St
Trinian's is a British gag cartoon comic strip series, created and drawn by
Ronald Searle from 1946 until 1952. The cartoons all centre on a boarding
school for girls, where the teachers are sadists and the girls are juvenile
delinquents. The series was Searle's most famous work and inspired a popular
series of comedy films.
Searle
published his first St Trinian's School cartoon in 1941 in the magazine
Lilliput. Shortly afterward he entered the military as World War II raged on.
He was captured at Singapore and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the
Japanese. After the war, in 1946 Searle started making new cartoons about the
girls, but the content was much darker compared to the earlier years.[2]
The school
is the antithesis of the type of posh girls' boarding school depicted by Enid
Blyton or Angela Brazil; its female pupils are bad and often well armed, and
mayhem is rife. The schoolmistresses are also disreputable. Cartoons often
showed dead bodies of girls who had been murdered with pitchforks or succumbed
to violent team sports, sometimes with vultures circling; girls drank, gambled
and smoked. It is reputed that the gymslip style of dress worn by the girls was
closely modelled on the school uniform of James Allen's Girls' School (JAGS) in
Dulwich, which Searle's daughter Kate attended.
In the
1950s, films were developed that were based on the cartoon series. These
comedies implied that the girls at the school were the daughters of dubious
characters, such as gangsters, crooks, and shady bookmakers. The institution is
often referred to as a "female borstal", as if it were a reform
school.
The
inspiration
During 1941
Searle had gone to the artists' community in the village of Kirkcudbright.
Whilst visiting the family Johnston, he made a drawing to please their two
schoolgirl daughters, Cécilé and Pat, (their school had been evacuated to New
Gala House in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders owing to the war). Searle was
puzzled as to why two schoolgirls should seem so keen to return to their
school, an Academy for Young Ladies in Dalkeith Road known as St Trinnean's.
The school was of the experimental sort, and allowed its pupils a certain
degree of freedom and autonomy in their own educational choices. The school's
original building is now part of the University of Edinburgh.
Searle's St
Trinian's was based on two independent girls' schools in Cambridge – Perse
School for Girls, now known as the co-educational Stephen Perse Foundation, and
St Mary's School for girls, formerly a convent. Growing up in Cambridge, Searle
regularly saw the girls on their way to and from school; they originally
inspired his cartoons and characters. The Perse School for Girls' Archive area
holds several original St Trinian's books, given to the school by Ronald
Searle. He also based the school partly on the former Cambridgeshire High
School for Girls (now Long Road Sixth Form College).
During his
BBC interview Searle agreed that the cruelty depicted at St Trinian's derived
partly from his captivity during World War II but stressed that he included it
only because the ignoble aspect to warfare in general had become more widely
known.
Books
Hurrah for
St Trinian's (1948)
The Female
Approach (1950)
Back to the
Slaughterhouse (1952)
The Terror
of St Trinians or Angela's Prince Charming (1952; text by Timothy Shy, pen-name
for D. B. Wyndham-Lewis)
Souls in
Torment (1953)
Film
adaptations
In the
1950s, a series of St Trinian's comedy films was made, featuring well-known
British actors, including Alastair Sim (in drag as the headmistress, and also
playing her brother); George Cole as spiv "Flash Harry", Joyce
Grenfell as Sgt Ruby Gates, a beleaguered policewoman; and Richard Wattis and
Eric Barker as the civil servants at the Ministry of Education for whom the
school is a source of constant frustration and nervous breakdowns. Searle's
cartoons appeared in the films' main title design.
In the
films the school became embroiled in various shady enterprises, thanks mainly
to Flash, and, as a result, was always threatened with closure by the Ministry.
(In the last of the original four, this became the "Ministry of
Schools", possibly because of fears of a libel action from a real Minister
of Education.) The first four films form a chronological quartet, and were
produced by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. They had earlier produced The
Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a stylistically similar school comedy,
starring Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Richard Wattis, Guy
Middleton, and Bernadette O'Farrell, all of whom later appeared in the St
Trinian's series, often playing similar characters.
Barchester
and Barset were used as names for the fictional towns near which St Trinian's
School was supposedly located in the original films. In Blue Murder at St
Trinian's, a signpost was marked as 2 miles to Barset, 8 miles to Wantage,
indicating a location in what was then Berkshire, now Oxfordshire.
St
Trinian's is depicted as an unorthodox girls' school where the younger girls
wreak havoc and the older girls express their femininity overtly, turning their
shapeless schoolgirl dress into something sexy and risqué by the standards of
the times. St Trinian's is often invoked in discussions about groups of
schoolgirls running amok.
The St
Trinian's girls themselves come in two categories: the Fourth Form, most
closely resembling Searle's original drawings of ink-stained, ungovernable
pranksters, and the much older Sixth Form, sexually precocious to a degree that
may have seemed alarming to some in 1954.
In the
films, the Fourth Form includes a number of much younger girls who are the most
ferocious of them all. It is something of a rule of thumb that the smaller a St
Trinian's is, the more dangerous she is—especially when armed, most commonly
with a lacrosse or hockey stick—though none of them can ever be considered
harmless.
In the
first two films, St Trinian's is presided over by the genial Miss Millicent
Fritton (Sim in drag), whose philosophy is summed up as: "In other schools
girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls
leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared." Later
other headmistresses included Dora Bryan in The Great St Trinian's Train
Robbery.
In December
2007, a new film, St Trinian's, was released. The cast included Rupert Everett,
Colin Firth, Russell Brand, Lily Cole, Talulah Riley, Stephen Fry, and Gemma
Arterton.[9] Reviews were mixed. A second new St Trinian's film, St Trinian's
2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold, was released in 2009.
Published 3
January 2012
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-16391857
British
cartoonist Ronald Searle, best known for creating the fictional girls' school
St Trinian's, has died aged 91.
His
daughter Kate Searle said in a statement that he "passed away peacefully
in his sleep" in a hospital in France.
Searle's
spindly cartoons of the naughty schoolgirls first appeared in 1941, before the
idea was adapted for film.
The first
movie version, The Belles of St Trinian's, was released in 1954.
Joyce
Grenfell and George Cole starred in the film, along with Alastair Sim, who
appeared in drag as headmistress Millicent Fritton.
Searle also
provided illustrations the Molesworth series, written by Geoffrey Willans.
The gothic,
line-drawn cartoons breathed life into the gruesome pupils of St Custard's
school, in particular the outspoken, but functionally-illiterate Nigel
Molesworth "the goriller of 3B".
Searle's
work regularly appeared in magazines and newspapers, including Punch and The
New Yorker.
'Unabashed
ambition'
Aside from
his schoolday stories, he was a savage satirist, and some of his darker
material was informed by his time as a prisoner of war during World War II.
There, he
worked on the infamous "Railway of Death" - a Japanese project to
create a rail link between Thailand and Burma, the construction of which led to
the death of more than 100,000 labourers, including 16,000 Allied prisoners.
Some of the
work he created whilst being held captive is displayed at the Imperial War
Museum in London.
Cartoonist
Gerald Scarfe paid tribute to Searle, whom he described as his "hero".
He said:
"He was clever and he was funny and he could draw. A lot of cartoonists
come up with an idea first but Ronald could really draw."
However, he
added that Searle's most famous creations were a "millstone around his
neck".
He told the
BBC: "He created St Trinian's, which we all loved, and he despised it
because he couldn't get away from it and of course he did many, many other
things."
Guardian
cartoonist Steve Bell said Searle's work stood out for its "genuine wit,
intelligence and unabashed ambition".
Anita
O'Brien, curator at the Cartoon Museum, said Searle was "absolutely
unique".
She added:
"He really was one of the most important cartoonists, not just in Britain,
but in the rest of the world.
"Many
people were influenced by his work. He did so many things, he was so versatile,
so talented, so prolific. He will be incredibly missed and there was no one
else like him."
Chris
Beetles, who held several exhibitions of Searle's work at his gallery, said:
"He had become the yardstick by which all those professionals in his trade
judged themselves, and his witty draughtsmanship was the standard to which they
aspired.
"Over
my 40-year collecting and art dealing lifetime, I have never encountered a
cartoonist with his consistency of drawing ability, and such an inventive range
of humour from burlesque to surrealism."
'Comic
anarchism'
Across his
career, Searle won a number of awards, including prizes from America's National
Cartoonists' Society and France's prestigious Legion d'Honneur in 2007.
But St
Trinian's was his most enduring work - spawning five films between 1954 and
1980.
After a
27-year hiatus, the series was revived in 2007, with Rupert Everett in the
headmistress role.
The movie
also starred Talulah Riley, Jodie Whittaker and Gemma Arterton, making her film
debut.
A sequel,
St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold, was released two years later.
Simon
Winder, from Penguin the company that published St Trinian's said: "We are
all extremely sad to hear of Ronald's death. He was a marvellous, remarkable
man and a great artist.
"I can
think of nobody who did more to ridicule and undermine 1950s Britain and St
Trinian's and Molesworth will endure forever as masterpieces of comic
anarchism."
A full
statement from Searle's family read as follows: "Ronald William Fordham
Searle, born 3 March 1920, passed away peacefully in his sleep, after a short
illness, with his children, Kate and John, and his grandson, Daniel, beside
him, on 30 December 2011 in Draguignan, France.
"He requested a private cremation with no fuss and no flowers."
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