Published in 1956, ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes’ was Angus Wilson’s second novel, and the second of his books to bear the wonderful art of Ronald Searle, his first novel being ‘Hemlock and After’ (1952).
I love Searle’s art: a scribbly, scratchy art which always hints at something sinister, unsavoury going just beneath the surface but which forces its way to the surface of the characters. Take, for example, the terrible schoolgirls of St. Trinians. They may be young, but their faces display very little youth or innocence.
Searle was born in Cambridge, England in 1920 and trained in art at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, abandoning his studies dat the start of the second World War, during which he was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned in the infamous Changi prison. During his time in prison he honed his skills by sketching the horrors of the camps:
“I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on.”
Most of these drawings appear in his 1986 book, Ronald Searle: To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939–1945
In the post war years Searle went on to produce a massive amount of work, from the terrible school girls of St. Trinians to drawing for many magazines, titles for films (‘Those Magnificant Men in their Flying Machines, ‘The Happiest Days of Your Life’ and ‘Monti Carlo or Bust’) and his work made many, many books beautiful.
Searle married the journalist Kaye Webb who edited Puffin books during one of its most successful periods (and during which I believe it produced its most beautiful books) from 1961 to 1979. They worked together on an interesting and more serious work, ‘Refugees 1960’, which saw Webb put words to Searle’s searing sketches depicting the plight of refugees at that time.
wordsandpictures 