Ronald Searle: A Biography

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Exhibition:Ronald Searle Exhibit

Author:Russell Davies

Features: Hardcover

Ronald Searle is perhaps England's most famous cartoonist, and the professionals' choice. Ask any contemporary cartoonist who is the greatest in the post-war era and the unanimous reply will probably be - Ronald Searle! He started work as a solicitor's clerk, and then joined the hire purchase department of the co-operative Society, studying in the evenings and later full-time at the Cambridge Daily News from the age of fifteen. Enlisting in the Royal Engineers at the outbreak of the Second World War, he spent time in Kirkcudbright, where he encountered evacuees from St. Trinian's, a progressive girls' school situated in Edinburgh. This resulted in his first cartoon for Lilliput, published in October 1941, and later developed into one of his most famous creations, through a series of books and their cinematic spin-offs. Remarkably, he survived the horrific experiences of the Changi Camp, Singapore as a Japanese prisoner-of-war and managed to produce a visual record of life in a prison camp. On his return to England in 1945, he exhibited the surviving pictures at the Cambridge School of Art, and published Forty Drawings. The exhibition and volume together established his reputation as one of Britain's most powerful draughtsmen, and led to several opportunities to record the atmosphere of post-war Europe. His contributed to Punch and these drawings crystallised in, The Female Approach (1949). Throughout the fifties, he produced a large variety of illustrations, which together seemed to present a guide to life in Britain in the 1950's. This fascinating book is a new edition of Russel Davies' definitive biography. It includes updated exhibition listings and a bibliography.