Searle & Sprod: a tale of two jailmates
Cartoonists Ronald Searle and George Sprod were both inspired by hellish Changi Prison – but Sprod is forgotten, says Nick Newman
Conflict and comedy go hand in hand. War has a habit of producing jokers – the First World War spawned the comic trench masterpiece The Wipers Times, and the Second World War saw the genius of Spike Milligan explode in the foothills of Monte Cassino. Meanwhile in the Far East, the fall of Singapore brought together two soldiers with a passion for cartoons: Searle and Sprod.
Surprisingly, Sprod was not a pseudonym. George Napier Sprod was an Australian, who arrived in Britain in 1949. He visited the offices of Punch with four drawings, and left with none. Within six years, he was a fixture in the magazine.
Ronald Searle was already a Punch regular and well on the way to international success. But this was not the first time they had contributed to the same publication. They had met in the most gruelling of circumstances, as prisoners of war in Changi Prison, and their shared experiences were to leave a lasting legacy for comic art.
Both artists drew cartoons from their youth. Sprod was published aged 13, in the Adelaide Mail. At 19, he cycled 400 miles to Sydney to try his luck as a cartoonist. He submitted drawings to Smith’s Weekly. When war broke out, he lied about his age to enlist in the Royal Australian Artillery.
Searle first drew for the Cambridge Daily News at 15, and was paid half a guinea (52.5p). Having enlisted, he began submitting cartoons to Lilliput – where Assistant Editor (and future wife) Kaye Webb accepted his drawings of anarchic schoolgirls, based on the daughters of friends who attended a progressive academy – called St Trinnean’s, later reinvented by Searle as St Trinian’s.
Following the fall of Singapore in 1942, Searle was incarcerated in the hellhole of Changi Prison. Built by the British in 1936 to accommodate 600 inmates, it was now crammed with some 10,000 POWS. Among them was Gunner Sprod.
Drawing alleviated the boredom of captivity. At the same time, survival depended on ruthless self-interest – and that meant trading artistic talents.
Sprod wrote and illustrated Narrowminded News, holding ‘editorial conferences’ with his co-editor as they lugged baskets of earth. It featured camp gossip, skits on officers and items about frog-racing. Ten issues were published up to Christmas 1942, by which time Searle and Sprod were working together, providing murals for the Flying Dutchman Snack Bar (sago balls in grated coconut a speciality).
They also contributed to The Chunkel (named after an Asian hoe). It was published by Sergeant Jack Wood (later the Mayor of York) and examples have been preserved online by his family.
The collection provides an insight into the two cartoonists’ contrasting interests and styles. Searle produced a serious piece entitled ‘Art Today’, stating, ‘Great art is that which can arouse in the beholder the same splendid emotion that urged the artist to creation.’
On the opposite page, Sprod produced a larky article entitled ‘Drooling at the Flying Dutchman’: ‘It has been noticed that gurgling noises, smackings of lips, and other sounds indicative of relish, have been proceeding from the Flying Dutchman. These are the reactions of those unable to restrain their animal passions at the sight of the Searle and Sprod murals.’
In 1943, Sprod was sent to Siam as a night orderly in a hospital camp, producing Nuts and Jolts, a handwritten publication to amuse the patients and, said Sprod, ‘to prevent men from dropping their bundle’.
Searle had also been sent north, to work on the infamous Burma Railway. At Changi, he drew mildly subversive cartoons poking fun at generals, for a magazine called The Survivor. Its aim was to provoke debate, but Army chaplains took exception and had it banned. ‘That is one reason I got sent up to Siam,’ Searle later observed. ‘It upset the extremely conservative mentalities of our own administration.’
When the Japanese wanted groups to
send up north, the English took the opportunity to get rid of ‘troublemakers’. The horror of the Burma Railway was captured in the fictional film The Bridge on the River Kwai, yet Searle continued to draw, graphically cataloguing the beatings and torture. One attack on his hands put him in hospital. Said Searle, ‘There I lost all my friends.’
He traded pornographic drawings with his guards for paper, and survived beriberi, tropical ulcers and malaria. Down to six stone and at death’s door, he was transported in 1943 to Sime Road camp near Singapore racecourse, where he was reunited with Sprod.
Loet Velmans, a young Jewish Dutchman who escaped Nazi occupation only to be captured by the Japanese, recalled both men contributing to a Jewish publication. ‘Searle and Sprod were our Tweedledum and Tweedledee,’ he wrote. ‘Both spent the whole day sketching; both were extremely talented; and, of course, both were extremely thin.’
Both men began designing décor for the Barn Theatre (Hut 16), for Cinderella and the Magic Soya Bean and Rag Bag Revue. For his 24th birthday in 1944, Sprod drew Searle a card with a mournful caricature of Ronald imprisoned by candles on a birthday cake – a far cry from their usual diet. ‘Fried kitten,’ wrote Searle, ‘quite filling, good meal.’
Yet, despite such hardships, they and Jack Ward went on to produce The Exile, the most famous of the camp ‘newspapers’. Each copy – with a print run of just one – had a readership of 10,000. They produced ten editions within six months. After liberation, Searle’s involvement with The Exile won the admiration of Lord Mountbatten’s special adviser Tom Driberg, and dinner with Mountbatten.
Sprod, however, had moved on – determined to produce a publication more in tune with his Aussie mates. The result was Smoke-oh. Years later, Sprod published a collection of his POW cartoons and anecdotes in Bamboo Round My Shoulder: Changi, the Lighter Side.
Post-war, Searle returned to Britain with notebooks full of ideas – many of which were published in Lilliput and Punch – such as ‘Hand up the girl who burnt down the East Wing last night’, originally drawn in prison. He later said that, in its horrific way, his time in Changi was ‘a gift’, because of life models all around him, captive, stricken and dying. His harrowing drawings established him as a master of reportage.
His skills were much in demand: notably, he chronicled the trial of Adolf Eichmann for Life magazine. As the creator of St Trinian’s, illustrator of Molesworth and satirist for Le Monde, his international reputation was assured.
Sprod returned to Australia as a humble gagsmith for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Australian Women’s Weekly. Aged 29, he voyaged to England with his portfolio, linking up again with Searle, whom he followed to Lilliput and the News Chronicle.
Punch Editor Malcolm Muggeridge became an avid fan. He said of Sprod’s topical cartoons, ‘We don’t want to give our readers a snigger. We’re in for a blankety good belly laugh.’
Sprod provided many. His crude style evolved and became much more Searlelike, in baroque graphic style and tone. A classic cartoon depicted a smart hostess showing her guest to a bed covered with dogs, saying, ‘It’s a little chilly, so I’ve put an extra dog on your bed.’
Muggeridge described Sprod as short, stolid and enigmatic, adding, ‘I cannot imagine anyone not liking his drawings.’
Despite his popularity – the Duke of Edinburgh was a collector – Sprod is now largely forgotten. While Searle will go down in history as the father of black humour, and one of the greatest cartoonists of the 20th century, Sprod’s epitaph might be a line from his book of POW anecdotes: ‘Still and all, you’ve gotta have a laugh, ain’t you, mate?’