Cartoonist and writer, George Sprod left Adelaide for Sydney as a teenager riding a bike as far as Hay before the heat of an Australian February forced him to sell his bike and continue the journey by train. He joined the AIF in 1940 at the age of 19 and was captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942. He was a prisoner of war for 3 1/2 years. The cartoons he created at that time are now in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and were published in his book Bamboo Round My Shoulder : Changi, the Lighter Side. After discharge in 1945 Sprod worked as a cartoonist on Consolidated Press publications. He left for England in the late 1940s where he contributed cartoons to various newspapers, including regular contributions to Punch, and published a book of cartoons Chips off a Shoulder (Reinhardt, 1956). Sprod returned to Sydney after an absence of 20 years in March 1969, and continued to publish cartoons and prose in The Sydney Morning Herald and in book form including a book of cartoons When I Survey the Wondrous Cross : Sydney's King's Cross, Ancient and Modern (Quincunx, 1989). He lived in the Cross until his death.
Source: A Funnier Side of Life, Even in War by Dan Sprod (The Sydney Morning Herald 10-11 May, 2003 p. 40)
