Before the internet
Kilroy was here
1945
Kilroy was here is a doodle of a bald, long-nosed face peeking over a wall, with the words Kilroy was here, that American servicemen drew wherever they went during the Second World War. It is often called the first meme: nobody ran it, people just copied it and changed it.
- Year
- 1945
- Made by
- Unknown US servicemen; the face came from Britain’s Mr Chad
- Where it started
- Walls, ships and vehicles wherever US troops went in the Second World War
- What it was
- A doodle and a line of graffiti
- Also called
- Mr Chad, Kilroy
The story
Troops drew it on walls, ships and vehicles, from the beaches of Normandy to Pacific islands, as a joke and a sign that Americans had already been there. In Britain the same peeking face was called Mr Chad, and it grumbled “Wot, no …?” about whatever was rationed; Australians wrote Foo was here.
The face and the words seem to have started apart. One word historian credits the face to the British cartoonist Jack Greenall, in the Daily Mirror in December 1937, and the oldest dated mention of Kilroy was here in print is from April 1945.
Who Kilroy was is still argued over. In 1946 a radio contest named James J. Kilroy, a shipyard inspector in Quincy, Massachusetts, who said he wrote the words on work he had checked, and he won a streetcar. More than 40 people had claimed to be the original.
Why it matters
It behaved like an internet meme decades early: an easy drawing and one line, copied by strangers and changed to suit wherever they were, with nobody in charge of it.
Where it is now
Two Kilroys are carved into the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the doodle still turns up as graffiti and in films, games and cartoons.
Sources
- Kilroy was here (Wikipedia)
- Kilroy was here (National Park Service)
- Kilroy was here (Dave Wilton, Wordorigins)
- Kilroy was here (World Wide Words)
- Kilroy was here, the original meme (WBUR, Endless Thread, 2021)
Checked against these sources on 25 October 2026.