COINED a new word myself once. Back in 1961. Europower, I said snappily in a headline about electricity being imported by undersea line from France. Never caught on though.

Annibale Caracci, one of the Italian old masters of the 17th century, had better luck. If caricatura had not tripped off his tongue, people would be taking a deep breath and saying: "You know, a thingagummy ... one of those things that has made the past month of electioneering halfway bearable ... those kind of comically distorted drawings or likenesses. You know, they kind of satirise or ridicule someone or something, sort of like ..."

The trail from the Caracci dynasty of artists (Annibale's jealousy of his brother, Agostino, after they together did the frescoes at the Farnese palace, drove the latter from Rome) winds past such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Max Beerbohm and through Teesside before ending up in a Wensleydale village where 76-year-old artist Phil May today wields a profitable brush amid a collection of the life's work of his famous father.

Fred May was a caricaturist of world renown. The Encylopaedia Britannica, after explaining that Caracci invented the genre as well the word, lists great artists who were exponents and then singles out Fred May as an example of a particular style.

Old Annibale's word-coining inspiration was caricare, Italian for "to load". Well, yes, a caricature can be loaded against its victim, though Fred May's were far gentler than, for instance, Gerald Scarfe.

Another definition is "to surcharge" and that fits too, in the sense that the drawings - "swift pen scribbles" in May's case, says the Britannica - add to a subject's prominent features.

Fred was born on Merseyside in 1890, two years after the first staff cartoonist was appointed to a newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, by W T Stead who had made his reputation in Darlington as editor of The Northern Echo. By 1912, however, the cartoonist was firmly established on the Middlesbrough evening paper and a household name in this region. Past Times used his cariacture of the iron master J J Burton recently in the piece about the owner of the iron-ore mine whose subsidence altered the shape of Roseberry Topping.

As a Green Howards officer during the First World War - wounded at Arras - he would sketch soldiers relaxing during pauses in the shelling on the Western Front. It was one of these drawings from the trenches that in 1917 attracted the attention of The Tatler and led to his nearly 60 years' association with the London weekly. Phil May, at his home and studio in West Witton, near Leyburn, keeps bound volumes of the society magazine featuring his father's work.

In those days Tatler was strong on sport. Fred's round was Wimbledon, Henley, the Cup Final, Test matches, the Boat Race, the Schneider air trophy, motor racing at Brooklands ... Phil remembers going with his father to the latter two events as a schoolboy and his own specialities as an artist today include action pictures of the classic racing cars, the Bugattis and the Lagondas, and famous old aircraft.

But it is on his acute observation of people that Fred's reputation mainly rests. Locally, there were series of Teesside personalities, members of the Cleveland Hunt, Yorkshire cricketers, Middlesbrough's great football teams of the 20s and 30s. When he made the big time, nationally, among those who were flattered by his attentions, even when he domed an already shiny pate or added to their numerous chins, were Sir Malcolm Campbell, Churchill, Chamberlain, the Aga Khan, the Duke of Windsor, Amy Johnson and Hollywood stars like James Cagney.

Winston autographed his likeness, the only caricature of himself he so honoured. So, too, eventually did Archbishop of York, Dr W Temple, who had played hard to get when an editor repeatedly asked if he would sit for May. Fred was in a train at King's Cross one day when Temple took the seat opposite, and from behind his newspaper the artist discreetly sketched and a colour version appeared in The Graphic.

He was a freelance, and other publications Phil remembers his father despatching his work to by train include the weekly Sketch and the News-Chronicle.

Magazines worldwide, especially in Empire countries, were pleased to have his sketches of great happenings in London. When in 1923 the Japanese government commissioned for a permanent exhibition of international art, Fred was the choice as a representative of British caricaturists.

By this time he was living in Reading, the better to access his main market in London. But he always maintained his links with Teesside and North Yorkshire, and sketched prolifically on frequent visits here. One particular friend was Bill Kelly, stockbroker and Middlesbrough FC chairman during the club's great inter-war years, who lived at Teddy's Nook, the Saltburn clifftop villa whose Edward VII connection Past Lives has featured. Phil is still in touch with Bill Kelly jnr, whose home is near Great Ayton.

In the Second World War, he was Major May, again of the Green Howards. He held a staff post at 21 Army group GHQ and was also a liaison officer with RAF Fighter Command. It was demanding work at the action board, but there were lighter moments and his pencil was always quick to record them. One of the less-urgent calls one night was a complaint that "my best milker is caught up in your wire". The resulting cartoon showed a fat farmer squeezed into a phone box in the middle of a field and, above it, a cow suspended from a barrage balloon.

His awards included the MBE, the Territorial Decoration and, among several from France, the Chevalier Legion d'Honneur. His medals are held by the Green Howards museum at Richmond. The Reginald Hunt collection, held by the city of York, has some of his best work; more is at the RAF museum, Hendon and at the Liverpool artists' club. Nearer home, some prints are at the Blue Lion pub, East Witton, near Leyburn.

Only weeks before his death at 85 in 1976, his last Tatler assignment was to record the International Air Tattoo. A president of the Royal Academy, Sir David Murray, said: "There was brilliant art behind every line of his caricatures. It was said, too, that he knew half the world - and the other half knew him." As his son proudly puts it: "His work is a social history of England."

l In The Times on Saturdays, the cartoonist Peter Brookes has a Nature Notes space which he fills in the best tradition of Annibale Caracci who 500 years ago invented the device of transforming an animal, insect or vegetable into a familiar face. Brookes adds a zoological or botanical name in mock-Latin. In the week of Crufts and John Prescott's election punch, he had the deputy PM as a boxer dog, "aggressive, bite worse than bark".

The 18th-century English caricaturists, notably George Townshend, were the first to indulge in political caricature, but when lithographic printing was invented at the end of the century, the French, especially, went for this form of satire in a big way. From the 1830s, two publications, the weekly La Caricature and daily La Charivari (where Punch, founded in 1841 but tame and well-mannered by comparison, got the name of its weekly feature) became immensely popular