A to Z of artists Payne, Charlie Johnson (Snaffles) 1884 - 1967

Charles Johnson Payne was born into a family of eight children at Leamington Spa, Warwickshire on 17 January 1884. His father ran a small bootmaking business in the town, later moving to Banbury, Oxfordshire to be the licensee of The Plough Inn. Little is known of Charlie Payne’s early life but at the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, he unsuccessfully tried to enlist in the army when aged fifteen. He became a gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery in about 1902, remaining with them for four years before leaving due to a disability. The active life he experienced in the army probably provided the spark which fired his interest in horses, soldiers and people, and gave him the confidence to draw professionally. While living (and hunting) at Aldershot, Snaffles contributed over thirty of his drawings to The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News between 1910 and 1914. He was a trooper with the Leicestershire Yeomanry for a short time after moving to Oakham in Rutland in 1912. Soon after the outbreak of the First World War he was employed as an illustrator by The Graphic to cover the fighting in northern France. Looking for a more active part, he served as a mechanic in the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service before being commissioned Lieutenant in the Department of Naval Engineering’s ‘Dazzle’ Section in 1917. Throughout the war, Snaffles’s paintings of hunting at home, soldiers in France and, immediately post-war, of naval incidents were being reproduced as prints. Marrying in 1915, his wife Lucy brought a discipline to his activities and work with the 1920s and 1930s becoming Snaffles’s most prolific and successful period as a painter and illustrator. In the mid-1930s The Field judged him "one of the finest horse artists of today". He visited Ireland, France, Germany, Holland and, in 1927 and 1928, India. This last experience led to an exhibition of his Indian pictures at the Sporting Gallery, London in 1929. His illustrated volume My Sketch Book in the Shiny was published the following year. He visited India again in 1935, returning via Aden and Somaliland, leading to further books and his first illustrations in Punch. A second successful exhibition of his eastern pictures was held in 1936. In 1939, then living in Surrey, Snaffles helped with the camouflage of vulnerable targets in preparation for the coming war. Moving to Wiltshire in the same year, he briefly joined the Home Guard but ill-health was again the reason for his having to leave; he took up farm work. The early years of the Second World War saw the publication of a few war-related prints and, between 1949 and 1953, Snaffles wrote three autobiographical books, the last titled: I’ve heard the Revelly. Afflicted in his last years with failing eyesight, he died at Tisbury, Wiltshire on 30 December 1967. The British Sporting Art Trust held an exhibition of his work in London in 1981, combined with the publication of a catalogue raisonné of his prints.