Ronald Searle, Singapore and St. Trinian’s

On December 30th we lost Ronald Searle, a man who brilliantly lampooned British society in the 1950s and created the two great post-war visions of the British education system!! – St Trinian’s and Molesworth. What many people don’t know (and everyone knows St Trinian’s) was that Searle was a POW in Singapore, first imprisoned in Changi jail and then being forced to work on the Burma-Siam Railway – the Death Railway of Bridge Over the River Kwai fame. Searle suffered horribly with beri-beri and malaria and saw many of his comrades die in the jungles of South East Asia through to his release in 1945.

Searle’s self-portrait of himself at the time of the surrender of Singapore

Searle’s drawings of life in Changi and on the Burma Railway were stunning and conveyed perhaps better than any other images or memoirs the horrors of the POW camps in the Far East. He drew while in captivity hiding his pictures under his mattress. He eventually produced over 300 drawings many of which first reached the public through being included in Russell Braddon’s memoir The Naked Island. More were made available in the 1986 book, Ronald Searle: To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939-1945. Some of his pictures can be seen in London’s Imperial War Museum. Some have also suggested that the skinny figures that typified Searle’s drawings of the St Trinian’s brats reflected his war-time familiarity with starving prisoners – the war, it seems, affected Searle’s work just as it did other famous internees such as JG Ballard.

The Terror of St Trinian’s and Other Drawings shows Searle’s repeated skinny girls