The American popular culture expression "Kilroy was here" gained immense popularity during World War II and is typically seen in graffiti. The phrase is often accompanied by a cartoon doodle of a bald-headed man with a prominent nose peering over a wall.
This simple drawing and phrase became a national joke in the United States, with the mischievous face appearing in unusual places, even the top of the Statue of Liberty.
The phrase may have originated through United States servicemen, who would draw the doodle and the text "Kilroy was here" on the walls and other places where they were stationed, encamped, or visited. During WWII, United States servicemen began scrawling the Kilroy text and picture on walls and other surfaces wherever they were stationed, encamped or just passing through. The comical cartoon, which came to be known as simply Kilroy, appeared on every surface imaginable, including ship holds, rail cars, bridges and more throughout Japan, Italy, France and the Philippines.
Despite the fact that the use of graffiti and the defacing of public property was discouraged, Kilroy became one of the war’s most widespread inside jokes. When they encountered a Kilroy, it imbued a sense of pride, knowing that there was no place in Europe that the Allied forces couldn’t reach. For enemy forces, Kilroy stood for something far more ominous. The axis-nations were notably confused and disturbed by the frequency of the graffiti throughout Europe.
The Kilroy image and phrase have also been fittingly etched into the stone at the WWII Memorial in Washington DC. To honor this iconic symbol in American history, Gettysburg Flag Works has created the “Kilroy was here” flag. Made in the USA for indoor or outdoor use, the flag is digitally printed on durable all-weather nylon with four rows reinforced stitching.
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The Origins of "Kilroy Was Here"
The exact origins of the Kilroy phrase are highly debated, and several men by the name of Kilroy have claimed they were the inspiration.
More than 40 candidates claimed to have originated the phrase and cartoon in response to a 1946 contest conducted by the American Transit Association to establish the origin of the phenomenon.
One of the more popular theories involves James J. Kilroy (1902-1962), an American shipyard inspector at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. James Kilroy had served on the Boston City Council and represented the Roxbury district in the Massachusetts Legislature during the 1930s. He worked at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy during the war checking the work of riveters paid by how many rivets they installed.
He used chalk to mark the rivets and plates he inspected. The New York Times indicated J.J. During World War II he worked at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he claimed to have used the phrase to mark rivets he had checked. The builders, whose rivets J.J. Kilroy was counting, were paid depending on the number of rivets they put in. A riveter would make a chalk mark at the end of his or her shift to show where they had left off and the next riveter had started. Unscrupulous riveters discovered that, if they started work before the inspector arrived, they could receive extra pay by erasing the previous worker's chalk mark and chalking a mark farther back on the same seam, giving themselves credit for some of the previous riveter's work.
Usually, inspectors made a small chalk mark which riveters used to erase, so that they would be paid double for their work. J.J. Kilroy stopped this practice by writing "Kilroy was here" at the site of each chalk mark. At the time, ships were being sent out before they had been painted, so when sealed areas were opened for maintenance, soldiers found an unexplained name scrawled. Thousands of servicemen may have potentially seen his slogan on the outgoing ships and Kilroy's apparent omnipresence and inscrutability sparked a legend.
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James Kilroy was credited after his claim was verified by shipyard officials and the riveters whose work he inspected. He won the contest and the grand prize, a full-size trolley street car.
Another theory involves Sgt. Francis J. Kilroy Jr. The Lowell Sun reported in November 1945 that Sgt. Francis J. Kilroy Jr. from Everett, Massachusetts, wrote "Kilroy will be here next week" on a barracks bulletin board at a Boca Raton, Florida, airbase while ill with flu, and the phrase was picked up by other airmen and quickly spread abroad.
The Associated Press similarly reported at the same time that according to Sgt. Kilroy, when he was hospitalized early in World War II a friend of his, Sgt. James Maloney, wrote the phrase on a bulletin board. Maloney continued to write the shortened phrase when he was shipped out a month later, and other airmen soon picked up the phrase.
Mr. Chad: The British Counterpart
Meanwhile, the cartoon of the bald-headed man peering over the wall is believed to have originated with British forces during World War I. The long-nosed character was referred to as Mr. The "Kilroy" illustration began as the English cartoon Mr. Chad, who often found himself attached to "WOT! No____?" lines (e.g., "WOT! No Petrol?"); it was a humorous way of bringing attention to serious shortages and rationing during World War II.
In Britain, the graffito is known as "Mr Chad" or just "Chad". The figure was initially known in the United Kingdom as "Mr Chad" and would appear with the slogan "Wot, no sugar" or a similar phrase bemoaning shortages and rationing.
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He often appeared with a single curling hair that resembled a question mark and with crosses in his eyes. The phrase "Wot, no __?" pre-dates "Chad" and was widely used separately from the doodle. Chad was used by the RAF and civilians; he was known in the army as Private Snoops, and in the navy he was called The Watcher.
The drawing was created by British cartoonist and erstwhile drawing instructor Jack Greenall in the mid 1920s, early in his career when he was employed at a technical drawing school, as an exercise for his students in drawing simple forms. The figure first saw print when Greenall included the image in a Useless Eustace cartoon published in London’s Daily Mirror on 11 December 1937.
Chad might have first been drawn by British cartoonist George Edward Chatterton in 1938. A theory suggested by a spokesman for the Royal Air Force Museum London in 1977 was that Chad was probably an adaptation of the Greek letter Omega, used as the symbol for electrical resistance; his creator was probably an electrician in a ground crew.
Life suggested that Chad originated with REME, and noted that a symbol for alternating current, a sine wave through a straight line, resembles Chad, that the plus and minus signs in his eyes represent polarity, and that his fingers are symbols of electrical resistors. The character is usually drawn in Australia with pluses and minuses as eyes and the nose and eyes resemble a distorted sine wave.
Similarly, The Guardian noted in 2000 that several readers had told them that "Mr. Chad" was based on a diagram representing an electrical circuit. One correspondent said that in 1941 at RAF Yatesbury a man named Dickie Lyle drew a version of the diagram as a face when the instructor had left the room, and wrote "Wot, no leave?" beneath it. This idea was repeated in a submission to the BBC in 2005 that included a story of a 1941 radar lecturer in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire drawing the circuit diagram, and the words "WOT! No electrons?"
It is unclear how Chad gained widespread popularity or became conflated with Kilroy. It was, however, widely in use by the late part of the war and in the immediate post-war years, with slogans ranging from the simple "What, no bread?" or "Wot, no char?" to the plaintive; one sighting, on the side of a British 1st Airborne Division glider in Operation Market Garden, had the complaint "Wot, no engines?" The Los Angeles Times reported in 1946 that Chad was "the No. 1 doodle", noting his appearance on a wall in the Houses of Parliament after the 1945 Labour election victory, with "Wot, no Tories?"
Etymologist Dave Wilton says, "Some time during the war, Chad and Kilroy met, and in the spirit of Allied unity merged, with the British drawing appearing over the American phrase." Trains in Austria in 1946 featured Mr. As rationing became less common, so did the joke; while the cartoon is occasionally sighted today as "Kilroy was here", "Chad" and his complaints have long fallen from popular use, although they continue to be seen occasionally on walls and in references in popular culture.
Other Names and Variations
"Smoe" redirects here. Writing about the Kilroy phenomenon in 1946, The Milwaukee Journal describes the doodle as the European counter-part to "Kilroy was here", under the name Smoe. It also says that Smoe was called Clem in the African theater. It noted that next to "Kilroy was here" was often added "And so was Smoe". While Kilroy enjoyed a resurgence of interest after the war due to radio shows and comic writers, the name Smoe had already disappeared by the end of 1946.
A B-24 airman writing in 1998 also noted the distinction between the character of Smoe and Kilroy (who he says was never pictured), and suggested that Smoe stood for "Sad men of Europe". Correspondents to Life magazine in 1962 also insisted that Clem, Mr. Chad or Luke the Spook was the name of the figure, and that Kilroy was unpictured.
Similar drawings appear in many countries. Herbie (Canada), Overby (Los Angeles, late 1960s), Flywheel, Private Snoops, The Jeep, and Clem (Canada) are alternative names. An advert in Billboard in November 1946 for plastic 'Kilroys' also used the names Clem, Heffinger, Luke the Spook , Smoe and Stinkie. "Luke the Spook", the nose-art on a B-29 bomber of the same name, resembles the doodle and is said to have been created at the Boeing factory in Seattle.
In the Australian variant, the character peeping over the wall is not named Kilroy but Foo, as in "Foo was here". In the United Kingdom, such graffiti is known as "Chad" or "Mr Chad". In Chile, the graphic is known as a "sapo" (slang for nosy); this might refer to the character's peeping, an activity associated with frogs because of their protruding eyes. In Poland, Kilroy is replaced with "Józef Tkaczuk", an elementary school janitor (as an urban legend says), "Robert Motherwell" or "M. Pulina". Graffiti writings have the form of sentences like "Gdzie jest Józef Tkaczuk?" ("Where is Joseph Tkatchuk?") and "Tu byłem - Józef Tkaczuk" ("I was here - Joseph Thatchuk").
Cultural Impact
Peter Viereck wrote a poem, published in 1948, about the ubiquitous Kilroy, writing that "God is like Kilroy. Kilroy is seen scrawling "Kilroy is here" on a wall in Tennessee Williams's 1953 play Camino Real, which he revises to "was" before his final departure. Kilroy functions in the play as "a folk character ... who here is a sort of Everyman." The graffiti appears on the cover of the first edition published by New Directions.
Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel V.
024 Kilroy Was Here: Is This The Grandfather of All Memes?
In 1983, rock band Styx released their seventh studio album, Kilroy Was Here. The album functions as a light rock opera. It tells the story of Robert Kilroy, a rock and roll performer who was placed in a futuristic prison for "rock and roll misfits" by the anti-rock-and-roll group the Majority for Musical Morality (MMM) and its founder Dr. Everett Righteous. When Jonathan Chance (played by guitarist Tommy Shaw) finally meets Kilroy at the very end of the song Mr. Roboto, Kilroy unmasks and yells, "I'm Kilroy!
Kilroy's omnipresence made him prominent in public consciousness during the 1940s, to the point where he is immortalized on the World War II Monument in Washington, D.C., purposely chiseled into the stone by the monuments creators. You could even purchase little clips of him to peek over your shirt pockets.
Variations of Kilroy Around the World
| Country | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Chad or Mr Chad | Appears with slogans like "Wot, no sugar?" |
| Australia | Foo | Phrase used is "Foo was here" |
| Chile | Sapo | Slang for nosy, referring to the character peeping |
| Poland | Józef Tkaczuk | Replaced with an elementary school janitor |
| Canada | Herbie, Clem | Alternative names |
| Los Angeles (late 1960s) | Overby | Alternative name |
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