Cartoonist Ronald Searle
'One of the UK's most beloved cartoonists, Ronald Searle, creator of the tearaway girls' school St Trinian's, has died aged 91.'
The Guardian has a bio of his life in pictures.
He was young when he discovered his life's work. He began to draw at the age of five, attended evening classes, and won a scholarship to the Cambridge School of Art. During the Second World War, after breaking rocks for 16 hours a day while a prisoner of the Japanese, he defied danger and exhaustion to create poignant drawings by the flickering flames of a fire. That he and the drawings survived is remarkable.
On his return, Searle's wildly popular cartoons of St Trinian's girls and Molesworth confronted unjust authority with satire, laughter, and revenge. His mingling of horror with acute psychological insight and whimsical delight is not for the faint of heart, and he numbered most of the British public among his admirers.
Fans of the feline share his affection for cats, whom he portrayed in a series of books. Searle's output, feline and not, was staggering.
When his wife Monica was hospitalised with breast cancer in 1969, Searle drew a series of private cartoons of 'Mrs Mole' to cheer her up during her painful treatments and 'evoke the blissful future ahead'. The drawings, exhibited for the first time last year, show him at his most tender.
Ave atque Vale.
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