Month: September 2023

A Tribute to Ronald Searle

/ stidyatkusane / 2 Comments

If I had to name the two cartoonists who have “influenced” me the most in my career it would be Carl Giles and Ronald Searle even though their styles are poles apart.

It was Giles who first got me into cartooning.

As a child, my parents used to give me his annual Christmas present every year. His cartoons had an immediate impact on my youthful mind. I fell in love with his drawings of English towns and the countryside and the bustling, chaotic, lawless world of his “family”.

It all seemed so cosily, quintessentially British even though, at that stage, I had never been anywhere near the country. When I finally did and saw how accurate his portrayal was it only made me admire his genius more.

I discovered Ronald Searle a little later on and was equally enthralled. If Carl Giles made me decide I wanted to be a cartoonist, Ronald Searle, with his darker, more hard-hitting brand of, humour became the one I wanted to be like. Not for nothing has Searle been described as “the most joyously vengeful pictorial satirist since Cruikshank.”

A superb graphic artist with a decidedly quirky sense of humour, his trademark scratchy, ink-splattered-style of drawing and taste for the grotesque have proved to be hugely influential and he has been widely imitated by a whole range of cartoonists, among them Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman and the Americans Pat Oliphant, Jeff MacNelly and Mike Peters.

‘War and Patriotism’. The Great British Songbook

Searle, himself, often expressed surprise at people’s reaction to his, at times, heavily distorted caricatures. In the introduction to his book ‘Ronald Searle in Perspective,’ he wrote: “I had the inborn advantage of the eccentric, the abnormal seeming to me… perfectly normal and not at all a caricature of ‘proper’ behaviour as demanded by ‘them’ from outside.”

Born in England in 1920, Searle was forced to leave school at 15 because his family could not afford further education. Taking a job as a solicitor’s clerk, he financed his evening art classes out of his own earnings. While thus employed he started sending his cartoons to the Cambridge Daily News who were only too happy to publish them. In 1938 he won a full-time scholarship to a local art school.

Enlisting in the Territorial Army at the outbreak of the Second World War, Searle was captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the infamous ‘Death Railway’ from Siam to Burma where, along with his fellow POWs, he endured numerous harsh beatings at the hands of his captors (including one where they smashed his hands), starvation, dysentery, Dengue fever and malaria, as well as witnessing the death of many of his comrades.

Corpse at Bukit Timah, Singapore, January-February,1942

At significant personal risk to himself and using whatever scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, Searle set about portraying the squalid conditions of camp life; the harrowing set of drawings he produced during this period provided a uniquely important record of the horrors of war.

The publication of Searle’s wartime drawings was followed by the St Trinians series, for which he is still probably best known and whose legacy he came, in later years, to regard as something of a burden. Almost as well known were his illustrations for Geoffrey Willans’s series of books about the myopic schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, also known as ‘The Curse of St Custard’s’.

Searle’s wartime experiences undoubtedly affected his worldview and darkened his humour; under his scabrous pen forms began to billow, bulge and explode, lines stabbed and splattered. It also seems to have affected his attitude to his home country.

In 1961 he suddenly packed his bags and quit England for good, taking up residence with his second wife in a remote village in Haute Provence where he continued to develop his artistic range and powers of invention in a dazzling flow of cartoons, portrait caricatures, reportage pieces and illustrations for such popular books as The Rake’s Progress, From frozen North to Filthy Lucre, Searle’s Cats, The Square Egg, The King of Beasts and Other Creatures and The Illustrated Winespeak.

Elegant but lacks backbone. From The Illustrated Winespeak

Unquestionably, one of the most important cartoonists and social commentators of the past century, Ronald Searle’s drawings have come to be admired by his fellow cartoonists, the public, art critics and historians, and even by his victims. Refusing to recognise the limits imposed by decorum or good taste, he turned his art into a powerful – and amusing – weapon. He will be remembered, in the words of the writer Stephen Heller, as “a satiric magician, able with the flick of a pen to anthropomorphise the most unlikely beast into a reflection of man’s foibles.”

Book Review

/ stidyatkusane / 2 Comments

Published by Bookstorm

At its peak, the British Empire was the largest formal empire the world had ever seen. For better or worse it had a massive impact on history and helped shape the international order as we know it today. We still live in its shadow.

Amongst its many exports were its people. It is estimated that between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles and settled across the globe. The majority did not return.

Author Bryan Rostrom’s ancestors were part of this mass exodus like many English-speaking white South Africans. Lured by the promise of adventure or hoping to find a better life they scattered across the globe. One branch ended up in China during the Boxer Rebellion. His great-grandfather settled in Australia where he made a fortune in business, gathering, in the process, what appeared to be a priceless collection of paintings by the old masters – only for it to emerge, later, that he had been duped and they were mostly good forgeries. Alas, his vast wealth was quickly squandered by his offspring,

Fusing history with memoir, Rostrom uses his ancestor’s lives as the central plank in a fascinating study of 18th and 19th-century globalisation and an all-but vanished world, where colonial politics is interspersed with striking personalities and some entertaining anecdotes. A cherished family legend had it, for example, that a distinguished seafaring ancestor of his was eaten alive by a queen on the island of Tahiti. His subsequent research revealed a slightly less gruesome but no less fascinating tale

Both Rostrom’s grandparents opted to try their luck in South Africa although they were separated from each other by what the author refers to as “an abyss of class”. As editor of several influential papers, Lewis Rose got to rub shoulders with some of the richest, most powerful and most influential people in society. His views were heavily patronising (especially on the issue of race), decidedly jingoistic and very much representative of the British establishment at that time. His other grandfather, Bill Rostrom, was a more elusive character who became deeply involved in trade union activities. As a printer, he helped produce the financially strapped Communist Party “organ”.

The media business appears to have run in the family blood. An ex-South African amateur middleweight boxing champion and former war correspondent, Rostrom’s father lived a peripatetic life as a journalist, travelling the globe. His son followed in his footsteps. Coming of age under apartheid, in a society in which discrimination was still rife, he began to find his political views diverging from those of his ancestors (his father had also been an enthusiast of the Empire). At university, he became an activist although he happily admits he wasn’t very good at it. Like many (white) rebels at the time he experienced some uncertainty as to his real aims, especially as he was only too aware of the privileged status his skin colour afforded him. Unwilling to serve in the army he skipped the country and was later stripped of his South African citizenship for doing so.

He returned, after independence, to find a country grappling with a whole new set of challenges.

In trawling back through his family history, Rostrom does a brilliant job holding a mirror up to the social conventions and political beliefs of the day. Written with veteran assurance and brimming with believable characters and rich social detail, his concise, pithy and fast-paced narrative pedals along with never a dull paragraph.

Published by Jonathan Ball

The Anglo-Boer War, fought between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics, was one of the pivotal events in South African history. At the time, the Boers lacked a formal army but didn’t need one. They were tough and self-sufficient, they were excellent shots, skilled horsemen and they knew the country. The British, convinced of their natural superiority to these supposedly rough and unsophisticated farmers, would soon discover just how badly they had underestimated their opponents The conflict, most in Britain had believed would quickly and easily be won, would drag on for years as the Boers resorted to stubborn guerilla tactics.

Amongst those who answered the call to arms were four Free State farmers – the Moolman brothers, Michael, Chris, Pieter and Lool. Believing that God and justice were on their side, their decision to take up arms has not been a difficult one. Full of youthful enthusiasm and excited by the prospect of adventure, they marched off to battle with little idea of the ordeal that awaited them.

They would soon find themselves in the thick of battle. Chris, for example, would find himself fighting in the legendary Battle of Magersfontein – which turned out to be a stunning Boer victory although many of those participating in it had not realised it at the time – and Lool in Colesberg. In the end, though, all four were captured and sent to internment camps: Michael to Bermuda, Chris and Peter were exiled to Ceylon while Lool was held in Green Point Camp in Cape Town where he subsequently died.

For the Boers, used to a life of freedom and wide open spaces, life in the camps proved a humiliating experience, especially for the married men who suffered the most, separated from their loved ones. What saved those who did not succumb to disease was their pride and determination not to be crushed by the conditions.

Remarkably, three of the Moolman brothers kept diaries, the only known instance of this happening in the Boer War. These were passed down through the generations and eventually came into the hands of the author (whose husband is the grandson of Michael) who has used them as the basis for a stirring narrative of what turned out to be a courageous but doomed military endeavour.

In rescuing from obscurity the lives of these four ordinary Boer soldiers, she has managed to throw new light on both familiar and not-so-familiar events. Such an account was needed especially as most of the English-language books written after the war have tended to reflect the Anglophile position.