Who was Kilroy? Possibly a shipyard inspector fighting rivet fraud
A bald man with a big nose peers over a wall beside three words: Kilroy was here. GIs scrawled it across the Second World War, and legend says Stalin found it in a Potsdam bathroom. One strong candidate for its origin is a Massachusetts inspector who wrote it in crayon so riveters couldn't cheat.
The Oxford English Dictionary calls Kilroy a mythical person, and nobody has settled the origin. Many accounts date the phrase to 1939, with unverified sightings from 1937. What made it famous was placement: servicemen joked that whatever beach they stormed, Kilroy's name was already chalked there. Robert Capa saw a variant, KILROY WAS STUCK HERE, on a burnt barn at Bastogne in December 1944, and one story claims Hitler suspected Kilroy was an Allied spy's codename.
In 1946 the American Transit Association ran a contest to find the source, and more than 40 people came forward. The winner was James J. Kilroy, a former Boston city councillor who inspected work at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. Riveters were paid per rivet, and some rubbed out inspectors' small chalk ticks so a job would be counted twice. Kilroy switched to writing his phrase in tougher crayon. Because interiors were rarely repainted in the rush to launch, thousands of troops aboard Quincy-built ships saw his handiwork, sometimes inside sealed hull spaces no graffiti artist could reach.
Rivals exist. A 1945 newspaper report credited Sgt. Francis J. Kilroy Jr., laid up with flu at a Florida airbase, whose friend kept writing the line on bulletin boards after shipping out. Brewer's Dictionary suspects the phrase simply grew by accident.
The doodle may have a separate parent. In Britain the peeking figure was Mr Chad, often grumbling Wot, no sugar about wartime rationing, and may have been drawn first by cartoonist George Edward Chatterton, nicknamed Chat, in 1938. Soldiers called him Private Snoops, sailors The Watcher. Australians had Foo, chalked on railway carriages in the First World War roughly 25 years earlier. At some point Chad's face and Kilroy's slogan fused into a single transatlantic joke.
Source: Kilroy was here
