Ken Sprague (1 January 1927 – 25 July 2004) was an English socialist political cartoonist, journalist and activist, involved in trade union, civil rights and peace movements.
His first work of art, in 1937, in response to the Guernica air raid in the Spanish Civil War, was a linocut made from linoleum torn from the kitchen floor.
He won a scholarship to Bournemouth Municipal College and, from 13 and a half, studied graphics – since in those days students of his background were rarely considered for fine arts courses.
He was also sent to Yugoslavia to bring back an ejector seat from a German plane the partisans had shot down, during which visit he adopted the big handlebar moustache that was to become his trademark for the rest of his life.
The Communist Party, he told his biographer, was his university, but after the Bournemouth Daily Echo had labelled him a college revolutionary, local job prospects dwindled.
During the 1950s and '60s, Sprague also did several set designs for the left-wing Unity Theatre, including productions of George Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart, Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
In the late 1960s Ken began editing the Transport and General Workers' Union's The Record, transforming it into a lively newspaper, and illustrating it with his own cartoons.
He encountered some criticism form comrades, given Hussein's brutal dictatorship (including CIA-supported slaughter of communists), but Sprague maintained he was documenting the horrors of war, the subject which had first brought him to political art.
John Green is also the author of other books on socialist activists, like the Jewish East End anti-fascist Aubrey Morris, the trade union leader Ken Gill and a biography of Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels