Ronald Searle - The Terror of St Trinians and Other Drawings

We need hardly explain or apologize for their inclusion; but that we felt they had to go in, despite being duplicated elsewhere, says something about his appeal, the deep furrows he has made in the national consciousness. Most people under forty came to Searle through the four Molesworth books, his incredible collaboration with Geoffrey Willans, the novelist, teacher and wartime RNVS officer who found, in the depiction of the truculent, philosophical and rebellious schoolboy (a kind of Diogenes in shorts, with beetles doodled on his knees), his finest and most enduring creation. I first came to them as a schoolboy in the sixties and early seventies, in a prep school still faintly redolent of the cabbage-and-carbolic atmosphere of St Custards. What struck me at the time was that the book was hardly an act of imagination; it was a documentary. We made allowances for the passage of history the school was for day-bugs only, no one said cave at the approach of authority, and not all the masters were quite as demented but the mise-en-scne was highly recognizable, authentic; we may even have willed our school to be a little more like St Custards than it actually was, forcing life to live up to the world of art. Much of Willanss linguistic exuberance passed us by as far as we were concerned, he spelt strubres more or less correctly but it was Searles illustrations that sealed the matter for us.

For there, right on the page, was an example of how we felt we might be able to draw, had we the application or the energy. He was so expert and painstaking that we hardly recognized how expert and painstaking he was. He had managed to climb into a childs mind strictly speaking, a boys mind and pull out our weirdest yet, at the same time, most standard imaginings. Most importantly, perhaps because we could see that he was not condescending, did not appear to be artistically slumming it, we knew at once that he was on our side, in that seemingly endless attritional war between adults and ourselves. If Willans exposed the grown-up world as a conspiracy against youth and an inept and pointless conspiracy at that then Searles illustrations confirmed it, pitilessly, and in a visual language that we immediately understood. It is also perhaps necessary to remind people now how rare it once was for schoolbooks to be illustrated, unless incompetently or emetically; and the molesworth books, which were, in a sense, schoolbooks, were more than just illustrated.

Searles contribution was not so much integral as essential for their success. The Molesworth cycle burgeoned manically and generously with drawings, satisfying the schoolboys craving for release from the tyranny of linear print. And the drawings were not dependent on the text; sometimes it seemed the other way round. There is no textual authority for many, if not most, of the illustrations; the word illustration is, in this context, misleading. The molesworth-headed spider (closer and closer, crept the ghastly THING) just leaps into the book, as a boys vicious daydream interrupts a period of great tedium, most typically, as I recall, Latin lessons. The grate latin lies, also an autonomous series of cartoons, said not only all that needed to be said about the supposed classical ideal, they also said everything that needed to be said about the timelessly disappointing nature of the human condition.

Take All the romans loved home, with the browbeaten centurion still in his armour, the mocking image of an authority he can never command in his own home, the wife yelling at some prior incompetence or dereliction, the child crying at some prior and presumably imaginary or trifling injustice, even the dog pinching his dinner; the mans resigned, exhausted slump not only that of someone trapped in history, but a horribly proleptic vision of the destiny that awaited those foolish enough to grow up. It told us all, in the blink of time it took the eye to register the details, what was wrong with the nuclear family, the thankless tedium of duty, at the same time as the conventional culture all around sang the praises of the homestead. It was a highly concentrated and dyspeptic sitcom, but and this is the mystery and spirit of cartoon art it was still funny. It made me laugh then, and, now that I am however strangely happily in that centurions caligulae, more or less, it makes me laugh even more. But when young, in those days, one felt that merely to hold a book with such a number of illustrations was a signal of rebellion in itself; we felt obscurely that Searles drawings begged authoritarian disapproval simply by existing in such profusion. That they also flayed their subjects with a merciless and unforgiving line both grotesque and precise, one never looked at the world the same way after his illustrations as one did before made it all the better.