Ronald Searle CBE, RDI (March 3, 1920 – December 30, 2011) was a British-born illustrator and cartoonist, best known as the creator of ‘St Trinian’s School’. His work has had a big influence on later cartoonists including Matt Groening, creator of both The Simpsons and Futurama.

His love of drawing was nurtured at the Cambridge School of Art and in the columns of the Cambridge Daily News, the forerunner of the Cambridge News.

ABOUT Ronald Searle

The RDI stands for Royal Designer for Industry, a distinction established by the British Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in 1936. It is awarded to people who have achieved sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry. Recipient’s works are often diverse, ranging from fashion to engineering, theatre to product design and graphics to environmental design.

He was unarguably Britain’s greatest cartoonist, one they appeared to have overlooked during his life time and an oversight modern art historians there must deeply regret. His death leaves a gaping hole in his homeland’s artifacts since before his death, he had already handed The Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany, his archive, sketchbooks since 1938 and rare books and drawings — from Annibale Carracci to Rowlandson and Cruikshank.

His actions were, perhaps, a nod to the country that had treated him as a serious artist. And similarly, in France, he had been greatly admired and is listed among those having been awarded the Chevaliers of the Légion d’honneur. The Légion was open to men and women of all ranks and professions and awarded only for merit or bravery.

Small Beginnings

He was drawing at the age of 5, professionally by 15, and swapped his job at a parcel-packing company to become a very young resident cartoonist for the Cambridge Daily News where he drew some 200 weekly cartoons and honed his ability for satirical commentary.

His first News cartoon, published in October, 1935, featured the headquarters of the City Council, the Guildhall. While he was working for the paper, he was also studying at the School of Art where he acquired the extraordinary discipline that was to characterise his future work — the habit of looking and drawing.

World War II

At the end of his Art course, World War II broke out and he enlisted in the Royal Engineers. He trained for two years in the UK. In 1941, the same year his first St Trinian’s cartoon was published in the magazine Lilliput, he was posted to Singapore. A month after his arrival there, it fell to the Japanese and he spent the rest of the hostilities as a POW.

He was regularly beaten, had a pickaxe embedded in his back and he suffered bouts of malaria and beri-beri. But he never stopped drawing. Secretly, often in near-darkness, he recorded the horrors he and his fellow captives endured, usually concealing the resulting drawings under the mattresses of prisoners suffering from cholera. He was freed in 1945, and published the surviving drawings in fellow prisoner Russell Braddon’s account of his own captivity, ‘The Naked Island’.

In the 1950s, his career as an artist took off. He produced an extraordinary body of work – drawings for Punch, cartoons for the Tribune, the Sunday Express and the News Chronicle along with more St Trinian’s books. He also created animations for Walt Disney as well as for advertisements.

St Trinian’s Films

The first St Trinian’s film was made in 1954, chronicling the unruly adventures of the ‘School for young ladies’. It was remade in 2007 starring Rupert Everett and Colin Firth. Ronald was presented with an Honorary Doctorate by Anglia Ruskin that same year, and Chris Owen the current Head of the School of Art, has no doubt about his influence on generations of students since.

He said: “Ronald Searle was undoubtedly the most important of all the illustrators who attended Cambridge School of Art during the 20th century. Others also included Edward Bawden, and the inventors of Spitting Image: Roger Fluck and Peter Law. Like them, Searle demonstrated not only remarkable drawing skills, but also a radical creative spirit, that endeared him to the British public.

Over the years, he helped to bring illustration at the School of Art to international attention. He was a great friend to the school. Ronald established ‘The Searle Award for Creativity’, an annual public exhibition of student work in the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge.”

The VIDEO

RELATED

1. Website: Art of Illustration  2. Blog: A Fan’s Appreciation

Be Sociable, Share!

•