself if you're interested in learning more.
Relationship to Guinness Advertising
An important piece of historical context for understanding this political cartoon comes from Guinness, of all places. The political cartoon's text, and the decision to use a sea lion to represent a landlord, is because My Gawd! My Wages is a parody of John Gilroy's My Goodness, My Guinness advertisement from 1935. Compare the clear resemblance in the typography, the pursuing man, and the oversized sea lion.
Historical Context
Rent Control
Rent control was a live political controversy, one especially important historical detail is that rent restrictions were scheduled to expire in 1938. The pamphlet warned that tenants might face further rent increases and urged the formation of a local Tenants' Defense League, as well as political pressure to preserve and expand the existing protections. On 28 January 1937, the British House of Commons debated the approaching expiration of rent restrictions, including the relationship between working people's wages and high housing costs. In November 1937, the government confirmed that the relevant legislation was scheduled to expire on 24 June 1938.
British Communism in the Late 1930's
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) underwent an important strategic shift during the middle of the 1930s. Following the Communist International's Seventh Congress in 1935, communist organizations increasingly advocated alliances between communists, socialists, trade unionists, and other opponents of fascism. These arrangements were commonly described as the Popular Front. In Britain, this meant that communist political material often emphasized practical reforms and cooperation with the Labour movement rather than immediately demanding revolutionary transformation. The strategy was controversial, and the Labour Party leadership generally resisted formal political cooperation with the CPGB.
Communist Plan for Life in Hackney illustrates this approach particularly clearly.
The pamphlet offered qualified praise for Hackney's Labour council, pressed it to undertake more ambitious reforms, and appealed for unity throughout the local labour movement. Its proposals included a forty-hour working week, paid holidays, better unemployment assistance, municipal nurseries, affordable housing, and improved factory conditions. It was explicitly communist in authorship, but much of its practical program overlapped with contemporary social-democratic reform. This matters when interpreting My Gawd! My Wages: the drawing uses confrontational class satire to advance a predominantly reformist municipal program.
Fascism and the Battle of Cable Street
The pamphlet also belongs to the politically charged period immediately after the Battle of Cable Street.
On 4 October 1936, anti-fascist demonstrators, including communists, trade unionists, Jewish residents, and other Londoners, blocked a planned march by Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists through East London's Jewish neighborhoods.
The event became an important symbol of British anti-fascist resistance. However, the historical evidence is more complicated than the popular story of an immediate and decisive defeat for the movement: Britain's National Archives notes that fascist recruitment in parts of East London increased immediately afterward.
The Hackney pamphlet condemned fascist violence, called for stronger opposition to fascist organizing, and advocated unity among working-class political organizations. It also addressed the Spanish Civil War, the growing threat of international conflict, and the British National Government's military spending. This reflects a broader political atmosphere in which everyday concerns about rents, wages, and living conditions were increasingly presented as inseparable from struggles over democracy, war, and fascism.
Economic Emphasis
Britain was still experiencing the uneven consequences of the Great Depression. While parts of the economy recovered during the middle of the 1930s, unemployment, regional economic inequality, precarious industrial work, and poor housing remained serious problems. The pamphlet described harsh conditions in Hackney's tailoring industry, factory speed-ups, insecure subcontracted employment, and inadequate protection for young workers. It also criticized food-price increases and argued that workers required higher wages merely to maintain their existing standard of living.
Against that background, the cartoon communicates a particularly bitter joke: even when a worker succeeds in earning wages, much of that income may immediately disappear into the landlord's hands.
Artistic Style, Symbolism, and Political Function
The cartoon belongs to the broad tradition of popular British political satire, and is a perfect example of many of the characteristic staples of British socialist agitation artwork of the era. Perhaps the most interesting element is the conversion of an advertisement joke about a stolen luxury (from My Goodness! My Guinness) into a political agitator that would be bitterly relatable to the intended audience. The recognizable advertising formula would have helped contemporary viewers understand the parody without explanation, similarly to how internet memes are often repurposed for political agitation today.
This is an example of advertising détournement, in the broad descriptive sense of redirecting familiar commercial imagery toward a political message. The term itself became associated with the Situationist movement considerably later, so it should not be used to suggest that the cartoonist was a Situationist or consciously followed that movement. More accurately, the drawing is an early example of appropriated advertising imagery used for political satire. The strategy also had a practical advantage. A visually familiar advertisement could attract attention more rapidly than a dense political argument, making it well suited to a low-cost campaigning pamphlet.
Its simplified figures, exaggerated proportions, heavy black silhouettes, and immediately legible lettering prioritize accessibility and rhetorical force over naturalistic representation. The landlord's top hat invokes an established visual convention associating wealth and property ownership with social privilege, while the diminutive worker's frantic pursuit dramatizes the unequal relationship between labor and capital. Particularly significant is the cartoon's transformation of a familiar commercial image into an instrument of political criticism, demonstrating how the visual culture of consumer capitalism could be repurposed to challenge the economic relationships that sustained it. As both an artifact of local Communist Party campaigning and an example of interwar advertising parody, the illustration offers valuable insight into the political culture of 1930s Britain, when questions of wages, housing, class inequality, and collective action occupied a central position in working-class public life.
Sources, References, and Further Reading
The Radical History of Hackney, “Communist Plan for Life in Hackney (1930s),” published 8 January 2017. Local-history introduction, cover, pamphlet transcription, contemporary statistics and policy demands, issuer/printer imprint, probable publication date, and related pamphlet references.
https://hackneyhistory.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/communist-plan-for-life-in-hackney-1930s/
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, collection record: John Gilroy, My Goodness, My Guinness (1935), color lithograph; object number 80.059.001. Documents a surviving version of the commercial antecedent and its medium/dimensions.
https://emuseum.cornell.edu/objects/14159/my-goodness-my-guinness
Guinness Storehouse / Guinness Archive, “Why It’s a Lovely Day for a Guinness: The Story Behind the Guinness Toucan.” Official history of Gilroy's zoo-animal advertising and the inaugural May 1935 sea-lion image.
https://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/whats-hoppening/history-of-guinness-toucan
UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons, “Rent Restrictions Acts,” 28 January 1937. Parliamentary exchange documenting contemporary concern over the approaching expiry of restrictions and the burden of rents on wages.
The National Archives (United Kingdom), “The Battle of Cable Street.” Interpretive archival history of the October 1936 anti-fascist confrontation and its consequences.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/the-battle-of-cable-street/
Oxford University Research Archive, The Labour Party and the Popular Front Movement in Britain in the 1930s. Scholarly background on interwar Communist/Labour relations and the British Popular Front strategy. Institutional item page.
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3Ab529abb8-09b0-4b81-9828-62388b9f7a4a
Guinness Storehouse / Guinness Archive, “Gilroy Advertising.” Official gallery covering John Gilroy's career and the animal advertisements, including the sea-lion/zookeeper pairing.
https://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/discover/guinness-galleries/gilroy-advertising
UK Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons, “Schedule,” 8 November 1937. Parliamentary statement that the Rent Restrictions Act was due to expire on 24 June 1938 and discussion of impending legislation.
Amiel and Melburn Trust Archive, archive portal (previously linked from the Hackney historian's discussion of comparable borough Communist Party pamphlets). Research lead for publications and the claim about a possible 28-borough pamphlet series; the historic direct subpage now redirects to the archive homepage.
The Radical History of Hackney, “Hackney Needs Socialism (1978).” Later related local Communist Party publication cited by the Hackney history article as a comparison across decades.
https://hackneyhistory.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/hackney-needs-socialism-1978/