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St Trinian’s began life as a single cartoon drawn by Searle, aged 21, for the magazine Lilliput in 1941. He was then swept up in a particularly horrible way by the Second World War, captured by the Japanese and sent first to Changi gaol and then to work on the building of the Burma-Thailand railway, the ‘Death Railway’. He made secret drawings of life in the camps which were eventually published in To The Kwai and Back.

Searle was released at the end of the war, after three and a half years of captivity, returned to London and became an incredibly prolific and funny artist. He became famous first for the St Trinian’s series (I have happy memories of repeatedly reading my parents’ copy of his St Trinian’s collection Back to the Slaughterhouse) and then for the miraculous Molesworth books, with texts written by Geoffrey Willans: Down with Skool!: A Guide to School Life for Tiny Pupils and Their Parents, How to be Topp, Whizz for Atomms and Back in the Jug Agane. I’m sure that while running Penguin Modern Classics I have published several more intellectually coherent and searingly powerful works, but getting these books back into print (as a one-volume complete Molesworth) was by miles the most enjoyable thing I did.

The films based on the world Searle created in the St Trinian’s cartoons began in 1954 with The Belles of St Trinian’s with Alastair Sim in the drag role of the headmistress (now taken by Rupert Everett in the new film). The rest of the cast was a chaotic mass of British comic actors - Sid James, George Cole, Irene Handl, Joyce Grenfell and so on – and while it has dated in some ways it maintains a lunatic idiocy that makes it still very funny. There were three sequels which can be less whole-heartedly recommended.

In Penguin Modern Classics, aside from Molesworth, we have a selection of Searle’s best cartoons from the 1950s called The Terror of St Trinian’s and Other Drawings, including all of his hilarious updates on Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, remodelled for 1950s Britain with actors, clergymen, critics and painters mercilessly ridiculed.

Now to celebrate the new film we have put together all of Searle’s St Trinian’s drawings, some not seen for many years, into a single volume just called St Trinian’s.

Searle is a total hero. He has made life for very many people much more enjoyable for sixty years and the new film is a great opportunity to celebrate a strange, unique figure. He is still painting and drawing, living in France (where he moved in the early 1960s), now aged 87. This Christmas it would be actively dysfunctional not to give your friends copies of the new Penguin St Trinian’s.

Simon Winder - Publishing Director, Penguin Press

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