In 1996, a panel of black and white illustrations designed by the cartoonist Donald Rooum (1926-2019) was installed in the entryway to Angel Alley. Rooum designed the panel to include black and white portraits of thirty-six radicals, described as ‘more or less classifiable as anarchist’ by the Survey of London, featuring Peter Kropotkin, Noam Chomsky and Emma Goldman.
This Anarchist Portrait project was organised between Freedom Press and Whitechapel Gallery in association with Free Form Arts Trust, the project artist was Anya Patel.
Donald Rooum (1928-2019) was an anarchist cartoonist and political writer, well-known for his Wildcat cartoons.
Rooum was born in Bradford and studied commercial design (1949-1953) at Bradford Art School. After leaving Bradford Art School, Donald was employed between 1954-1966 as a layout artist and typographer in a number of London advertising agencies. From 1966 onward he worked as a typographic design lecturer at the London College of Printing, retiring in 1983 to concentrate on his freelance political cartoon work, which had started many years earlier.
Donald had shown a keen interest in politics from his early teens, following the lead from his father, who was active in the Labour Party. Donald had been conscripted into the military service toward the end of World War Two, but appealed against this on the grounds of Conscientious Objection. He was subsequently given a political rating as a ‘subversive’, spared from service overseas, and spent most of his military life working in the kitchen of an Army camp. Despite his reluctant military service, he did receive financial help from the Army on his discharge toward the cost of his studies at Bradford School of Art (see above).
From 1949 onward, Donald began to become more publicly prominent in the anarchist movement, participating in summer schools and speaking in public in Bradford and at Speaker’s Corner, London. He was also a founding member of the Malatesta anarchist social club in London and began what was to be a long association with Freedom Press Publications, becoming a writer, and later editor, for Freedom, the anarchist newspaper.
Read an interview with Rooum for Spitalfields Life here.
