Hugh Bredin, copywriter who was also a gifted illustrator and cartoonist – obituary

Hugh Bredin, who has died aged 89, was a croquet player, jazz fan, author, illustrator, pen-and-ink cartoonist, contributor to Punch and Private Eye – and, for more than 30 years, a senior copywriter at some of Britain’s largest advertising agencies, including the American-owned J Walter Thompson.

In 1980 he published The Jeeves Cocktail Book: A Guide to Mixed Drinking. By then his art had already been used to launch the popular new “international intrigue” board game Diplomacy which still flourishes today; the design of the game somehow echoed Bredin’s own flamboyance – especially the loud kipper ties made for him by the celebrated Mayfair boutique owner Mr Fish.

George Richard Hugh Bredin was born on March 3 1935 on the Wirral Peninsula across the Mersey from Liverpool, a descendant of a Huguenot family who had moved from Bordeaux to Ireland in the 17th century and included Picasso’s long-standing lawyer Jean-Denis Bredin.

His maternal grandfather, Thomas Ellison, had been president of the Liverpool Cotton Exchange. Hugh’s father George would soon serve as governor of the Blue Nile province in Sudan.

Hugh’s early childhood was spent in the hands of his forthright mother, Dorothy Wall Ellison, who enjoyed golf, bridge and horse racing and once played tennis in Monaco with Charlie Chaplin.

Hugh began his formal education at Mostyn House, Cheshire. Unusually, his nanny, Miss Mowle, went with him to the prep school – she was given the role of under-matron – and was soon called “Nanny” by the entire school.

In 1948 he moved to Winchester College, where he would make lifelong friends including the future theatre director Anthony Page, and Julian Mitchell, writer of the hit Winchester-inspired play, Another Country.

Mitchell recalled Bredin’s semi-detached nature and an “air of mystery” as a schoolboy. He is also remembered by fellow pupils for his love of jazz – he was often caned for playing records at the wrong time – and for his early works of art. When he was 13 he sold a drawing of a school cricket match for a substantial sum.

Despite failing his maths exams several times, Bredin was eventually able, in 1955, to take a place at Oriel College, Oxford, to read English. He studied Trollope and Dickens and made friends of Willie Donaldson, author of the Henry Root Letters, and Jilly Cooper.

On an early visit to London, he also went gambling with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

In the early 1960s Bredin was wrenched away from 19th-century literature and began working as an advertising copywriter at J Walter Thompson, then occupying a grand building in Berkeley Square, where his colleagues would include Fay Maschler and Fay Weldon and where he worked on promoting Lucozade and After Eight mints.

As a married man, his career as an artist and illustrator greatly expanded. He still played croquet and golf, but also had successful exhibitions in galleries in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. In more recent times he lived in Wandsworth, sold a house in Parsons Green to Lord Egremont, and spent his final years in Chiswick.

Bredin had married Gabrielle Drew, a student at the Oxford Theatre School. That did not last, and in 1967 he married Nina, daughter of Professor David Talbot Rice and Tamara Talbot Rice the art historian and friend of Evelyn Waugh. Nina died in 2004 and he is survived by two daughters and three sons.

Hugh Bredin, born March 3 1935, died March 10 2024