I was sorry to read in The New York Times yesterday that Ronald Searle had died. A contributor to several magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Le Monde, Punch and The New Yorker, he was often compared to the 18th century satirist, William Hogarth. But, his style, a mix of scratchy, minimalist pen and ink with brightly-coloured flourishes, was all his own.
He is best known for writing and illustrating the stories of the badly-behaved students at St. Trinian's, a fictional girls' school which spawned several film spin-offs. But, he must have grown tired of his creation because he eventually blew up the school in The Terror of St. Trinian's.
When I was at university I decorated the walls of my room with black and white photocopies of Searle's cats. You could tell he loved cats, giving them slightly human faces. But, he wasn't gushy about them. In that rough style of his, most of them look as if they've been pulled through a hedge.
I came across his work again as the poster artist for my favourite film, Withnail and I. But, I didn't put the cat illustrator and film artist together until I came to work at the library and found a copy of Ronald Searle in Perspective while I was shelf-reading one day.
Something I hadn't known about him was the time he spent in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. At 19 he had joined the Army as an architectural draughtsman, was sent to Singapore and captured soon after.
After working long hours in a quarry, Searle would use his drawing skill to document secretly the harsh conditions of Changi Prison which provided forced labour for building the Burma Railway, including the bridge over the River Kwai. He must have done this at great personal risk. This is what he told cartoonist Steve Bell:
"At times I was so ill that I couldn't draw at all. You're doing 16 hours a day rock breaking and you're exhausted. You come back and have a bowl of rice. You have no light, but you have fire, a big fire keeping the mountain lions away, and snakes perhaps, and by the light of the fire, I made the drawings. I didn't have a watch or anything, so you just lie down in the tent until you were dragged out the next morning to go back to the rock breaking. And so all these drawings, some of them very bad, were all I could do in a state of exhaustion."
His prison camp drawings were compiled in a book, To the Kwai and Back: war drawings 1939-1945.
He wrote his last book, Les Très Riches Heures de Mrs. Mole, to cheer up his wife during her chemotherapy sessions. She died of cancer just a few months ago. I guess he couldn't live without her. He was 91.
The library has over 50 books by Ronald Searle besides the ones I've listed above. If you only get the chance to look at one, make it Searle's Cats.
