British cartoonist Ronald Searle, the creator of the willfully wicked schoolgirls of St Trinian’s who amused generations of Britons, has died, his family said on Tuesday. He was 91.
Searle was a prolific illustrator who drew for The New Yorker, Punch and Walt Disney, but it was the fictional girls’ boarding school where the students ran riot that most captured the public imagination.
The long-legged, leering schoolgirls drank, smoked and generally cut a swath of destruction; their weapon-wielding antics were colored by Searle’s morbid sense of humor. His satire of the venerable English school system struck a chord, launching a series of hit films, including one recent incarnation starring Colin Firth, Gemma Arterton and Russell Brand.
Searle’s secret, as one early profile noted, was to turn “the very epitome of decency and polite tradition for every right-thinking Englishman” into “a place of terror more hellish than anything conceived since the days of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel.”
Searle’s dark streak may well have been informed by his experiences as a soldier during World War II. Born in Cambridge on March 3, 1920, his promising career as a cartoonist was interrupted by his capture by the Japanese in Singapore. He spent the rest of the conflict under atrocious conditions as a prisoner of war, but somehow managed to keep drawing despite beatings and bouts of malaria and beriberi.
His drawings of camp life were published following his liberation in 1945 in fellow prisoner Russell Braddon’s account of his own captivity, The Naked Island.
St Trinian’s sly schoolgirls made him famous, but Searle long insisted that the students were just “a small part of my work.”
He designed cover art for The New Yorker and a series of editorial cartoons for France’s Le Monde newspaper. He designed wry, occasionally absurd advertisements for Church’s shoes and US Rubber. His Molesworth books, set in the fictional St Custard’s, also proved popular.
However, St Trinian’s refused to die, despite Searle’s attempt to draw a line under the series by having the girls’ blow up their school with an atom bomb.
In a statement, Searle’s family said that he died “peacefully in his sleep” on Friday in the small city of Draguignan in southern France following a short illness.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately made clear on Tuesday. The statement said Searle had requested a “private cremation with no fuss and no flowers.”
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was