GEORGE ADAMSON was a prolific artist and a distinguished etcher and engraver. Although he exhibited at the Royal Academy, he far more readily lent himself to often colourful illustrations of children’s books or satirical cartoons. He worked commercially, designing stationery and greetings cards and illustrating more than 100 books.

George Worsley Adamson was born in New York, where his Glaswegian father was a railway engineer. His mother died when he was 7 and, with his two sisters, he moved to Lancashire. His father returned to the US and died soon after, leaving his children to be brought up by their mother’s family.

Adamson had hoped to be an architiect, but after studying at the Mining and Technical College in Wigan, he went on to Wigan School of Art in 1930 on a course which included a year at Liverpool University. Before the outbreak of the war he had set himself up as an art teacher with a secondary teachers’ art certificate from Oxford, where he was awarded a distinction in figure composition and the history of painting. Returning to Liverpool, he specialised in engraving and studied under Geoffrey Wedgwood.

During the war he served in the RAF and in 1943 was an official war artist — some of his works are in the collections of the Imperial War Museum and the RAF Museum. In 1946 he settled in Exeter where he spent the rest of his life. There he began by teaching etching and graphic design at the College of Art, but soon his career as a freelance artist took centre stage.

He was commissioned by publications as diverse as Tatler and the New Scientist. He illustrated Auberon Waugh’s diary columns in Private Eye and the first five volumes of the magazine’s Dear Bill books (1980-84), and illustrated some 200 case studies for the Nursing Times. His cartoons appeared in almost all national newspapers and major periodicals in the UK.

His work is also associated with many well-known books: Ted Hughes’s first collection of poetry for children, Meet My Folks! (1961), was submitted to Adamson for illustration. Sylvia Plath’s verdict on his efforts was that they were “very fine and witty”. He followed in the path of Heath Robinson, illustrating new editions of Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm books in the mid-1960s and also illustrated The Faber Book of Nursery Verse(1958) and Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). In 1981 he was awarded the Punch book illustration prize won a commission to illustrate the Folio Society’s Short Stories of P. G. Wodehouse.

In his first book, A Finding Alphabet (1965), he provided the text as well as the illustrations. His books gave free rein to an imagination which sometimes bordered on the surreal. They were primarily for children: A Finding Alphabet, for example, reproduced oil paintings of groups of objects, sometimes fantastic, beginning with the same letters, while Widdecombe Fair (1966) was an exciting visual exploration of the old Devonshire folk song.

In 1987, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers for his achievements.

George Adamson, illustrator and humorist, was born on February 7, 1913. He died on March 5, 2005, aged 92.