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

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh, not Ronald Searle! Damn.

I love his stuff dearly.

Nine

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

May he rest in peace.

...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.

An appropriate tribute, that, I reckon. Please be careful as you're doing these things.

...was Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer with Not Enough Drawings by Ronald Searle (1981)...

Sounds like a match made in Heaven. Okay, well, maybe not there, exactly... I think I'm going to have to ILL it, in any event.

[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.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

The obituaries have been obsessing about St Trinians, while admitting that Searle grew to detest it (because, I think, it eclipsed everything else he did); so thank you for this reminder of other things.

Molesworth was my first exposure to Searle; I also imprinted on his illustrations for The Thirteen Clocks, and was shocked to discover that they were not the originals...

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Damn. That's a great pity. My aunt had one of the Molesworth books in her bungalow; I liked it very much, and the St Trinian films, as a kid. I rewatched Belles again recently, and Alistair Sim was as good as I'd remembered.