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Ronald Searle CBE 1920 - 2011
Britain is often credited with being the home of graphic satire. A tradition that runs through William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, George Cruikshank and beyond makes it difficult to argue with such a claim. It is a tradition that Cambridge School of Art has played a particularly prominent role in upholding, with its alumni of notable exponents including Edward Bawden, 'Luck and Flaw' (Roger Law and Peter Fluck), as well as comedy film and TV director, Steve Bendelack, and head of design at The Times, David Driver. But of all these, it was the presence at the school of one Ronald Searle that most profoundly influenced generations of subsequent students, not to mention graphic artists the world over. Ronald Searle died at the age of 91 on 30 December 2011, just a few weeks after the death of his beloved wife Monica.
I was fortunate enough to meet Ronald and Monica in 2008, when I travelled to their home in Southern France to bestow on Ronald an Honorary Doctorate from our university and to interview him at length in advance of the mounting of an exhibition of his work in the Ruskin Gallery as part of Anglia Ruskin's 150th anniversary celebrations. As a lifelong fan who, like many of my generation, had shamelessly and fruitlessly attempted to copy his work as a young art student, I anticipated meeting him with a mixture of terror and huge excitement. I was quickly put at ease by the overwhelmingly generous welcome and copious quantities of champagne. Ronald went on to talk at great length and with great affection about his memories of growing up in Cambridge in the 1920s and 30s, and his joy at being accepted as a student at Cambridge School of Art. Russell Davies, in his 1990 biography of Searle, reports that, 'This was not a momentary joy. It persisted throughout Ronald's time at the School of Art.' He quotes Ronald as writing in later years, 'Lautrec was more precocious, but he was never as happy as I was then.' Ronald's joy was to be short-lived as the outbreak of war interrupted his studies. Soon he would be captured by the Japanese at Singapore and endure years of deprivation and torture while being forced to work on the building of the Burma Railway. Unlike most of his fellow prisoners, he not only survived but also managed to bring back a massive volume of drawings that document the horror of war and which are now housed at the Imperial War Museum in London.
During his time at the art school, Ronald lived at 29 Collier Road, backing on to the school's Edwardian studios. His bedroom is still instantly visible, just a few yards from those same studios, which still house illustration students in what is now known as the Ruskin Building. Prior to moving to Collier Road, the family had lived at number 6 Petersfield, a few yards further in the direction of Parker's Piece. Speaking to Ronald about this on my visit, it was clear that he was greatly tickled by the fact that his literary agent of recent years is now, by quirk of coincidence, based at number 1 Petersfield, since relocating from London to Cambridge. Rachel Calder, who runs the agency, has become closely involved with Cambridge School of Art, acting as a judge on the Searle Award for Creativity - an annual competition open to CSA students that was set up by Ronald after the Honorary Doctorate award. Rachel knew Ronald for many years and gave us her own thoughts on his passing:
'Ronald was not only a master draughtsman, a graphic genius and the most highly regarded satiric artist of the twentieth century but also a wonderful man, terrific company, warm, welcoming and outlandishly generous. He had a remarkable eye for detail and could remember almost every drawing he made, for whom it was done and where it appeared. He valued his work highly and never wanted it used in trivial ways, but he would let some people use drawings for nothing if he thought the cause was honourable or interesting enough. It was a source of great pleasure to both of us that I ended up living and working in his beloved Cambridge, even becoming involved with his alma mater, the Cambridge School of Art. I still can't believe he has gone. He seemed immortal to me.'
Ronald was himself something of a scholar of the British tradition of graphic satire. He donated his vast collection of books on the subject to the Wilhelm Busch German Museum of Caricature and Critical Graphic Arts in Hanover, along with a considerable amount of his own work. It is something of a paradox that, despite this glorious tradition in the UK, it is only here that such an artist could become burdened with the label of 'the St Trinian's artist' in honour of a very minor element of his oeuvre. In France he was honoured for his wider output of graphic commentary with a retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale as long ago as the 1970s. Such comparative lack of recognition in his home country surely disappointed him but he didn't let it show. The fact that the best of his successors today - Scarfe, Steadman and Bell for instance - invariably cite Ronald Searle as the most important and influential artist of the twentieth century, will have meant much more to him.
Professor Martin Salisbury
Areas Of Interest: Arts, Alumni
Faculty: Arts, Law & Social Sciences
Citation:
"Vice Chancellor, it is my pleasure to read the Citation for Ronald Searle for the award of Honorary Doctorate of the University. Ronald Searle is an alumnus of Anglia Ruskin University who is the 'scoundrel' but much-loved grandfather of contemporary cartooning known for his biting satire.
The cartoonist creator of St Trinian's, Ronald Searle was born in Cambridge in 1920 and educated at the Cambridge School of Art which is now a flagship school of Anglia Ruskin University.
A famous and enduring alumnus of the University, he grew up in Cambridge, his childhood homes being on the doorstep of the School of Art, at Collier Road and Petersfield. He left his studies on the outbreak of the Second World War to serve in the Royal Engineers and in 1942 was captured by the Japanese at Singapore, then held by them for three and a half years enduring horrific war-time experiences.
He is widely-known for his spindly cartoons that cleverly depict the global issues that are featured in newspapers and magazines worldwide. As well as collaborating with Geoffrey Williams on the Molesworth books and his invention of St Trinians, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions across the world and appears in several major American and European collections. He moved to Paris in 1961 and then, in 1975, to a remote village in Haute-Provence, where he still lives.
It was at the age of just 15 that he became the resident cartoonist on the Cambridge Evening News. A drawing was published in the Daily Express shortly afterwards. During his time in service, his work was exhibited for the first time by members of HM Forces. Soon afterwards he left for the village of Kirkcudbright in Scotland, which was an artist's community and it was this posting that was to affect the rest of his career.
One of his most welcome ports of call there was the home of the Johnstone family. One day, purely as a joke, he made a drawing to please the two schoolgirl daughters, Cecile and Pat, who attended the Academy for Young Ladies in Edinburgh. The name of their school was St Trinnean's.
The magazine Lilliput accepted the cartoon of the not-so-innocent British boarding-school girls and it was published in October 1941. It showed a group of schoolgirls gazing bemusedly at an official noticeboard, bare flesh showing between the tops of their stockings and their gym slips and the caption read - owing to the international situation the match with St Trinian's has been postponed.
His second drawing to be published, completed in Changi Gaol, was more instantly amusing. It featured a classroom full of grinning schoolgirls with their hands at their sides being addressed by a Victorian-looking schoolmistress and it sported the caption 'Hands up the girl who burnt down the East wing last night'.
Ronald Searle continued his cartooning and drawing secretly during his time as a prisoner of war. He produced and kept safe an extraordinary output of drawings from this time and managed to bring home a vast collection of drawings, often produced on whatever scraps of paper he could find, which recorded many of the terrible events which took place. On returning to Cambridge, Searle exhibited his drawings at the Cambridge School of Art, in the same studios that are used by illustration students today. Some of the drawings were published by Cambridge University Press in book form as 'Forty Drawings', his first published book. The entire collection of these is today kept at the Imperial War Museum.
One of Searle's commissions after the war was to visually document the trial of Adolph Eichmann.
Unsurprisingly Ronald Searle's eye catching cartoons featuring the gin-swigging, cigar-smoking and often demonic girls continued to be featured in print, eventually appearing in book form with the publication of Hurrah for St Trinian's! in 1947. The book was introduced by D B Wyndham Lewis who became the girls' official chronicler when a writer was needed to accompany the cartoons. He later published a full-length novel with Searle, The Terror of St Trinian's and the rest, as they say, is history.
Other writers and film makers also seized on the opportunity to bring St Trinian's to life, such was its mass attraction. Interest spread abroad and the girls had duly become unstoppable. The latest film in the St Trinian's saga - due out in December - will bring up to date the original adventures of the school for young ladies, made in 1954, which featured Alastair Sim and Joyce Grenfell.
Ronald Searle also embarked on his own publishing venture to create Merry England etc, and The Rake's Progress and has produced title sequences for the movie industry including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Monte Carlo Or Bust.
His most familiar characters are grounded in an inter-war England and have been described as including 'pearled dames' and 'society rotters'.
Ronald Searle will be exhibiting the full body of his work at Anglia Ruskin University's Ruskin Gallery early next year as a part of the University's celebration of 150 years of art history in Cambridge. At the same time, his work will also appear again in the Cambridge Evening News; and a new award will be set up for pupils of the Cambridge School of Art entitled The Ronald Searle Award for Creativity in the Arts.
He continues to create more wonders today, sketching from the idyll of his home in the South of France.
Vice Chancellor, as Ronald Searle is too frail to travel to collect this award, I hereby invite you to confer it upon him in absentia."
Britain is often credited with being the home of graphic satire. A tradition that runs through William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, George Cruikshank and beyond makes it difficult to argue with such a claim. It is a tradition that Cambridge School of Art has played a particularly prominent role in upholding, with its alumni of notable exponents including Edward Bawden, 'Luck and Flaw' (Roger Law and Peter Fluck), as well as comedy film and TV director, Steve Bendelack, and head of design at The Times, David Driver. But of all these, it was the presence at the school of one Ronald Searle that most profoundly influenced generations of subsequent students, not to mention graphic artists the world over. Ronald Searle died at the age of 91 on 30 December 2011, just a few weeks after the death of his beloved wife Monica.
I was fortunate enough to meet Ronald and Monica in 2008, when I travelled to their home in Southern France to bestow on Ronald an Honorary Doctorate from our university and to interview him at length in advance of the mounting of an exhibition of his work in the Ruskin Gallery as part of Anglia Ruskin's 150th anniversary celebrations. As a lifelong fan who, like many of my generation, had shamelessly and fruitlessly attempted to copy his work as a young art student, I anticipated meeting him with a mixture of terror and huge excitement. I was quickly put at ease by the overwhelmingly generous welcome and copious quantities of champagne. Ronald went on to talk at great length and with great affection about his memories of growing up in Cambridge in the 1920s and 30s, and his joy at being accepted as a student at Cambridge School of Art. Russell Davies, in his 1990 biography of Searle, reports that, 'This was not a momentary joy. It persisted throughout Ronald's time at the School of Art.' He quotes Ronald as writing in later years, 'Lautrec was more precocious, but he was never as happy as I was then.' Ronald's joy was to be short-lived as the outbreak of war interrupted his studies. Soon he would be captured by the Japanese at Singapore and endure years of deprivation and torture while being forced to work on the building of the Burma Railway. Unlike most of his fellow prisoners, he not only survived but also managed to bring back a massive volume of drawings that document the horror of war and which are now housed at the Imperial War Museum in London.
During his time at the art school, Ronald lived at 29 Collier Road, backing on to the school's Edwardian studios. His bedroom is still instantly visible, just a few yards from those same studios, which still house illustration students in what is now known as the Ruskin Building. Prior to moving to Collier Road, the family had lived at number 6 Petersfield, a few yards further in the direction of Parker's Piece. Speaking to Ronald about this on my visit, it was clear that he was greatly tickled by the fact that his literary agent of recent years is now, by quirk of coincidence, based at number 1 Petersfield, since relocating from London to Cambridge. Rachel Calder, who runs the agency, has become closely involved with Cambridge School of Art, acting as a judge on the Searle Award for Creativity - an annual competition open to CSA students that was set up by Ronald after the Honorary Doctorate award. Rachel knew Ronald for many years and gave us her own thoughts on his passing:
'Ronald was not only a master draughtsman, a graphic genius and the most highly regarded satiric artist of the twentieth century but also a wonderful man, terrific company, warm, welcoming and outlandishly generous. He had a remarkable eye for detail and could remember almost every drawing he made, for whom it was done and where it appeared. He valued his work highly and never wanted it used in trivial ways, but he would let some people use drawings for nothing if he thought the cause was honourable or interesting enough. It was a source of great pleasure to both of us that I ended up living and working in his beloved Cambridge, even becoming involved with his alma mater, the Cambridge School of Art. I still can't believe he has gone. He seemed immortal to me.'
Ronald was himself something of a scholar of the British tradition of graphic satire. He donated his vast collection of books on the subject to the Wilhelm Busch German Museum of Caricature and Critical Graphic Arts in Hanover, along with a considerable amount of his own work. It is something of a paradox that, despite this glorious tradition in the UK, it is only here that such an artist could become burdened with the label of 'the St Trinian's artist' in honour of a very minor element of his oeuvre. In France he was honoured for his wider output of graphic commentary with a retrospective at the Bibliothèque Nationale as long ago as the 1970s. Such comparative lack of recognition in his home country surely disappointed him but he didn't let it show. The fact that the best of his successors today - Scarfe, Steadman and Bell for instance - invariably cite Ronald Searle as the most important and influential artist of the twentieth century, will have meant much more to him.
Professor Martin Salisbury
Director, The Centre for Children's Book Studies, Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration, Faculty of Arts, Law & Social Sciences
Areas Of Interest: Arts, Alumni
Faculty: Arts, Law & Social Sciences
Citation:
"Vice Chancellor, it is my pleasure to read the Citation for Ronald Searle for the award of Honorary Doctorate of the University. Ronald Searle is an alumnus of Anglia Ruskin University who is the 'scoundrel' but much-loved grandfather of contemporary cartooning known for his biting satire.
The cartoonist creator of St Trinian's, Ronald Searle was born in Cambridge in 1920 and educated at the Cambridge School of Art which is now a flagship school of Anglia Ruskin University.
A famous and enduring alumnus of the University, he grew up in Cambridge, his childhood homes being on the doorstep of the School of Art, at Collier Road and Petersfield. He left his studies on the outbreak of the Second World War to serve in the Royal Engineers and in 1942 was captured by the Japanese at Singapore, then held by them for three and a half years enduring horrific war-time experiences.
He is widely-known for his spindly cartoons that cleverly depict the global issues that are featured in newspapers and magazines worldwide. As well as collaborating with Geoffrey Williams on the Molesworth books and his invention of St Trinians, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions across the world and appears in several major American and European collections. He moved to Paris in 1961 and then, in 1975, to a remote village in Haute-Provence, where he still lives.
It was at the age of just 15 that he became the resident cartoonist on the Cambridge Evening News. A drawing was published in the Daily Express shortly afterwards. During his time in service, his work was exhibited for the first time by members of HM Forces. Soon afterwards he left for the village of Kirkcudbright in Scotland, which was an artist's community and it was this posting that was to affect the rest of his career.
One of his most welcome ports of call there was the home of the Johnstone family. One day, purely as a joke, he made a drawing to please the two schoolgirl daughters, Cecile and Pat, who attended the Academy for Young Ladies in Edinburgh. The name of their school was St Trinnean's.
The magazine Lilliput accepted the cartoon of the not-so-innocent British boarding-school girls and it was published in October 1941. It showed a group of schoolgirls gazing bemusedly at an official noticeboard, bare flesh showing between the tops of their stockings and their gym slips and the caption read - owing to the international situation the match with St Trinian's has been postponed.
His second drawing to be published, completed in Changi Gaol, was more instantly amusing. It featured a classroom full of grinning schoolgirls with their hands at their sides being addressed by a Victorian-looking schoolmistress and it sported the caption 'Hands up the girl who burnt down the East wing last night'.
Ronald Searle continued his cartooning and drawing secretly during his time as a prisoner of war. He produced and kept safe an extraordinary output of drawings from this time and managed to bring home a vast collection of drawings, often produced on whatever scraps of paper he could find, which recorded many of the terrible events which took place. On returning to Cambridge, Searle exhibited his drawings at the Cambridge School of Art, in the same studios that are used by illustration students today. Some of the drawings were published by Cambridge University Press in book form as 'Forty Drawings', his first published book. The entire collection of these is today kept at the Imperial War Museum.
One of Searle's commissions after the war was to visually document the trial of Adolph Eichmann.
Unsurprisingly Ronald Searle's eye catching cartoons featuring the gin-swigging, cigar-smoking and often demonic girls continued to be featured in print, eventually appearing in book form with the publication of Hurrah for St Trinian's! in 1947. The book was introduced by D B Wyndham Lewis who became the girls' official chronicler when a writer was needed to accompany the cartoons. He later published a full-length novel with Searle, The Terror of St Trinian's and the rest, as they say, is history.
Other writers and film makers also seized on the opportunity to bring St Trinian's to life, such was its mass attraction. Interest spread abroad and the girls had duly become unstoppable. The latest film in the St Trinian's saga - due out in December - will bring up to date the original adventures of the school for young ladies, made in 1954, which featured Alastair Sim and Joyce Grenfell.
Ronald Searle also embarked on his own publishing venture to create Merry England etc, and The Rake's Progress and has produced title sequences for the movie industry including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Monte Carlo Or Bust.
His most familiar characters are grounded in an inter-war England and have been described as including 'pearled dames' and 'society rotters'.
Ronald Searle will be exhibiting the full body of his work at Anglia Ruskin University's Ruskin Gallery early next year as a part of the University's celebration of 150 years of art history in Cambridge. At the same time, his work will also appear again in the Cambridge Evening News; and a new award will be set up for pupils of the Cambridge School of Art entitled The Ronald Searle Award for Creativity in the Arts.
He continues to create more wonders today, sketching from the idyll of his home in the South of France.
Vice Chancellor, as Ronald Searle is too frail to travel to collect this award, I hereby invite you to confer it upon him in absentia."
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