Kilroy
was here

©

Ah, Kilroy. The little cartoon bald head, peering over a fence that hid everything except his eyes and his long U-shaped nose... and sometimes his fingers, gripping the top of the fence. And his proclamation, "Kilroy was here."

Kilroy was a mysterious World War II soldier, probably American, who traveled all over the world scrawling the immortal phrase "Kilroy was here" wherever a flat surface presented itself. Often, the phrase was accompanied by a simple drawing of a big-nosed man peering over a wall. Clearly, the graffiti were scrawled by thousands of different soldiers, not a single one named Kilroy. But did Kilroy actually exist? And if so, did he start the fad?

The New York Times, on 24 December 1946, credited James J. Kilroy of Quincy, Massachusetts, with starting the craze. Kilroy was an inspector at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in that city, and used a yellow crayon to write "Kilroy was here" on items that he had inspected. The graffiti became a common sight around the shipyard, and was imitated by many of the other 14,000 shipyard workers when they were drafted and sent around the world.

Bryson cites the above account and also mentions another possible origin. There was a Sergeant Francis Kilroy of the US Army Air Transport Command who scrawled the immortal phrase on boxes that were to be shipped abroad. Again, the phrase was picked up by other GIs and spread to everywhere from Murmansk to Espiritu Santo.

The cartoon usually associated with Kilroy has quite a different origin. It is originally British, named Mr. Chad, and apparently predates the Kilroy phrase by a few years. It commonly appeared with the phrase "Wot, no ...?" underneath, with the blank filled in with whatever happened to be in short supply at the time (example: "Wot, no cigarettes?"). Sometime during the war, Chad and Kilroy met and in the spirit of Allied unity merged, with the British drawing appearing over the American phrase. The OED2 lists Chad's origin as "obscure," but it may have been created by George Edward Chatterton, a cartoonist in civilian life who spent the war years in the Royal Air Force.