Cartoonist Peter Bromhead at an exhibition of his work in 2014. Photo / Richard Robinson
Bromhead led a self-described “unashamedly colourful” life, which might have been one of the few understatements in it.
It could be slightly chaotic at times, both professionally and personally. A renowned charmer and raconteur, he married four times – finding love again in his 80s. His wife, Jereza, was at his side when he died.
He has 10 children – the oldest and youngest children are more than 50 years apart.
Born in Portsmouth, England, in May 1933, Bromhead endured a childhood in which he survived German air raids and an awful parent. He had a terrible relationship with his mother, Hilda, and knew little about his biological father, Charles.
In his 2016 autobiography Scratching a Living, he describes Hilda as “ghastly” and says he struggled to look at pictures of her.
A Bromhead cartoon from April 2020. Illustration / Peter Bromhead
When he was 2, his mother allegedly pushed him out of the upstairs exit of a double-decker bus in Portsmouth, “while undergoing one of her frequent fits of uncontrollable rage”, Bromhead wrote in the book.
He ended up on the road, and in hospital with serious head injuries. Bromhead always insisted his mother opened the exit door and pushed him; she told authorities that her own son had done it and fallen.
Bromhead also wrote about visiting Hilda on her deathbed in Tauranga.
“When I entered her room, she just glared at me and muttered bitterly, ‘Charlie [Bromhead’s father] always said he’d come back to haunt me. For Christ’s sake get out of my sight, I never want to see you again!’ She died later that same night.”
Bromhead – who immigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s with his mother, stepfather and first wife – once described cartooning as like “taking your brain on an exercycle”.
He was a renowned quick-draw, often providing pocket cartoons – single-column illustrations to lighten the load of a heavy story – within an hour of an editor’s request.
He continued to draw until late in life.
A Peter Bromhead ‘pocket’ cartoon from November 2020.
His political cartoons for the Star were especially memorable, particularly those of Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon.
They were not flattering caricatures. Muldoon supposedly hated them. Other politicians felt the same about Bromhead’s drawings of them.
“[Muldoon] told me he hated my cartoons – but actually had a portrait in his home office,” Bromhead said in a recently published Star-Times interview.
Despite regular run-ins with Muldoon, Bromhead told the Star-Times he was amusing company.
“I don’t look back at him as a sinister person … I almost look back to him with fondness.
“Everything today (especially with the Government) is controlled by PR and a team of ex-journalists who are in the strange world of soft-creaming everything. Today Muldoon seems a bit more real than our present PM, Chris Luxon, who doesn’t seem to be emotionally involved.”
One of Peter Bromhead’s many thousands of cartoons. Photo / Supplied
His cartoons transcended publishing-company boundaries and rivalries; he worked for most of the big New Zealand newspaper firms (in their various guises) at some stage.
He estimated he’d worked for about 40 different editors over his career. Each one, he said, had displayed a different attitude towards cartoons.
“Some believed that cartoons should be retained only as necessary evils, shrunk down so they didn’t occupy too much space; while other, more enlightened editors have seen the value and impact of graphic work on a page,” Bromhead wrote in his book.
He was sometimes asked what made a great cartoon. “My cynical response is invariably ‘one the editor accepts’.”
Cartoonist and author Peter Bromhead died in Rotorua last week, aged 93. Photo / Stephen Parker
Bromhead often joked wryly that his 11 national media awards matched his 11 redundancies.
“I was on my way to Wellington to receive the print media award recognising my outstanding services to the industry when I got this text from the Sunday Star-Times saying my services were terminated,” Bromhead said in a 2016 interview with Rotorua Daily Post journalist Jill Nicholas.
“It was such bad timing on their part; I was able to tell the Fairfax directors [the Star-Times’ then owners] up there on stage how I’d just received their redundancy.”
Peter Bromhead took aim at political parties from across the spectrum.
Bromhead’s talents extended beyond his cartooning tools – he was also an interior designer, furniture importer, artist, writer and columnist. He loved cars and tennis.
He was appointed a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to cartooning in 1999.
He was also awarded a Prince Hendrikse Medal for industrial design in Denmark.
Much of his wealth came through his eponymous firm Bromhead Design. But that was liquidated in 2016, with reported debts at the time of more than $270,000.
“It used to be a multimillion-dollar business. It’s a very disappointing result,” Bromhead told Stuff at the time.
He retired full-time to Rotorua for the latter period of his life.
He once quipped, 10 years ago: “I owe my 83 years to a steady diet of pies, chips and bad food”.
A Peter Bromhead cartoon from the Herald on Sunday in September 2009.
He reportedly met Jereza, a registered nurse and his fourth wife, on Tinder, when he was in his 80s.
“We have had several very happy years together – it’s just very unfortunate I’m on the exit road,” he told the Star-Times.
In his book, Bromhead wrote about his own expectations of a send-off.
“I was asked recently, at a funeral service for a colleague, what sort of service I would like to celebrate my own demise,” he wrote.
“I explained that my loved ones were under strict instructions to wheel me up the church aisle in a recycling wheelie-bin, on the basis that I came into this world in the foetal position and I might as well go out of it in the same way.
“I also suggested that, at an appropriately solemn moment of the service, my mobile should go off in the wheelie-bin and my recorded voice should state, ‘I’m sorry I can’t talk to you at the moment, I’m in a meeting’.”
He added a final word that he hoped few people would attend his funeral “as this would mean I’d managed to outlive my friends, acquaintances and workmates. What more could I ask for?”.
A Peter Bromhead Herald on Sunday cartoon from October 2010.
In a Facebook post in May, he wrote: “I am now in hospice care, which I guess means it’s time to prepare myself to kick the bucket, so this might be my last cartoon after 50 years of inky drawings. I borrowed part of Mr Steinberg’s [The New Yorker’s Saul Steinberg] drawing for this, a cartoonist I admire greatly.
“I am most impressed with the care and attention I’m receiving from medical services in New Zealand, volunteers and professionals all doing their best to cope with the ghastly scourge of cancer. We should all feel very proud of what Kiwis give back freely! Cheers everybody!”
Peter Bromhead posted this cartoon on Facebook in May, saying it might be his last.
Bromhead was still active on Facebook until a few weeks ago, but then his words, birthday wishes for others, and drawing tools went silent.
Bromhead died on Tuesday last week, August 25, in Rotorua.
In their statement – provided to the Herald by Bromhead’s son Tim – Bromhead’s family said he would be greatly missed by his family and friends.
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including managing editor, NZ Herald editor and Herald on Sunday editor and has a small shareholding in NZME. He hired Peter Bromhead as cartoonist for the Herald on Sunday.