Art-ology

I have taken up again my bid to collect all the Giles’ Cartoons. This is something I started years ago and which was postponed when we moved to Australia and since we returned in 2003, I didn’t pick up on it. I had only really got going and thus far have 12 of 50 books, the earliest of which goes back to 1953/54 and was the 10th series. The 1st series came out in 1946/47 and will probably be very expensive if I can find one.

I got my love of Giles from my father who had lots of Giles Annuals at home throughout my boyhood and I used to adore re-reading them, normally once a year. The humour and detail of the drawing cast a crucial light on my understanding of Twentieth Century British history after the war years. The Giles family saw through every twist and turn of the changes to society, a stationary point around which the world turned.

Giles did his Work From Home, he would scan the newspapers and decide his subject for the day and begin to draw. When he was finished he would go to the station where he lived in Ipswich and put the cartoon on the train where someone from the Daily Express would pick it up and take it to the printing works to be published in the next day’s paper.

Today, Giles life would inevitably be very different. For a start he could use Internet Business to deliver his work through a scanner and email132013201320. It could almost be regarded to be doing a type of Online Jobs but there would be more. As a current day cartoonist he would have a website to give admirers more information, show random cartoons that perhaps hadn’t been published, sell themed goods and in all probability make him a very rich man.

That is not to say that he did not become affluent. The Express paid him extremely handsomely to deliver 3 cartoons per week to them, £400,000 a year in 1955 – equal to to today’s Premier League wages for the time. Many people only bought the Express on the days that Giles cartoons were published. But what made Giles special?

For a start he drew the 20th Century. The Giles family, though by no means in every cartoon, illustrated how Britain was changing. The teenage daughters often brought home a succession of hopeless boyfriends who ranged from teddy boys, mods and rockers, groovers and hippies, punks and new romantics to Goths. The hypochondriac Aunt Vera was usually being scared by the latest health scare, always drawn putting a hankie to her nose, surrounded by collections of tablets and remedies. Her baby son, when not kept close by was cruelly tortured by the other boys, normally with Ernie and Larry, the mop haired boy from next door, shown for instance attempting to light the fire under a roasting spit that Vera’s baby way attached to. There was Mr Giles, a small working class man with grand plans and a sailing obsession, married to Mother who actually keeps everything together against the chaos and anarchy, sometimes the one delivering the witty quip. And of course the fearsome Grandma, with a racing obsession, always dressed in a black coat with fox fur stole, with a penguin headed umbrella close to hand to keep off the rain or thrash someone who has provoked her ire.

It was the understated joke, gentle mockery of the world as it seemed to Giles that delivered the killer joke and once that was done, the rest of the action was in the background.

He carried out all his Work From Home and one wonders if he had been in an office what else would he have pictured? What would he have made of the Internet Business? He covered in 1960 the beginning of parking meters, the MOT test and traffic wardens. How would be portray Mr Giles trying to do Online Jobs with Ernie and Larry presumably creating a porn site or hacking into MI5 at the back of the room, Grandma betting the family home on online casino sites and Mother, as always with a pile of ironing good naturedly observing.

Giles taught me British history from his present time. His cartoons remain timeless simply because they display, in a style that rarely varied down the decades, how the people and society of the times could be mocked, and take the sting out of challenging days.

I shall finish with a description of a cartoon from 8/9/1963. We are in London. It is raining cats and dogs, in front of Admiralty Arch the Life Guards are riding out up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace. Except for one man. He is jogging along behind, struggling with his swords and uniform to keep up. The caption at the bottom reads “A young lady called on the Household Cavalry this week to ask if she could buy one of their horses.” Genius.