Who's this?

[Ian Townsend]

I was writing something today and the work of this gentleman came up and made me smile. I then realised I had no idea what he looked like. Great face! Who is he?

http://i168.photobucket.com/albums/u177/Pattrick_104_2007/whos_this_1_zps69c7b528.jpg

Clue: He is not a musician.

If there are no takers I'll post a clue up later tomorrow.

[eruditio]

He looks very sprightly and has deep laugh lines. He's got to be a humorist of some sort. Comedy playwright?

[Ian Townsend]

Oooooohhh ball park!
Kind of.
With one thing you said.

hello clouds, hello sky

[Col Wolfe]

He passed away last year, I believe :(

[Carlos]

He passed away last year, I believe :(

Yes, 30th December 2011.

http://artblahblah.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/StTrinians.jpg

[Ian Townsend]

Carlos is a swot and we suspekt he kepe dollies at home. chiz.
(well done!)

I was really struck by what a cheeky face he had. I hope I look like that in about 25 years time.

Belated RIP Ronald Searle. Dude. :cool:

[Carlos]

I just did a search with the words your wrote and there it was. He died at 91, hope he had a good life. He do really have a cheeky face.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02098/Ronald-Searle_2098348b.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iKN4d0IzhdM/ULv-Z-P3tWI/AAAAAAAAPp0/2vU_KCQsKOw/s1600/1.-Ronald-Searle-2010.jpeg

[ironheadrat]

hope he had a good life. [/IMG]

I think it probably improved after he was liberated from the Changi POW camp where he went down to 40 kgs and contracted malaria and beri beri.

Can't find any photos of Geoffrey Willans, who as any fule kno, actually wrote the books and died 50 years earlier than his partner.

[ironheadrat]

I suspect that having a cheeky face was a distinct disadvantage in a brutal prison camp run by fanatical disciplinarians.
According to Primo Levi and other sources it was the little wiry ones who were most likely to survive the camps. Searle looks the type. I'd have been fucked.

[auxillary_output]

I suspect that having a cheeky face was a distinct disadvantage in a brutal prison camp run by fanatical disciplinarians.
According to Primo Levi and other sources it was the little wiry ones who were most likely to survive the camps. Searle looks the type. I'd have been fucked.
Extraordinary story.

This Wikipedia summary about Searle in the prison camp makes uncomfortable reading.

Although Searle published the first St Trinian's cartoon in the magazine Lilliput in 1941, his professional career really begins with his documentation of the brutal camp conditions of his period as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese in World War II in a series of drawings that he hid under the mattresses of prisoners dying of cholera. Searle recalled, "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." But Searle survived, along with approximately 300 of his drawings. Liberated late in 1945, Searle returned to England where he published several of the drawings in fellow prisoner Russell Braddon's The Naked Island. Another of Searle's fellow prisoners later recounted, "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 aren’t revolting, 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."[3]
Most of these drawings appear in his 1986 book, Ronald Searle: To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939-1945.[4] In the book, Searle also wrote of his experiences as a prisoner, including the day he woke up to find a dead friend on either side of him, and a live snake underneath his head:
"You can’t have that sort of experience without it directing the rest of your life. I think that’s why I never really left my prison cell, because it gave me my measuring stick for the rest of my life... Basically all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo."

[Ian Townsend]

In the book, Searle also wrote of his experiences as a prisoner, including the day he woke up to find a dead friend on either side of him, and a live snake underneath his head:
"You can’t have that sort of experience without it directing the rest of your life. I think that’s why I never really left my prison cell, because it gave me my measuring stick for the rest of my life... Basically all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo."


Jesus H that's grim. Thanks for posting though.