There are some artists whose work becomes so familiar it feels like it’s always been there, on bookshelves, in childhood memories, and now, on our walls. Norman Thelwell is one of those artists.
In this rare conversation, I sat down with Penny Jones, Norman Thelwell’s daughter, to talk about what it was like growing up with the man behind the wildly beloved pony illustrations and how real life (and real ponies) shaped the humor that still makes people smile decades later. We hope you enjoy this rare and intimate conversation, a glimpse into what it was like growing up as the quiet muse behind a body of work that would become a beloved, global illustration legacy.
How It All Began
One of the first surprises Penny shared is that her father wasn’t a rider at heart. Horses didn’t become “his world” because he loved to ride them, in fact, the opposite.
He had “a very unpleasant experience…being bolted with a pony,” Penny told me. After that, “he only rode when he had to.” But what he did love was watching ponies and watching children refuse to be defeated by them.
When Norman had begun freelancing and the family lived in a village with a field behind their home, Penny remembers how his studio looked directly onto pony life in motion. He became fascinated by the constant comedy happening outside: ponies dodging capture, children persisting anyway.
He was “amazed at the antics of these ponies, how they would try and avoid their owners,” she said, and even more amused by the determination of the little girls trying to catch them. “Whatever the ponies could do, the little girls could outwit them.”
That spirit, pony mischief paired with tiny human resolve, is exactly the Thelwell magic we all recognize.
Punch And The Moment It All Took Off
While Norman had drawn since childhood, Penny describes Punch as the publication that truly changed everything. He’d been developing cartoons for years (including while he was in India, sending work back home), but it was Punch that “turned the corner so that he got really well known.”
In 1952, he submitted a pony drawing and the editors loved it. “They loved it and said, ‘Do it again,’” Penny recalled. And he did…for the rest of his life.
What struck me most is how Penny describes his imagination as almost endless: “He found he could do loads of drawings because it just went on forever.”
Talent, Practice, And A Lifetime Of Watching
As someone who works in design and is surrounded by artistry, I was especially interested in how he created. Penny explained that her father had been sketching from an early age, cycling around the English countryside as a teenager, drawing everything: animals, scenery, ducks, churches.
He believed drawing should be natural, almost obvious, and he always wondered why very few people could do it. To him, it seemed normal to look at something and just reproduce it.
If a pony did something memorable, he would sketch rapidly as it moved. Penny shared he would draw lots of different sketches in different positions. He didn’t necessarily copy a scene exactly, but he could hold the feeling of it and recreate it later: “He knew what he wanted to do and he could do it without having the reference in front of him.”
And yet, he was also meticulous. Penny described Thelwell had drawers full of reference clippings, farm equipment, countryside details. Anything he might need to depict a setting accurately. He’d cut images from papers and magazines and file them so he could “get a feeling for them” and interpret them in his own way.
That balance, instinctive talent and deep craft is part of why his work still feels so alive.
Penny And The Muse Behind The Humor
Of course, we had to talk about Penny’s pony and the story is as charming as you’d hope.
Her pony was a New Forest pony named Tonda. A name that began as a misunderstanding. Penny explained that an Irish groom pronounced Thunder as “Tunder,” and she decided, “Oh, well that’ll do.” Only later did she realize it had been Thunder all along, but “by then Tonda had stuck anyway.”
They fed him and he transformed into a powerhouse. “He just built muscle and energy and he was unstoppable,” she shared.
Penny wasn’t chasing ribbons. She loved the freedom of hacking around Hampshire, meeting friends with ponies, and simply living that pony-girl life. Her father, she said with a laugh, made one boundary clear: “Don’t expect me to drive you all over the country going to gymkhanas.”
And while Penny doesn’t claim she was directly the inspiration for every drawing, her presence absolutely shaped parts of the Thelwell world, especially when her father created a Sunday Express strip called Penelope, using her name because her parents said it matched her personality.
Why The Cartoons Worked
When I asked Penny what made her father’s work feel like lightning in a bottle, her answer was thoughtful and completely aligned with why these illustrations still resonate. She believes he was exceptional at capturing expression in animals without turning them into people. He could “give character and expression to animals” while still keeping them authentically animal-like. Part of the scene, not a caricature of humanity.
And then there were the details, the hidden jokes. Penny described the joy of discovering “extra little bits” inside the drawings. “Something would be going on, but then under the table it’d be a little dog.”
It’s that layered world-building the main joke, plus the tiny secondary stories that makes Thelwell illustrations feel endlessly rewatchable, like your favorite film.
Humor, Discipline, And A “Thinking Day”
Yes, Penny says, her father was genuinely funny in real life. “He had a great sense of humor” and he loved “talking to people and entertaining people.”
But he also treated it like work. Penny compared him to a comedian: funny, but serious about the craft because it was his livelihood.
One of my favorite details: he had a designated day for ideas. “He had to have a thinking day on a Monday,” she told me. A day to gather concepts, especially when Punch would commission big spreads.
And then he would execute them with extraordinary effort. Penny pointed out that while some cartoonists do the minimum, her father “put his heart and soul into every cartoon.” If a scene was set in a shop, “everything in the shop was there.” You could “spend hours just looking at the scene.”
That commitment to richness, to the whole world around the punchline — is what makes his work feel like a complete place you can step into.
Thelwell's Legacy
At the end of our conversation, I asked Penny what would make her father smile most if he could see how his work is still loved today. Her answer was quietly moving.
She described walking through exhibitions anonymously, listening to people react in real time: “People laugh at the cartoons and they adore his art.”
And she shared one moment that felt like the truest measure of legacy. A parent explaining the drawings to the next generation: hearing someone say, “My mother used to have those drawings...We’ve got the books in the loft,” and then watching them share the humor across decades.
Penny believes her father would simply love that his work still gives people joy. “People got an incredible amount of pleasure from his artwork.”
That, to me, is exactly what Thelwell has always done: it reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously and it captures something real about ponies, children, and the stubborn, funny tenderness between them.
