Ronald Searle - part 1

1956 Ronald Searle
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Ronald Searle, CBE, RDI (1920 – 2011) was an English artist and satirical cartoonist, comics artist, sculptor, medal designer and illustrator. He is perhaps best remembered as the creator of St Trinian’s School and for his collaboration with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth series. 

Searle was born in Cambridge. He started drawing at the age of five and left school at the age of 15. He trained at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) for two years.

In April 1939, realising that war was inevitable, he abandoned his art studies to enlist in the Royal Engineers. In January 1942, he was in the 287th Field Company, RE, in Singapore. After a month of fighting in Malaya, he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle, when Singapore fell to the Japanese. He spent the rest of the war as prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then in the Kwai jungle, working on the Siam-Burma Death Railway. Searle contracted both beriberi and malaria during his incarceration, which included numerous beatings, and his weight dropped to less than 40 kilograms. He was liberated in late 1945 with the final defeat of the Japanese. After the war, he served as a courtroom artist at the Nuremberg trials and later the  Adolf Eichman trial (1961).

He married the journalist Kaye Webb in 1947; they had twins, Kate and Johnny. In 1961, Searle moved to Paris, leaving his family; the marriage ended in divorce in 1967. Later he married Monica Koenig, a painter, theatre and jewellery designer.After 1975, Searle and his wife lived and worked in the mountains of Haute Provence. 

Although Searle published the first St Trinian’s cartoon in the magazine Lilliput in 1941, his professional career really begins with his documentation of the brutal camp conditions of his period as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese in WWII in a series of drawings that he hid under the mattresses of prisoners dying of cholera. Searle recalled, "I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on." But Searle survived, along with approximately 300 of his drawings. Liberated late in 1945, Searle returned to England, where he published several of the drawings in fellow prisoner Russell Braddon’s “The Naked Island.” Another of Searle's fellow prisoners later recounted, "If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren't revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being.”

Searle produced an extraordinary volume of work during the 1950s, including drawings for Life, Holiday, and Punch magazines. His cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, the Sunday Express, and the News Chronicle. He compiled more St Trinian's books, which were based on his sister's school and other girls' schools in Cambridge. He collaborated with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth books, and with Alex Atkinson on travel books.

After moving to Paris in 1961, he worked more on reportage for Life and Holiday and less on cartoons. He also continued to work in a broad range of media and created books (including his well-known cat books), animated films and sculpture for commemorative medals, both for the French Mint and the British Art Medal Society. Searle did a considerable amount of designing for the cinema, and in 1965, he completed the opening, intermission and closing credits for the comedy film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines as well as the 1969 film Monte Carlo or Bust! In 1975, the full-length cartoon Dick Deadeye, or Duty Done was released. It is based on the character and songs from H.M.S Pinafore.

In 2010, he gave about 2,200 of his works as permanent loans to Wilhelm Busch Museum, Hanover (Germany), now renamed Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst. Previously the summer palace of George I of Hanover, this museum also holds Searle's archives.

Searle did so many works that I want to post here, that I will post them in two separate series: 1940-1960, and at a later date: 1961-2007.

Images © Estate of Ronald Searle

This is part 1 of a 13-part series on the works of Ronald Searle, dated 1940-1960:

1940 Now what do you think of this one? – I practised it in the mirror last night
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1940-41 "Here’s an interesting problem, Sar’nt Major"
Lilliput, April 1942 Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1941 "I’ve just brought down a 'Junkers 88' "
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1941 "Remember when I gave you "Six' for putting a mouse in my desk?"
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1939 Dereham, Norfolk
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1940-45 Canon Noel Duckworth

1940-45 Changi Gaol, Singapore

1940-45 Japanese Guard

1940-45 Japanese punishment

1940-45 Japanese troops with beheaded Chinese civilians

1940-45 PoWs working on the construction of the Thai-Burma Railway

1940-45 PoWs working on the construction of the Thai-Burma Railway

1940-45 Spring comes to Ward 5

1940-45 Ward 5 says farewell to Thailand - land of romantic jungles! (And "Lofty")

1940-45 Thailand Jungle. Logs for Bridge Building

1941 A cigarette at night , 1941
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1941 Cape Town

1941 Cape Town

1941 Cape Town

1941 Mombasa
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature 

1941 Mombasa, Kenya

1941 Mombasa, Kenya

1942  Changi Gaol, Singapore
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1942 Chinese Guerilla, Malaya

1942 Chinese refugee

1942 Chinese refugee

1942 Chinese refugees

1942 Inspecting Officers

1942 Malaya

1942 Prisoners Queuing for Rice Changi, Singapore May 1942

1942 Self-Portrait
29.7 x 21 cm
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature 
© The Ronald Searle Cultural Trust

1942 Singapore.
"Jap's beating up a Chinese."

1943 Changi Camp, Singapore March 1943

1943 Changi Prison Camp

1943 Changi Prison Camp
"Sikh traitor punishing British officer for failing to salute, Changi"

1943 Cholera Lines – Thai-Burma Railway

1943 Cholera Lines – Thai-Burma Railway

1943 Self-Portrait (aged 23) Thailand Jungle July 1943

1943 Self-Portrait, Thailand Jungle
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature 
© The Ronald Searle Cultural Trust

1943 Sketches of the sick and dying at a hospital tent at Camp Konyu

1943 Thailand, Cholera

1943 Thailand. Prisoners working on a cutting

1943 Ward 5, Thailand

1944 Beach near the prison

1944 Changi Gaol, Singapore

1944 Changi Gaol, Singapore
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature 
© The Ronald Searle Cultural Trust

1944 Changi Prison Sketchbook May 1944

1944 Japanese soldiers, Singapore

1944 Prison camp hats

1944 Programme for “Speakeasy” Changi Gaol, Singapore
ink and coloured pencil 17.8 x 12.8 cm 

1944 Singapore 

1944 Singapore
pencil and watercolour 22.2 x 18.1 cm
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature
©The Ronald Searle Cultural Trust

1944 Singapore, Chinese bowing at Japanese guard point in Singapore

1944 Singapore. Japanese Soldier

1944-45 "Of course. I admit we're stormtroopers, Pilsworth, but I didn't bargain for this."
 20.3 x 17.2 cm
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing

1945 Planes dropping pamphlets announcing end of war, over Changi Gaol camp Singapore

1945 Allied flags on Changi Gaol for the first time since capitulation Feb 15 1942

1945 Japanese Guard, Changi, Singapore May 1945

1945 Japanese Officer, Singapore

1945 Japanese Officer, Singapore

1945 Native Group, Singapore

1945 Self-portrait after 3 years imprisonment
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature
© The Ronald Searle Cultural Trust 

1945 Sick prisoner, Singapore August 1945

1946 Torture
pen and ink and wash 22.5 x 18.7 cm
Wilhelm Busch - German Museum of Caricature and Drawing