St Trinian’s became an albatross round Searle’s neck

JUST DON’T mention St Trinian’s. Ronald Searle, the artist who created the anarchic girls’ school where every pupil was an accomplished terrorist, spent the rest of his life as a fugitive from its popularity. That was a long time: the first book appeared in 1948 when he was 28 and when he died last year he was 91.

So Searle, described as the greatest cartoonist and illustrator of the 20th century, was unique in another way – probably the only man who couldn’t abide his bestknown creation.

William Hewison, a former art editor of Punch Magazine to which Searle was a regular contributor, wrote in “The Cartoon Connection” (1977), his book on the art of the cartoonists: “The St Trinian’s albatross still hangs heavily around his neck even though he stopped producing those cartoons umpteen years ago.

“The power of his satirical drawings and the excellence of his caricatures are properly recognised in certain quarters, of course, but the public at large clings resolutely to those hordes of rampaging schoolgirls.”

Searle’s near-contemporary, the political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe best-known perhaps for his collaborations with the rock band Pink Floyd, described RS as his hero, the man whose work influenced his future career. But, he has said, Searle despised St Trinian’s. He couldn’t get away from it, yet his work covered so many other fields, from book illustration to brilliant pen portraits of theatrical greats to reportage.

So unfortunately typecast, like one or two of the actors he caricatured, Searle once said modestly about his St Trinian’s drawings: “I think they succeeded because it was the first black humour in England after the war and a change from all the other Punch stuff.”

This week an exhibition entitled “Ronald Searle Remembered” opens at the Chris Beetles Gallery in St James’s, London, a distinctive gallery specialising in the work of the great cartoonists and illustrators. These original drawings and paintings are framed and hung with the care and dignity you expect to find with, say, a national collection yet it’s the first gallery I’ve gone round trying hard to stifle laughter. (Unless you include the more bizarre “installations” of the Tate Modern . . .).

I won’t be able to visit the Searle exhibition, one of several the gallery has mounted. But the Chris Beetles website brings the artist’s genius into your home and you can browse through more than 400 drawings and paintings, from his sketches made clandestinely while a prisoner of war of the Japanese, working on the Burma railway, to post-war social satire and advertising shots.

Inevitably, the ghastly girls of St Trinian’s are here too. To compound the man’s misery (and increase his fame) no fewer than five films were made between 1954 and 1980 based on the beastly theme. The first, The Belles of St Trinian’s, starred the jolly hockey-sticks persona of Joyce Grenfell with Alastair Sim in drag playing the headmistress.

With the Suez crisis looming in 1956, Ronald Searle was called back to arms in the oddest way. The War Office asked him to join the Department of Psychological warfare, devising propaganda leaflets that would undermine the morale of the Egyptian military and public.

So off he went to Cyprus to terrify Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and those frightful anti-imperialists who seemed to believe that because the Suez Canal cut through Egyptian territory it didn’t actually belong to the British.

With his deadly pen, RS produced such images as Nasser crouching, terrified, in a trench while British armaments exploded righteously in the sky above.

In the end, none of these lethal tracts was distributed to the Egyptian public (although, apparently, you could find them for sale in the market place after the hostilities: nice one!). And the inevitable happened: the Suez Canal turned out to be Egyptian after all.

Asked afterwards about his part in the adventure, Searle said: “If Nasser came to hear about it he would die laughing, making it easier for the British to recapture the canal.”

Although having a quintessentially English sense of humour, RS moved to France in 1961 where he remarried and settled in the village of Tourtour in Haute Provence, away from pesky interviewers (he was a very private person) and miles from St Trinian’s School for Girls.

His death was reported with these headlines: “St Trinian’s Creator Dead...” (The Sun): “St Trinian’s Cartoonist Searle...” (Channel 4): “St Trinian’s Creator...” (Reuters): “St Trinian’s Artist Searle...” (Irish Times).

Those spiteful girls got him in the end.

Those spiteful girls got him in the end.