‘I went into the war as a student and came out as an artist’

Ronald Searle, who turned 90 this month, talks to Harry Mount about being captured by the Japanese, chronicling the 1950s and inventing both St Trinian’s and Molesworth

High in the mountains of Provence, in a low-ceilinged studio at the top of his teetering tower house, Ronald Searle is showing me the simple child’s pen he uses. As he draws the pen down the page, the ink thickens and swerves; a few sideways strokes, a little cross-hatching, and suddenly the famous Searle line comes to life: part Gothic, part anarchic, part comic. The girls of St Trinian’s, Nigel Molesworth, Adolf Eichmann, thousands of Punch caricatures, the Goya-like pictures of dying prisoners of war… all utterly different, all enclosed by that distinctive Ronald Searle line.

This month, Searle turned 90. Apart from a slight roughness to the voice, caused by a polyp on his vocal chord (‘The same as Julie Andrews — I’ll never sing “The Sound of Music” again either’), he is in fine fettle. His goatee beard is white but neatly trimmed; his high-collared white shirt and blue cardigan are immaculately pressed, his pale blue eyes hawk-like and always observing, observing.

And now, at last, Britain’s greatest cartoonist — and one of its great neglected artists — is receiving his due. Nick Garland, Gerald Scarfe, Posy Simmonds and Steve Bell have all expressed a deep debt to the master. Four new exhibitions are celebrating his birthday, at the Cartoon Museum, Maggs Brothers Rare Books and the Chris Beetles Gallery in London, and at the Wilhelm-Busch Museum in Hanover.

It is the German museum that will receive his complete works on his death. Searle has already handed them his archive, his sketchbooks since 1938 and his rare books and drawings — from Annibale Carracci to Rowlandson and Cruikshank. It is no less than Germany deserves for treating Searle as the serious artist he is.