The death on December 30 of Ronald Searle, Britain’s foremost “graphic satirist”—to use his own designation—came as a terrific shock to his countrymen, many of whom thought he’d been dead for ages. Searle, ninety-one, had lived in Provence since 1966, and in France since 1961. He was untroubled by the possibility that his native land had forgotten him. “One marvelous thing about having left England,” he said in 2005, is that Frenchmen and other foreigners have “never heard of St. Trinian’s,” that Pandaemonium of a girls’ boarding school given diabolical life in Searle’s cartoons. Searle, complaining about a British “tendency to pigeonhole you,” thought it nicer to be presumed dead than remembered for work done in the 1950s.
Some were probably shocked for the opposite reason: Wasn’t Searle death-proof? A story known only vaguely to his more casual admirers, but retold with grim vividness by his many obituarists, was the ordeal he survived in his youth as a prisoner of war. At the outset of the Second World War, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers Corps of the Territorial Army. Soon he shipped out to Singapore, naïve, hopeful, and hopelessly ignorant of his adversary. Officers spoke of “yellow dwarves” who “couldn’t shoot straight.” It was 1942. After a month of jungle combat, during which fellow “sappers” were picked off by guerrillas hidden in palm trees, Singapore fell to the Japanese.
There can be no overstating the effect of his four-year captivity, split between Singapore, in Changi Jail, and Thailand, laboring on the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” made infamous by David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Searle considered Lean’s version roseate nonsense, and little wonder: In the Japanese he met only cruelty wedded to an honor culture that saw prisoners as, in a sense, already dead. Starvation, insect bites, dysentery, beriberi, gruesome skin afflictions, beatings—as horrible as these were, worst was to wake up with a dead comrade on either side of him. With lapidary candor, Searle said: “There I lost all my friends.”
There he also gained the full force of his artistry. “They say that I was partly a father of black humor,” he once remarked. He must have appreciated the bile-black irony that a prison camp was his art school: four years as a literally starving artist, with nothing to do but suffer and sketch. Searle produced hundreds of drawings while in Japanese custody. The prisoners donated the flyleaves of their books to their resident Goya. He worked away, hiding the finished products beneath dying men. Searle had been an artist before the war, but in these conditions his creativity took on the urgency of reportage, and of survival.
As another POW put it: “If you can imagine something that weighs six stone [eighty-four pounds] 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.” A difference of temperament explains how Searle, despite all the “horribleness [he] saw,” became the kind of artist he did. Miraculously, over three hundred drawings survived the humidity and violence of Southeast Asia. At first glance, little in the execution of these works anticipates the signature style of the illustrator of the St. Trinian’s and Molesworth books; the star of Punch, Life, Holiday, and other publications; a man as comfortable with Charles Addams– and Gahan Wilson–style grotesquerie as with more broadly appealing work about, e.g., cats, dogs, and oenophilia. The prison drawings are cartoons only in the formal sense.
“Cholera,” made with pen and blue ink on buff paper in Thailand (1943) is exemplary. With a gestural scattering of lines, like hairs clinging to a shower stall, Searle records for posterity the pelvis, ribs, and cavernous abdomen of a dying man. Hardest to look at is the face. Bald, jug-eared, with skeletal temples and nose, it gapes in wide-eyed, open-mouthed astonishment that such fates as this are possible. An earlier drawing, “Dead Soldier, on Bukit Timah roadside, Singapore” (1942), resembles a crucifixion study, the top half taken up with a broken M of outstretched arms and hanging head.
Who would believe the man who drew that would live to be one of the funniest artists of the twentieth century? It makes a kind of sense. Searle explained that “the mentality, really, of everyone who was involved in the war was that no longer the politeness of [the] prewar [world] existed. . . . This obviously changed the attitude toward all things, and certainly as far as humor is concerned.”
As to whether he’d have arrived at his sinister view of life, the jolly menace of his style, given different circumstances, Searle was unequivocal: “Absolutely impossible. You’ve got to have the experience to be able to express it.” Searle, rather than be destroyed by horror and brutality, patiently absorbed them into his tragicomic outlook. He came to see the past as a boon: “If you’re a freelance artist and you’re commenting on the world around you, you’ve got to live on an island. . . . Once you’ve been a prisoner, you never escape from your island prison. And it gives you the point of view of looking around you, of being able to comment or react to anything that’s around you without having any parochial responsibility.” Still, he had to be prepared to benefit from this experience.
Searle was born in Cambridge, East Anglia, on March 3, 1920. His beginnings were, as they say, humble, but his family wasn’t poor: “We didn’t have any money. There was a difference.” That difference was a knack for hard work and self-reliance. It was also a native eccentricity. Whatever his family was poor in, it wasn’t spirit. His father, a Post Office employee, may not have been odd, but his relatives were. Aunt Edie “was known to dust the coal.” His father’s cousins were “earning their living on the music-hall stage as lady serpents. In brief costumes of fringed scales, [they] would ooze about the stage of any theatre that had the courage to book them.”
Young Ronald himself was a performer, a boy soprano known, to his enduring horror, as the “Nightingale of East Anglia.” Though paid handsomely for concerts—six shillings, three of which he got to keep for art supplies—Searle recalled, “Before my East Anglian wings could really take off, my voice dropped, and all was well.”
Searle’s love of culture extended to a fascination for the architecture and history of Cambridge. If his leaning toward the bizarre predated the war, Cambridge was to blame. It was full of “lovely museums where there were everything from shrunken heads to fabulous African masks.” (One St. Trinian’s cartoon depicts a schoolgirl eyeing her sleeping dorm-mate maliciously while taking notes on a huge volume called How to Shrink a Human Head.)
For his style, Searle blamed not only Cambridge but also his hands:
Quite suddenly I began to draw. I had been scribbling for ever. Now it took shape and I became, first fascinated, then obsessed, with what it was possible to do with pen and pencil. No one paid much attention to this, nor to the fact that the drawings were immediately grotesque. This was assumed to be one of the penalties for being “cack-handed,” local dialect for mocking a left-hander. . . . I had the inborn advantage of the eccentric.
At fifteen, he was fired from a solicitor’s office for drawing all day on stolen paper. Anyone who was doing the same thing in his high school classes at that age will have cause for envy. Searle was soon contributing to the Cambridge Daily News and Granta. His lodestars were Max Beerbohm; George Grosz, a book of whose work “stayed in my pocket when I went into the army”; and the usual suspects, Cruikshank, Gillray, Hogarth, and Rowlandson. He received his first real instruction at the Cambridge Technical School. Soon he’d be doing his study abroad in Southeast Asia.
Postwar life was a cycle of success (career), failure (personal life), success (personal life), self-imposed exile, and belated recognition. The challenge of providing for his wife, Kaye Webb, and two children spurred Searle through a period of Stakhanovite productivity that cemented his reputation.
He left his family in 1961, a move he described as both self-centered and the best decision of his life. It was, he said, a matter of survival. One finds it difficult to excuse his callousness, but the trials of his early life make it harder still not to take him at his word. He stayed with his second wife, Monica Koenig, until an especially bitter end. The drawings he made to ease the suffering of her terminal cancer are now collected in Les Très Riches Heures of Mrs Mole (2011).
There is little biographical excitement to be had from Searle’s postwar existence, but there is an awful lot of brilliant work. Where to begin? St. Trinian’s, with its feral schoolgirls, would have been enough to make Searle a national treasure. In The Terror of St. Trinian’s, we find “A shrieking horde of Lower School types”—a representative cartoon of tiny, pinafore-clad harpies, wielding sickles and maces, in combat with a fireman. Later, in a splendid two-page drawing, the arsonist-heroine Angela Menace “rescues” Headmistress Umbrage from the blaze Angela herself has set. Curls of inky smoke meet webs of water and ladders—
Total chaos. Turn the page too quickly and you might miss the tiny, hooting, savage faces in the crowd below. Searle had mastered this kind of manic spectacle, with its discomfiting suggestion—years before such films as If . . . (1968) dared to think themselves subversive—that the bestial lurked even in spider-legged schoolgirls.
And speaking of spiders! What about the marvelous illustration in Whizz for Atomms (1956), the third of Searle’s Molesworth books, depicting the spelling-challenged schoolboy Nigel Molesworth (Searle’s topp character, as any fule kno) as a leering, fanged, two-dozen-plus-legged space tarantula? Caption: “Nearer and nearer crept the ghastly thing.” It’s as if Odilon Redon woke up one dreary morning and decided to be funny.
Down with Skool! (1953), Searle’s first collaboration with Geoffrey Willans, may be the funniest book about childhood and education ever produced. It is the spoonful of sugar necessitated by a bitter pill like George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys.” On many pages one asks which came first, Willans’s text or Searle’s visual gag—but the answer is plain. This was a perfect partnership, two comic minds burning at the same fever pitch. “Kanes I Have Known by N. Molesworth” includes “2. The ‘Nonpliant’ or ‘Rigid’ with silencer attachment to drown victims [sic] cries.” It’s a cane to which is tied, with a dainty bow of twine, a bottle of ether.
As a journalist, Searle drew the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961; the Berlin Wall in 1963; François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his detested Tonton Macoutes in 1968; and a host of humanitarian crises. He exhibited work in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1971, the first living non-French artist to earn that distinction; contributed regularly to Le Monde until late in his life; and was made Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2007. His work inspired beloved illustrators like Ralph Steadman, Quentin Blake, and Matt Groening.
In 1979 Searle prepared a poster for UNICEF’s Year of the Child that epitomizes his outlook. A candy-colored horde of creepily cheerful children wreaths a monochromatic globe, like a womb, pregnant with a huddled, starving boy. Searle once said, of his nightmare in Southeast Asia, that the jungle was beautiful but full of danger. He was speaking also of the world as it is. Though he never succumbed to a reflexive bitterness, Searle couldn’t lose sight of a horror kept in check by man’s precarious capacity for goodness. “Everything,” he said, “goes back to being a prisoner. You can’t have that sort of experience without it affecting the rest of your life.” He remained life’s prisoner to the end, forever trying to buoy, instruct, and memorialize the doomed souls stuck in the same cell with him.
