Best known for his bristly comic drawings depicting the outrageously ghoulish machinations of the St. Trinian’s girls, and for his illustrations of the Molesworth books, written by Geoffrey Willans, which, as any fule kno (sic), tells of life at the boys’ prep school St. Custard’s, cartoonist Ronald Searle died “peacefully in his sleep” Friday, December 30, in southern France’s Draguignan after a short illness — and just months after his second wife, Monica, for whom he scandalously left his first wife and family in the early 1960s, died in July. Searles was 91, the Guardian reported.
Michael Cavna at ComicRiffs.com writes: “Searle will surely be best remembered for his St. Trinian’s boarding-school girls gone bad; through their brazenly wicked behavior, the artist was sending up the ‘proper’ British school system. These dark-humored hellions debuted in the magazine
Lilliput the same year—1941—that Searle was captured by Japan and endured brutal conditions as a World War II POW (he drew with whatever he could find during this time, later publishing To the Kwai—and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945).”
Searle “created an alternative to the conformity of Harold Macmillan’s Britain”, said his publisher Simon Winder, quoted in the Guardian. “He gave Britain in the 1950s particularly a sense of anarchy. He was extraordinarily skeptical about all forms of authority [and] there’s something just astonishingly anarchic about Molesworth and St. Trinian’s— that’s why they have appealed to so many generations.”
Searle enjoyed a spectacular career as an illustrator and a member of the legendary Punch table when he returned to Britain after the war. We’ll have a longer and more appreciative obit in the usual place by the end of the month (it’ll be in Opus 289).
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