Hands up the girl who burnt down the east wing last night

[sovay]

Ronald Searle. I was in college before I'd heard of St. Trinian's and graduate school before I was introduced to Molesworth. What we had in the house when I was growing up was Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle (1981), which traumatized me slightly at an impressionable age with its enthusiastic renderings of "The Irish Ballad" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park." I don't have even the marginal artistic skills I'd need to send him off in the appropriate fashion, so all I can say is: ave atque vale, as any fule kno; I'm off to knock somebody's head in with a hockey stick and set something on fire.

Donald Swann with Charlotte Mitchell & Shirley Hall, "Surly Girls"

Hail St. Trinian's Senior High!
Here's to our motto 'Do or Die!'
Kick the girls and make them cry!
Up! St. Trinian's girls!

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A fellow PoW, the Australian writer Russell Braddon, remarked that they would only have known that Searle was dead if he had stopped drawing. "If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that are not revolting," Braddon wrote, "calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being."

That's an artist.

[sovay]

That's an artist.

I had known that about him vaguely; not the details.