A member of The Arts Society
Christmas with Giles, Grandma and the family
Presented by Barry Venning
The statue of Grandma in Ipswich which was unveiled in 1993
With Christmas in the air, the recent meeting of The Arts Society Alton caught the mood perfectly when visiting speaker Barry Venning gave an interesting presentation on the life and work of Giles, one of the most well-known cartoonists from the second half of the twentieth century.
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Born Ronald Giles in 1914 from humble beginnings in North London, he left school at 14 going to work as an office boy at a studio commissioning animated advertisement. A serious motorcycle accident required a long convalescence with his grandmother in Suffolk and he never left the area. Following his recovery, he worked at an animation studio in Ipswich and, despite having never attended art school, in 1937 he got a job as a cartoonist with Reynolds News, a Sunday newspaper. From there he joined the Daily Express & Sunday Express with his first cartoon appearing in the 3 October 1943 edition of the Sunday Express.
Exempt from war service due to the long-term effects of his motorcycle injuries, he became a war correspondent in Ipswich, although he was sent to Europe in 1944 with the Coldstream Guards and witnessed the horrors of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Much of Giles work had been cartoons featuring the typical tommy, well-known British Generals and ridiculing leaders of the enemies, topics which had been extremely popular with the newspaper readership. With the end of the war he introduced the Giles family, a better-off working-class family who were deemed patriotic but suspicious of authority. In a single panel cartoon published daily in the Express from 1945 right up until 1991, he commented on a topic headlining the news of the day but with much more than a single joke. The ages of the family remained the same throughout the 46-year series, but their home, dress and hobbies reflected changing fashion and standard of living.
The speaker introduced the family, the main character being Grandma - a curmudgeonly character loosely based on Giles himself and the extended family as well as characters based on people he had known, and his own dog.
The highlight of the evening was a selection of the cartoons including several which gave a sideways look at Christmas and there was much mirth and laughter from the audience at the ones featured as the content was still amusing today.
Giles Annuals were produced annually from 1946 and until his death in 1995, he chose the cartoons for inclusion. They were a popular Christmas gift in the families of many of the audience and complete editions are sought after with some of the early ones are quite expensive to buy today, whilst later ones are more modestly priced as so many remain in circulation.
A life President of the RNLI, they produced charity Christmas cards featuring his work and he also contributed Christmas cartoons for The National Institute for the Deaf. He left the Daily Express in 1989 but continued with the Sunday Express for a further two years. The last decade of Giles’s life was plagued by failing health and he died in Ipswich in 1995.