Ronald Searle

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Ronald William Fordham Searle (born March 3, 1920) is an English cartoonist. Searle trained at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, currently known as Anglia Ruskin University.

He is the creator of, among other things, St Trinian's School and co-author (with Geoffrey Willans) of the Molesworth tetralogy.

He was born in Cambridge, to parents Willie and Nellie (his father was a porter at Cambridge Railway Station), and he started drawing at the age of five and left school at the age of fifteen. When World War II broke out, he enlisted, and joined the Royal Engineers. He trained for two years in the United Kingdom, and, in 1941, published the first St Trinian's cartoon in the art magazine Lilliput. In January 1941, he was stationed in Singapore. After Singapore fell to the Japanese, he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle. He spent the rest of the war a prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then working on the Siam-Burma railway. While a prisoner, he made drawings of camp life, which he hid under the mattresses of prisoners suffering from cholera. He was liberated in 1945, and took the surviving drawings home with him and published them in The Naked Island written by fellow captive Russell Braddon.

He married Kaye Webb in 1947. They had twins, Kate and Johnny. Searle produced an extraordinary volume of work during the 1950s: drawings for Punch, cartoons for the Tribune, the Sunday Express and the News Chronicle, along with more St Trinian's books, Molesworth, as well as travel books in collaboration with the humorist Alex Atkinson, animation for Disney, and advertisements, posters etc. He received recognition for his work, including the National Cartoonist Society Advertising and Illustration Award in 1959 and 1965, the Reuben Award in 1960, their Illustration Award in 1980, and their Advertising Award in 1986 and 1987.

In 1961 he left England and his family, and moved to Paris, where he subsequently married Monica Koenig. In France, he worked more on painting, and less on cartoons, leading to a series of paintings entitled "Anatomies and Decapitations". He continued to work in a broad range of media, and produced books (including his well-known cat books), animations for films, even designs for medals.

His work has had considerable influence on later cartoonists, including Matt Groening, among others.

In 2006 he was the subject of a BBC documentary on his life and work by Russell Davies.