Archive of newspaper artist Malky McCormick saved

It was an appearance on the Parkinson show in 1975 that is widely seen as starting Billy Connolly on the path from Scottish sensation to international comedy superstar.

During his appearance he explained, “in Scotland they call me Big Yin, and I’m not very big, but everyone up there is awful wee, you know”.

For his iconic nickname he could thank Scottish cartoonist and fellow banjo player Malky McCormick.

Malky performed with his band The Vindscreen Vipers in the same Scottish folk clubs as Connolly, and together they created The Big Yin cartoon strip for Scotland’s Sunday Mail newspaper – taking the name from a famous Connolly routine at the time which reimagined the Last Supper as taking place in Glasgow.

Original artwork for the strip, which ran until 1977, is part of a huge personal archive which has just been given to East Ayrshire Leisure Trust.

“Malky settled in Ayrshire and adopted Kilmarnock as his home,” says Lyndsay Jess, the trust’s museums development officer.

“He was a very creative individual, and we want to celebrate that and introduce our community and especially our young people to the comic art of Malky McCormick.”

Born in Glasgow in 1943, Donald Malcolm McCormick grew up in the shadow of Hampden Park. His love of football and cartooning began at an early age and continued all his life.

He was just six years old when his grandmother sent one of his cartoons to a newspaper, and 13 when the first one was published in the Glasgow Mercury and Advertiser.

He trained as a commercial artist and worked for DC Thomson, the Dundee publisher of comics like the Dandy and the Beano where he was required to “ghost” established cartoon strips, mimicking the style of the original artists.

He worked for a number of newspapers north of the border but it was his time at the Scottish Daily News, a short-lived workers’ co-operative which planted the seed for his most famous cartoon strip The Big Yin.

“I had known Billy for a few years through the folk clubs and we promised each other we would do this strip together,” he told BBC Radio Scotland in 1981.

The collaboration sparked interest from other newspapers including the Glasgow-based Sunday Mail.

“It was a colour tabloid with a much bigger audience so a much better vehicle for the Big Yin strip,” he recalled.

“It was the big break for me, no question about it.”

The first strip was published in 1975 and Malky and Billy began to map out a future for their creations.

They’d meet on a Monday, either at Billy’s home in Drymen or Malky’s home in Ayrshire, as Billy Connolly recalled.

“It was a strange affair to explain to people, doing a strip cartoon in two different towns,” he says.

“He used to turn up at my house on his motorbike. He would be flabbergasted that I hadn’t done anything. I was supposed to be writing the Big Yin.

“I never sat in when it was being drawn. I loved being part of it, but he did his bit and I did my bit – him in Ayrshire and me in Drymen.

“He would turn up on his motorbike fed-up and I would say ‘come on we’ll go for a pint’, so we would go for a pint and talk about stuff, roaring and laughing and I would say ‘that’s this week – yeah, we’ll do that’.”

The sessions more than often ended up in a pub, as Malky remembered.

“There was a drawing in Dick’s bar in Kilmarnock of us, one of the many places we were thrown out of celebrating the success of the strip.

But I mostly did it myself. He saw it occasionally and would chip in an idea but he was away so much.”

Connolly’s career eventually took him hundreds of miles away from Malky and their Monday sessions. The Big Yin’s run ended in 1977 and Malky moved onto other characters and projects.

He made caricatures of every Scottish football manager from the 1970s onwards, which are all on display at the Scottish Football Museum.

He helped set up a cartoon festival in Ayr.

He also spent three years at Scottish Television as a graphic artist and designer and later returned to the TV studios as the resident artist on the ITV show Win Lose or Draw.

Since his death in 2019, his family have been considering what to do with his substantial archive.

“It was something which kept me and my brothers up at night,” says his daughter Jane McCormick.

“The media of newspaper is not there anymore and it would have been a shame for it to drift away and him and his legacy not to be remembered.”

Archivists Ruby Davidson and Jestein Gibson have already started work on the Malky McCormick Project at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock.

“My dad had pictures and postcards on his wall so I knew who Malky McCormick was,” says Ruby.

“And everyone knows Billy Connolly, so it was lovely to see all those Big Yin cartoons.”

Malky acknowledged the influence of other Scottish cartoonists – including Bud Neil and Ewan Bain – but it seems he too encouraged a new generation.

“We’ve spoken to a lot of people in our local area who were inspired by his work and went on to become comic book artists themselves,” says Ruby.

And the plan now is to use Malky’s work to encourage even more young people to take up their pencils.

Jane says she’s delighted that a public engagement project is planned around the archive.

“He loved young people to be drawing,” she says.

“He judged art competitions in schools and took any opportunity to get young people into art.”

Fragile newspaper strips and early drawings will be digitised as part of the project and the public can view the process at the Dick Institute as well as the final exhibition.

“My dad loved his work to be seen, more than anything, so I’m over the moon to know that other people are going to be able to value it and appreciate it,” says Jane.

His old friend and collaborator Billy Connolly is also delighted.

Speaking to the archive from his home in Florida he said: “We were always getting in trouble and we did (the Big Yin) to get away with stuff – we could blame this non-existent person, who looked like me and behaved like me, but wisnae me… we could say wild, wild things… we broke a lot of ground.

“We pushed art. People don’t look at cartoons as art. But it is art – and it’s very important.”