Ronald Searle

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2005

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley travels to Provence in the south of France to meet the illustrator and satirist Ronald Searle in his first recorded interview in more than 30 years. Ronald Searle is arguably Britain's foremost graphic satirist, though he has not lived in this country since 1961 and likes to comment that most people in Britain now think he's dead. He is best-known as the creator of St Trinian's, the horrible, suspender-wearing schoolgirls who devote more time to gambling, torture and arson than they do their lessons.

Ronald Searle was born in 1920 in Cambridge and drew obsessively from an early age. At the age of just 15 he had his first cartoon published in the local paper, The Cambridge Daily News and his career blossomed in the mid-to-late 1930s. However, in 1939 he joined up and after two years of training he was posted to Singapore. He says that for a month they were 'running backwards' through the jungle before being captured by the Japanese and he spent the rest of the war as a P.O.W. They were traumatic years - he felt driven to draw as a way of recording what was happening around him - but his work led to him being singled out as a trouble-maker and as a result he was assigned to work on the infamous 'death railway' that the Japanese were building between Thailand and Burma. Ninety-five per cent of those working on it died but, despite coming close to death on several occasions, Ronald Searle survived.

In 1961 he left Britain for a new life in France - one where he was not known as the creator of St Trinians - but where he could concentrate on his political, satirical drawings and reportage. Now aged 85, he still regularly produces cartoons and illustrations for The New Yorker and Le Monde. His work can currently been seen at the Imperial War Museum in London.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Champagne Song by Johann Strauss Book: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Lawrence Goldman Luxury: Champagne (the best possible)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My Cosway this week is an artist and illustrator. He describes himself as a graphic satirist.
0:35.9	For the past 36 years he's lived here in the French village of Torture on the roof of the
0:41.4	VAR in Provence, where at the age of 85 he's still working.
0:46.0	These days it's mainly for the newspaper Lomond producing effective a pursuit on political chicanery and corporate greed. In the 1950s he was one of the most
0:56.0	famous men in Britain a stalwart of punch magazine illustrator of the glorious
1:00.7	Molesworth books and creator of that female hell on earth of the
1:03.3	female molesworth books and creator of that female hell on earth,
1:04.8	St Trinians. But the most important event in his life
1:08.8	happened even earlier than that. At the age of 22,
1:12.4	a sapper in the Royal Engineers he was captured by the Japanese
1:16.2	and put to work on the Burma Railway, a working death camp full of hideous brutality
1:21.2	and terrible disease where 95% of the prisoners died.
1:26.0	Throughout it all he drew to help himself survive.
1:30.4	Everything goes back to being a prisoner, he says. You can't have that sort of experience without
1:35.7	it affecting the rest of your life. He is Ronald Searle.
1:40.9	So here you live Ronald, high in the hills of Provence. You've lived here in this village
1:46.2	for the past 36 years. In fact, you spent more than half your life now, I think, in France,
1:50.1	44 years. Do you miss us? Do you miss the old country?
1:54.0	Well I don't miss any particular country because I think the point is if you're a
1:59.6	freelance artist and you're commenting on the world around you, you've got to live on an island.
	...

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