Kilroy was who?

Last summer Annie and I took our grandson, Richard, along with his mom, Amanda, and dad, our son, Bobby, to visit the war museum beside the veterans’ cemetery outside Bloomfield, MO.  Bobby is not only currently serving in the army, but is a history buff so, when I took a short break in the men’s room, I saw some graffiti that I had to tell him about.

“Go in there and stand in the stall, then look to your right.”

He did and came back out of the room with a smile on his face.  He said, “Somehow it’s comforting to know that Kilroy was here before us.”

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My dad served in the army in World War II and shared stories with me about seeing the big-nosed character drawn on walls, trucks, tanks, and just about anything else that could be written on.  The drawing was usually accompanied with the words, “Kilroy was here!” To millions of Americans so many miles from home, it was a symbol of courage, pride, encouragement, and was a strong morale booster. 

Dad told me that Kilroy was everywhere in those years, more common in the war zone but not at all rare back in the United States.

But who was Kilroy and how did he get here, er, there?

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It’s entirely probable that lots of people know some of the facts of the story, it is almost certain that no one person knows the whole, absolutely true story for sure.

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In the late 1930s Great Britain was experiencing shortages of many necessities and comfort items.  In 1938, British cartoonist George Edward Chatterton drew a character almost identical to the one we call “Kilroy”.  The text accompanying “Chat” (later Chad) was one form or another of “Wot, no …?” with the dots (actually a circumflex) replaced by “sugar” or “cigarettes” or whatever was in short supply at the time.

Some say Chatterton got the idea for the design of his cartoon from the omega (Ω) symbol and there is an undeniable resemblance there.  Others say he got his idea from Alice the Goon, a bulbous-nosed character introduced in the Popeye cartoons in 1933.  Yep, there’s a similarity there too.  But the one illustrated below, an electrical circuit including polarity, resistance, and a sine wave, bears an uncanny resemblance to the graffito we all now recognize as the famous Kilroy.

So it seems we’ve established that Chad predates Kilroy but, if that’s so, where did the latter originate and how did the two combine?

Well it seems that we’re not the first to ask that question.  In 1946 the American Transit Association (ATA) wondered the same thing and held a radio contest to establish the origin of the phrase.  They offered a prize to the winner so it’s no surprise that dozens of people claimed to be the real-life Kilroy and produced evidence to back their claim.  One such person was James J. Kilroy, who worked at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts during the war inspecting the work done by others on the tanks and hulls of warships.

As Kilroy explained to the ATA, “I started my new job with enthusiasm, carefully surveying every inner bottom and tank before issuing a contract.  I was thoroughly upset to find that practically every test leader (the head of a work crew) I met wanted me to go down and look over his job with him, and, when I explained to him that I had already checked the job and could not spare the time to crawl through one of those tanks again, he would accuse me of not having looked the job over.

“I was getting sick of being accused of not looking the jobs over and one day as I came through the manhole of a tank I had just surveyed, I angrily marked with yellow crayon on the tank top, where the tester could see it, ‘Kilroy was here’.

“The following day, a test gang leader approached me with a grin on his face and said, ‘I see you looked my job over.’ I nodded in agreement.”

Kilroy provided the ATA with corroborating statements from men he had worked with at the shipyard, and said that he assumed that shipyard workers who had seen his mark, then joined the military, took the phrase with them and began writing it in Europe.

He won the contest and the grand prize, a full-size trolley street car. Just a few days before Christmas the 12-ton car was delivered to Kilroy’s home in Halifax, MA, where it was attached to the house and used as living space for six of his nine children.

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Anyway, it seems that other countries had their own version of Kilroy with different names and even different slogans, but it appears that, sometime during the war, the drawing of Mr. Chad combined with Mr. Kilroy’s simple phrase, and exploded in popularity among American troops to become arguably the most famous graffito in the history of the world.

I guess Kilroy went viral before viral even existed.

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