Guardian cartoonist and illustrator whose work mixed handcraft with technology
Peter Clarke was a big man in every way, an adventurer who flew RAF Canberras from his teenage years and sailed small boats in dangerous waters in later life, and between times was a prolific illustrator and cartoonist for the Guardian. He treated the illnesses of his later life with contempt and has died aged 77 after a spell of more or less neglected diabetes. On one occasion, after coming round from a general anaesthetic, he threw off an array of medical attachments, exited hospital and stalked off home, calling in at his local on the way.
During his time as a cartoonist he moved from pen and ink, pots of glue, scalpels and art board to putting photocopiers to uses never dreamed of by their inventors and finally conquering Apple Macs – he was the first Guardian staffer to use the then unsophisticated graphic capabilities of a computer system that has for many years now been the central production system for the paper.
Indian ink, though, almost always played some part in his work. I remember once finding him at a hand basin dabbing white ink off his black shirt and trousers. "I wear black," he said wryly, "so that the ink splashes won't show." His inventive artwork became famous enough for a television crew to swarm into the office to film him creating portraits of personalities of the hour with his unique blend of technology and handcraft. Many of these were classics, like his John Major – to accompany Ian Aitken's brilliant profile – on the brink of becoming prime minister in November 1990 in which the long, bovine upper lip is a spiritual blood brother to Major's trademark Y-fronts in Steve Bell's If strip.
None of this was heralded by an early life in which he failed all his O-levels, including art, though he had loved drawing as a youngster. He was born in South Shields to a father who was a radiographer and a mother who was a fulltime housewife. When he was 10 and a proud geordie, the family moved to Surrey and he went to Tiffin school in Kingston, which he hated.
At 16, without mentioning it to his parents, he applied to join the RAF, and at 17 went to Canada to train as a Canberra bomber pilot, where, he later wrote, he enjoyed thinking about his late schoolmates wrestling with gerundives while he pootled about the skies. This was, according to his friend and sailing companion, the former Guardian reporter John Fairhall, the favoured occupation that would never be equalled by anything else in life. It was ended in England after six years when an undercarriage failed to open and Clarke's crash landing brought about his discharge with a back injury.
He migrated to Fleet Street, where an ex-pilot friend on the Daily Express set him up with a clerical job dignified by the title of cartoon editor. Within two years he was political cartoonist on the Daily Sketch, then, after a heady spell at the Daily Mail, where the editor, Mike Randall, hired him as picture editor with a staff of 142, a car and, because he had no licence, a driver, he found himself once more on the street when Randall was purged in time-honoured fashion with all his sidekicks.
In 1968 Clarke dabbled in fine art successfully enough to have a painting hung between canvases by David Hockney and Victor Pasmore. In 1970 he joined the newly founded Gemini News Service for 10 years, working all over Africa, before arriving at the Guardian. It was 1980 and he was, as he put it, a 45-year old Fleet Street tart, so he accepted a two-week holiday replacement slot that stretched to near the end of the century and brought him a 1988 Cartoonist of the Year award, two death threats and a protest from a Helena Kennedy aide about a disgraceful portrait of her boss, followed in the same post by a letter from Kennedy herself asking if she might buy it.
Peter spent his last years in a Norfolk farmhouse with his wife, Maureen, two sons and two daughters, learning to sail and making it once to St Petersburg, once from New Zealand across the Pacific to Vancouver, and generally, with Fairhall, around the waterways of East Anglia. "Not a great yachtsman, but with a great enjoyment of the sea," says Fairhall, to which Maureen adds: "He was hefty enough to be useful hanging on to the end of a rope."
Maureen, the four children and five grandchildren survive him.
• Peter Clarke, cartoonist, born 18 September 1935; died 16 December 2012
• This article was amended on 19 December 2012. The original had given the date of death as 16 November 2012.