In praise of Searle
Michael Vestey
Ihave always loved newspaper, magazine and book cartoons and illustrations, political or otherwise. I don't mean the comic strip varieties but those that through individual flair for draughtsmanship and humour tell us something about ourselves. Over the years I've collected them on a modest scale though my partner Katie, an illustrator herself, has a more impressive and growing collection, including cartoons of every prime minister since Churchill, by Low, Vicky, Jak, Cummings, Rushton, Riddell, Heath, the brilliant Wateridge of this magazine, as well as the social observers, Belcher. Spy, John Leach. Heath Robinson (and his brother), Sillince, Phil May, Emmwood, Glashan, Matt and the incomparable Ronald Searle among others.
One practical advantage of buying cartoons and illustrations, old or modern, is that they are less expensive than other works of art. Or at least, some of them are, those perhaps that are less fashionable. You can't now buy a Searle for under a thousand pounds and his colour illustrations fetch much more than that. So I was particularly interested in a Radio Four programme this week, Searle's Girls, on Radio Four (Tuesday) which concentrated on the impact one of his drawings had when it was first published in 1941. It was, of course, `Trinianism', the cartoon of the supposedly fictional girls' school. It, and later drawings on the same theme, eventually inspired five films which remain popular today whenever they're shown on television.
Any progressive girls school where the pupils were allowed more freedom than usual was tagged St Trinian's, so evocative an image did the cartoons and films create, appealing as it does to the English love of school naughtiness and early rebellion. Presumably relying on Russell Davies's biography Ronald Searle (Sinclair Stevenson, 1990), the presenter Annabel Giles followed the story of this creation from the time the artist, as a young sapper, was based at Kirkcudbright in Scotland. To amuse the daughters of a friend, he drew a cartoon of their school in Edinburgh which was actually called St Trinnean's, where facts and figures should be taught while dancing on the lawn and mathematics was useful for gambling purposes. It referred to a hockey match in which the school's goal was smaller than the opposition's thus enabling them to win. He sent it off to the magazine LiInput and heard nothing until the following year when, imprisoned in Changi, the Japanese prisoner of war camp in Singapore, he saw it printed in that publication.
During his years at Changi, Searle, between bouts of illness, produced cartoons for the camp magazines though the horrors of the period altered his outlook and introduced a seriousness to his work. In 1944 he created the second St Trinian's cartoon: 'Hands up the girl who burnt down the east wing last night.' Indeed, in every St Trinian's film arson is an essential ingredient. Only girls who burnt down the uninsured parts of the school were expelled. One of my favourite Searles is a 1952 pen and ink of a girl swathed in cigarette smoke, entitled, 'One of Angela's Most Frequently Recurring Dreams: Arson.'
As Giles reminded us, by 1952 he was trying to distance himself from St Trinian's but the idea had really taken off and the film-makers knew a hit when they saw one. The casts of the films included many of the great comic actors of the 1950s and since, Alastair Sim as the first headmistress, George Cole, Joyce Grenfell, Liz Fraser, Alec Guinness, Dora Bryan and so on. Fortunately, Searle widened his repertoire sufficiently to embrace all humankind, not to mention the famous cats, and his depth and range is prodigious. I see in the late Willie Rushton, for all his originality, some Searle influences and he's all the better for that.
Incidentally. Katie's Searle is 'The Stalls' a drawing of a theatre audience, one of a pair, in which the faces capture perfectly the mixture of exhibitionism, excitement and boredom that often accompanies a visit to the theatre. There is even a plutocratic figure smoking a cigar to help him through the evening. Now 81, Searle lives and works in the south of France. Katie wrote him a fan letter wondering if she might be able to buy one of his original illustrations from the English version of Wicked Etiquette, by Sarah Kortum. He declined gracefully saying he wished to keep the set together but kindly sent a copy of the book's American edition, The Hat Less Man, An Anthology of Odd and Forgotten Manners.
It occurred to me after listening to Searle's Girls that there is at least an hour-long programme to be made about his remarkable life, not just concentrating on St Trinian's but his art as a whole. Perhaps Radio Three might be persuaded.
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