The Terror of St Trinian's and Other Drawings - By Ronald Searle Page 0,3

of St Trinian’s, where staff and pupils are on the same side, as in Beachcomber’s Narkover.3

I don’t think much need be made of this: he suffered horrors, and may be felt to have dwelt on them enough at the time. Besides, he was to pay due homage to his comrades in his 1984 exhibition and book, To the Kwai and Back, which contains a good selection of his wartime drawings. (But not the relatively lighthearted cartoons he drew at the time, suitable enough for Punch; these figure in the biography, along with one drawing, in which various dishes, labelled from A to Z, are yearningly pictured; an idea, or an echo, of this is given in the improbably lavish banquet shown being eaten by a mother and father on page 92 of the Penguin Molesworth. Caption: ‘I think sometimes parents may wonder whether we are worth the sacrifices they make for us.’)

What his war did to his politics we can only guess at. He has kept fairly silent on the subject, allowing us to hopefully infer rather than straightforwardly deduce. He joined the army in April 1939, in a way that even left-leaning intellectuals and artists of the time did not. He gives no reasons in To the Kwai and Back. He was not a member of the privileged classes by any means, but not lumpenproletariat either; it is probable that he was an early volunteer against fascism rather than for the army, and while for all I know there have been many interviews with him in which he has said as much, as far as I have seen he has been reticent on the subject. He was, over all, an artist. But artists, as we understand the term, do not often sign up for active service. Can we glimpse his attitude in the section of The Rake’s Progress devoted to The Poet, where the hero both signs up for the International Brigades yet finds himself strangely captivated by the prominent buttocks of the young men in the Hitler Youth? It’s certainly just a dig at Spender, not at all earthed by Spender’s caricature further into the sequence. He has said that one work that changed his artistic direction was Marcel Ray’s monograph on George Grosz, and, mutatis mutandis, there are occasions when he draws very much like an English Grosz, that is, a Grosz living in a society whose hypocrisy is more genteel than murderous.

Post-war, his career flourished. (I refer readers who want chapter and verse to Russell Davies’s excellent biography.) Someone with a good graphic hand is never in as dire danger of starvation as a writer. He looks, in photographs, like the kind of semi-bohemian artist he occasionally ribs gently in his work, goateed, wearing turtle-necks and a lot of black; he had, for the times, an unconventional love life. But you cannot deduce from this an attitude of relentless and all-embracing anti-conformity. He subscribes neither to the class struggle nor to the vested interests of the gentry, and from time to time has taken pot-shots at each, happy to ridicule upwardly mobile Trades Unionists as well as Tories. The Trade Union Leader’s downfall in the Rake’s Progress series has the rubric ‘Knighted. Weeps at Party Conference. Cries “these hands are worker’s hands.”’ A cartoon in Tribune of 1949 shows a tiny, goateed Searle sketching at the Conservative Party conference while a pop-eyed, sclerotic Tory glares at him; the caption: ‘By God – if I had a horsewhip I’d horsewhip ‘im.’ Another Tribune cartoon of 1951 shows a fur-coated grande dame carrying a nasty-looking peke, asking a fed-uplooking butcher: ‘You stand there, talking about fair shares, without understanding the basic rules of humanity. How do you expect my little dog to live?’ (At the same time, he was contributing to the Sunday Express, but then so did the notionally much more left-wing Carl Giles.) He was contributing to Punch, Tribune, the SE, Lilliput, Circus, Seven and Our Time (‘ephemeral magazines of the left’, in Davies’s phrase). He was capable of producing, around Suez, some quite shameful anti-Nasser propaganda leaflets, at the request of an old friend, Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, who recruited him for the Psychological Warfare Department.

The St Trinian’s drawings, with a text by D. B. Wyndham Lewis, became a huge success; and an imprisoning one; interviewed by a young Quentin Blake for the BBC in 1951 he was already intimating that he had had enough. Perhaps St Trinian’s was too much of a one-joke routine; but