HARRY HARGREAVES was well known as a cartoonist, especially in the inexhaustible genre of gags about animals. He created The Bird for Punch and a Hayseeds strip for the London Evening News, both of which were widely syndicated. But he also put his talent for illustration and design to a variety of other uses, not all of them necessarily identifiable by bearing his signature. He illustrated books, drew advertisements and greetings cards, designed toys and worked as an animator in films and television.

Hargreaves was born in Manchester, the elder son of a civil servant. He was educated at Chorlton High School, and sang as a chorister in Manchester Cathedral. He contributed cartoons to the school magazine, and a cartoon was accepted by the Manchester Evening News when he was 14.

After leaving school two years later, he worked for an interior design company and enrolled part-time at the Manchester School of Art. He then trained as an engineer at Rolls-Royce, working on Kestrel and Merlin engines. The measure of his success in getting cartoons published is that by the age of 17 he was producing regular strips for The Beano and The Dandy.

The Second World War took a large chunk out of his young life. He volunteered for the RAFVR Signals and after a year in Britain he spent the rest of the war in Persia, Ceylon and India. He contributed to Blighty and to RAF magazines. From 1946 he worked as a cartoon animator for J. Arthur Rank’s Gaumont British Animation business.

A further measure of his success is that after the animation studio closed in 1950, Hargreaves, still only 28, was able to work from then on as a freelance. He drew strips for several Amalgamated Press comics (such as Knockout and Comet). He developed his work in advertising, for many familiar brands, and in toy design for Mettoy. While working as a cartoonist for the Toonder Film Studios in Amsterdam in 1953, he created Little Panda, which was so popular that it was syndicated in 150 newspapers across Europe and kept going until 1961.

A different measure of success again was that by the late 1950s Hargreaves became a fixture in Punch, where his cartoons appeared weekly for 17 years. His work was also within reach all over the newsstand, in general magazines such as Illustrated, Lilliput, Men Only and Life; in more specialised titles such as Tatler and Countryman; and in newspapers such as the Daily Sketch, The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mirror, in addition to many publications overseas. He was the first cartoonist employed by The Cricketer, and published three collections of cricket cartoons.

The Bird was created for Punch in 1958. Drawn vigorously in pen and ink, the creature had the chirpiness of a sparrow, but with ruffled feathers — which must have helped the artist to convey a characteristic flurry of movement, and emotions such as surprise. Like many cartoon animals, the bird had several human features, for many of the jokes, displayed across several frames, echoed human predicaments (especially, perhaps, those of children). The bird could frown, smile, put out its tongue, and use its wings as arms. Hargreaves applied a similar technique to the Hayseeds strip, which featured a range of animal characters and ran from 1968 almost until the Evening News amalgamated with the Evening Standard in 1980. Both series were captionless and were well suited to syndication. Six anthologies of The Bird were published, and two of Hayseeds.

His success with animal characters led to Hargreaves developing for ITV an animated fox, called Gogo, who appeared in a pop music programme between 1961 and 1965. People of the right age may also remember fondly the collectable sets of aliens (“crater critters”), which Hargreaves designed for distribution in their millions in Kellogg’s cereal packets in the 1960s. From 1969 to 1980 Hargreaves illustrated Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear stories for the BBC TV Blue Peter annuals, and in 1983 he produced distinguished illustrations for an edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. He worked work well into retirement, though he suffered ill health from his late sixties.

In 1948 Hargreaves married Wendy (known as Penny) Vickery, whom he met when they both worked at Gaumont British Animation. She and their two daughters survive him.

Harry Hargreaves, cartoonist, was born on February 9, 1922. He died on November 12, 2004, aged 82.