Here’s to Searle, the captain of cartoonists

The business of cartooning is in a pretty perilous state now that we have lost the captain of the ship. Ronald Searle was a cartoonist who could also draw — a rare thing. After the war, he became famous for a series of drawings he did for ‘Lilliput’ called St Trinian’s. The girls Searle created did the most appalling things to each other and to their teachers. But it wasn’t really about school-children. Searle was in fact using St Trinian’s as a way of exorcising the horrors he encountered whilst a prisoner of the Japanese, building railways in a chain gang.

After the success of St Trinian’s, he ran away from England to rid himself of the naughty school girl tag and became famous for his documentary drawings. But those girls will haunt him forever, and it is for his St Trinian’s cartoons that he’ll be remembered, because they were brilliant.