Ronald Searle

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and five.

Speaker 10:12

Yeah.

Presenter0:12

And the presenter?

Speaker 10:13

was Sue Lowley.

Presenter0:29

Mike Castaway this week is an artist and illustrator. He describes himself as a graphic satirist. For the past thirty six years he's lived here in the French village of Torture, on the roof of the Varre in Provence, where at the age of eighty five he's still working. These days it's mainly for the newspaper Le Monde, producing effective apercius on political chicanery and corporate greed. In the nineteen fifties he was one of the most famous men in Britain, a stalwart of Punch magazine, illustrator of the glorious Molesworth books, and creator of that female hell on earth, St Trinians. But the most important event in his life happened even earlier than that. At the age of twenty two, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, he was captured by the Japanese and put to work on the Burma Railway, a working death camp full of hideous brutality and terrible disease, where ninety five per cent of the prisoners died.

Presenter1:25

Throughout it all he drew to help himself survive. Everything goes back to being a prisoner, he says. You can't have that sort of experience without it affecting the rest of your life. He is Ronald Searle.

Presenter1:40

So here you live, Ronald, high in the hills of Provence. You've lived here in this village for the past thirty six years. In fact, you've spent more than half your life now, I think, in France forty four years. Do you do you miss us? Do you miss the old country?

Ronald Searle1:54

Well, I don't miss any particular country because I think the point is if you're a freelance artist and you're commenting on the world around you, you've got to live on an island. And I had the advantage of perhaps being captured and put into prison. And one curiosity is that once you've been a prisoner, you never escape from your island prison. And it gives you the point of view of looking around you and being able to comment or react to anything that's around you without having any parochial responsibility. I'm not French, I'm not Provençal, I like the people, I love the village, but I'm still a foreigner on a little island.

Presenter2:39

But the the problem is, of course, that therefore the British you've made this comment yourself before now tend, if you're not careful, to think, you know, you're dead and gone, because they haven't sort of seen you or known you around for so long.

Ronald Searle2:53

One marvellous thing about having left England is that in America they've never heard of Centrillions, in France they've never heard of Centrillians, in Germany never heard of Centrillions, the English have a tendency to pigeonhole you.

Ronald Searle3:04

Ronald Searle is the person who did the Centrinus programmes. That was fifty, sixty years ago. But it's almost as if you've done nothing since nineteen fifty six.

Presenter3:14

Yes. I think you once drew the analogy, didn't you, that you felt you were a cook who might be capable of making a classic sauce, but one day you knocked off a jam tart. And people have been asking you, or certainly the English have asked you for more jam tarts ever since. Exactly. But you are still very active, as I said just now, and you obviously.

Presenter3:31

relish that, although you you live apart here, and I know you your telephone doesn't ring because you've cut off the bell, not because it wouldn't ring if it could. But you can't call yourself a recluse because you're not. You're actually a very gregarious person. It's a strange contradiction of a life that you lead.

Ronald Searle3:49

Well, it's not a contradiction. I think if you're an illustrator or if you're a social commentator, you've got to have the material. You have your German newspapers, your French newspapers, your English newspapers, your English magazines. You have the lot. Because in fact, to create

Ronald Searle4:05

I think you've got to be in isolation in a certain sense. But the thing is you cannot work in isolation without bringing in the world.

Ronald Searle4:15

But you can actually execute in isolation.

Presenter4:19

So this is your style of isolation. We now, as you know, are sending you to another style, an imaginary desert island. Tell me about the first record that you'd like to play there.

Ronald Searle4:29

The first record, in fact, is to do with isolation in that sense.

Ronald Searle4:34

It's a fantasia on a theme by Thomas Talis, and Thomas Talis.

Ronald Searle4:41

as an echo of England that Vaughn Williams crystallizes into a form of nostalgia that if you're a prisoner and you want to recreate England, your childhood or the history, the actual smell of the country in which I was born, this particular record is perfection.

Presenter5:55

Part of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Talis, played by the London Philemonic, conducted by Sir Adrian Bolton. Music, you say, Ronald Searle, that represents for you the the roots from which you'd been torn when you found yourself as a young man in his early twenties, a prisoner of war in the tropical misery of South East Asia. You did hundreds of drawings, I know, during your four years of captivity, and I want to talk to you about those. But how much do you think

Presenter6:21

That experience influenced or permeated your work that came after that. You know, people.

Presenter6:28

point at St Trinians, and it may be too literal an example, you know, the anarchic cruelty in them. Was that fed by that experience?

Ronald Searle6:37

Perhaps to a certain extent, but I think basically what changed was the fact that.

Ronald Searle6:42

There'd been a war.

Ronald Searle6:44

And war is nothing but killing.

Ronald Searle6:47

I mean a soldier is there to kill, that's all. I mean you're trained to kill.

Ronald Searle6:52

So the mentality really of everyone who was involved in the war was that no longer the politeness of pre war existed. Horror, misery,

Ronald Searle7:04

Blackness, the horribleness that one saw. This obviously changed the attitude towards all things, and certainly as far as humour was concerned.

Presenter7:12

But do you think you would have found it as easy to do? Or I w I wonder if you'd have found your way naturally into that kind of black humour if it hadn't been for the Prisoner of War.

Ronald Searle7:21

Not at all, absolutely impossible. You've got to have the experience to be able to express it. The fact that my work at that period, which was called Black Humour, they say that I was partly a father of the black humour. But if you have that experience, you have to have a public that could accept it. And the fact that this humour suddenly was accepted in a big way.

Ronald Searle7:45

meant basically that

Ronald Searle7:47

The attitude towards humour had changed.

Presenter7:51

But it was said, wasn't it, when you were a boy, when you were drawing, that you had a proclivity for the grotesque early on.

Ronald Searle7:58

Perhaps that's because I was left-handed.

Ronald Searle8:01

I don't really know. No, I think I've always been curious, probably interested in the grotesque, but that may well have been the fact that Cambridge is littered with some lovely museums where there was everything from shrunken heads to

Presenter8:01

I think

Ronald Searle8:17

Fabulous African masks and I think there's the grotesque element was probably very apparent then. It simply was the smell of the thyme, if you like.

Presenter8:27

Record number two.

Ronald Searle8:29

Well, the second choice, Spotless Rose, basically is the roots of my childhood, my life. I was born in Cambridge.

Ronald Searle8:41

I spent all my time fascinated by the architecture and by the history. I love history, I love people. And one could walk into King's College Chapel, sit there alone in this magnificent building, and hear a choir practice and be swamped by these incredible voices. And for me, this a spotless rose, which was a century earlier than the chapel itself.

Ronald Searle9:05

Has all the

Ronald Searle9:07

excitement and all the terrifying agony, if you like, of what it is to be alone in another century, listening to unaccompanied voices with all the benefits of the architecture that was created so many centuries before.

Presenter9:26

Yeah.

Speaker 19:26

Reach my hand.

Presenter9:27

And so

Presenter9:38

His robot sweet rose ringing in medic for through God's grace.

Speaker 19:55

The light of bless and future she bears in our

Presenter10:18

A spotless rose, arranged by Herbert Howells and performed by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, conducted by Philip Ledger. The soloist was Gareth Morrell, and the organist Francis Greer. Um I'm told, Ronald Searle, that not a lot of people know this, but you were once called the Nightingale of East Anglia. You were a boy soprano, were you?

Ronald Searle10:37

Yes, well I've been trying to hide that ever since I was born. I d the idea of being a knighting cat of East Anglia.

Ronald Searle10:44

There aren't many nightingales in East Anglia actually, it's mostly crows.

Presenter10:48

But did they send you round?

Ronald Searle10:48

Prison.

Ronald Searle10:49

Yeah, exactly. One rehearsal, Vaughan Williams sat in and listened to it. I sang in the choir, much to my horror, because they paid you six shillings uh a year as choir boys benefits. Well, thank God, puberty struck.

Ronald Searle11:07

And before my East Anglian wings could really take off, my voice dropped.

Presenter11:12

Uh

Ronald Searle11:12

And all was well.

Presenter11:14

Presumably you were quite rich by then, and did you get to keep this money?

Ronald Searle11:18

Six shillings. Actually, three shillings went to my family and three shillings went to me for pocket money.

Presenter11:24

Which was quite a lot of money then. And and your background was quite humble, wasn't it? Your father.

Ronald Searle11:28

Well, we weren't actually poor, but what we we didn't have any money.

Ronald Searle11:34

There was a difference in those days. You see, the thing is that those particular days they were a horrible thing called the means test, and you had to ask beg for money. Well, we didn't we had lodgers instead. But uh six shillings then was quite a lot of money, you know. Absolutely.

Presenter11:47

Absolutely. It's very, very interesting, isn't it? Because as I say, yours was obviously a natural talent. You did it every minute of the day, as I understand it. You were always r drawing. And I think at fifteen you were offered uh work from the Cambridge Daily News.

Ronald Searle11:55

Absolutely.

Presenter12:02

And you then went on a bit later on, or at the same time, I think, to work for Granter, the University of Cambridge newspaper, didn't you?

Ronald Searle12:07

Yes, well that was parallel in that sense. But what was fascinating for me was that I was actually involved with a group on the granter, well because they're intellectual in the best sense.

Ronald Searle12:19

Arthur Sledinger Junior, who was advisor to Kennedy, Eric Hobsbaum.

Ronald Searle12:26

Charles Winter, who was editor of the evening standard.

Ronald Searle12:29

And so on and so on. When I was with a group of people who were, shall we say, intellectually interesting.

Ronald Searle12:37

This was the moment when when all the spies in Cambridge were meeting in all the corners under Blunt.

Presenter12:43

Mm-hmm.

Presenter12:44

Hmm.

Ronald Searle12:44

Yeah.

Ronald Searle12:45

And if you like, it was a it was a very revealing moment, which was not necessarily a good moment, but a very revealing moment historically, I think.

Presenter12:54

But as an eighteen year old boy, you obviously didn't know all of that was going on, but you could feel it in the ether, as it were. You felt you were somewhere that was interesting, and you were very happy, weren't you? It was a fascinating time, and you were doing what you wanted to do in life, which is

Ronald Searle13:08

Absolutely, because I think when you're that sort of age, then I was actually s I was sixteen, seventeen, you're a sponge.

Presenter13:14

Mm.

Ronald Searle13:15

I also had friends who worked in the Cavendish Laboratory. They just chipped the atom, and outside St. Andrew's Great Church.

Ronald Searle13:23

with a corset chop.

Ronald Searle13:25

And outside the corset shop would be standing an old white haired man with a battered hat.

Ronald Searle13:30

Gazing at the corset.

Ronald Searle13:33

Professor J J Thompson, who in fact

Ronald Searle13:37

Split the atom.

Ronald Searle13:40

No one knew the consequences. I mean, one was involved in that moment with such a global disaster.

Ronald Searle13:48

which then was minor movement in Cambridge.

Ronald Searle13:52

It brushed off.

Presenter13:55

Record number three.

Ronald Searle13:56

Cambridge again, one thing I used to do was to wander round the bookshops, and Heffers in Petticurie had a sixpenny box, and one day in this box I found a small book

Ronald Searle14:10

About a a German satirical artist called George Gross.

Ronald Searle14:18

I bought this book, and it became my Bible.

Ronald Searle14:21

I suddenly realized the actual

Ronald Searle14:24

possibilities that i graphic satire could be so

Ronald Searle14:28

Explosive, so so disastrous. And I thought, my God, you know, I wanted to become a m a great man like George Gross. That little book stayed in my pocket when I went into the army. Officially we were fighting Germany, but I mean, to me, I had in my pocket I had someone who represented the best of what Germany could possibly be.

Speaker 214:50

An ampern, lau went on ta, Lie sein tot, man am friend, Undein men.

Speaker 115:00

Hmm.

Speaker 215:13

Fly for vumpum, hum doman sha.

Presenter15:18

The Moritat von Machimesse, the opening to Kurtwaiel and Bertolt Brecht's Trotny Opera, sung by Harold Paulsson, and that was from the original cast recording of 1928. So, Ronald, you volunteered. You were called up, in fact, on the very first day of the war in September 1939. You were nineteen years old, a sapper, as I say, in the Royal Engineers. You spent two years being posted around the UK on training exercises, and then you were sent to the Far East, to Singapore, in 1942. Did you have any idea at all of what you were being sent to?

Ronald Searle15:54

Well, in our case we were told we were being sent to the Far East.

Ronald Searle16:00

To fight Japanese, and for all of us, the Japanese were.

Ronald Searle16:07

What, Fu Manchu?

Ronald Searle16:08

No one knew anything about them at all.

Ronald Searle16:12

And our commanders simply said to us, No problem, you know, they're slit-eyed, they can't shoot straight, they're just a lot of, you know.

Ronald Searle16:21

Yellow dwarfs.

Ronald Searle16:23

That sounds really rather horrible. That was the attitude at that epoch. Anyway, we were three months at sea. We finally ended up in Singapore.

Ronald Searle16:34

Of course the Japanese, in their own clever way, simply descended from behind us, and all we did basically for a month was to run backwards.

Presenter16:44

How long before you were captured?

Ronald Searle16:46

We had a month fighting in the jungle, and of course, the Japanese.

Ronald Searle16:50

if one could say so, were brilliant at uh guerrilla warfare. Uh they sat up in the top of every palm tree. As you walked down below, they shot you. And suddenly we found ourselves

Ronald Searle17:03

pathetic little territorials who'd never seen a Japanese before,

Ronald Searle17:07

Taken prisoner, you were in a temperature on the equator, practically. You were in a temperature of about ninety degrees all the time.

Presenter17:15

Did you realize immediately that this was going to be a terrible experience that wasn't going to be in line with any kind of international agreement on the holding of prisoners?

Ronald Searle17:20

Yeah.

Ronald Searle17:26

When you're nineteen years old and you're taken prisoner by a people you have of which you have no conception at all, of a culture which is so far from your own.

Ronald Searle17:36

You have absolutely no idea of what your future would be. It was only gradually, as the years went by, the months went by, that you realized that you were, in fact,

Ronald Searle17:47

Dirt.

Ronald Searle17:49

Available to your captor to do anything he wished. You were nothing at all.

Presenter17:54

And if you didn't do what, he wished you were shot.

Ronald Searle17:56

Well, not necessary. What happened to us very frequently was that we were very badly beaten.

Ronald Searle18:02

A Japanese carrying a bamboo pole.

Ronald Searle18:05

Beating you is like being beaten with old iron bar. No, the only people who executed were people who tried to escape.

Ronald Searle18:13

There you dug your own grave and that was it.

Presenter18:13

Thank you, Doug.

Presenter18:15

But against this background, right from the start you kept drawing, didn't you? In fact, you started a magazine up in the very beginning, didn't you?

Ronald Searle18:23

Well, there are two or three of us. We started a magazine. Yes, that was one reason why I got sent up t to the Siam.

Ronald Searle18:32

We we decided to create a magazine to keep the prisoners amused, but in fact it upset all the what you might call the extremely conservative mentalities of our own administration.

Presenter18:45

What the commanders in the chap

Ronald Searle18:46

Very much so, yes.

Ronald Searle18:48

And when the time came for the Japanese to say we want groups to be sent up north.

Ronald Searle18:54

The English chose

Presenter18:56

The trouble makers.

Ronald Searle18:58

Yeah, and I was on one of the parties that went up to uh the Tai Burma railway.

Presenter18:59

Darby

Ronald Searle19:04

and is known in a popular way as the bridge on the River Kwai. But in fact it was the Tai Burma railway on which there were bridges on the River Kwai, and I was on the River Kwai di and all the building of the bridges.

Ronald Searle19:19

There I lost all my friends.

Presenter19:22

Let's pause there for record number four.

Ronald Searle19:24

I think the next record in a way sums up a situation where you are lost, cut off from the world.

Ronald Searle19:34

No communication whatsoever within a thousand miles, and around you everyone you've known is dying.

Ronald Searle19:43

And you're in a jungle which in itself is rather beautiful, rather like a cathedral despite all the insects, but there's a certain atmosphere which is conjured up for me by this particular song, one of the four last songs written by Strauss, sung by Schwartzkopf, which has in the end an element of hope.

Ronald Searle20:10

You know you're going towards death.

Ronald Searle20:14

You start to think, well, maybe this is a release.

Ronald Searle20:18

Maybe this is beautiful, who knows?

Presenter21:12

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf singing The End of Im Arbentrot, the last of Richard Strauss's four last songs, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Ackermann.

Presenter21:22

And she sings, as you say, Ronald Serley, Can Can This Be Death?

Presenter21:27

From everything you've said, obviously that's how it felt. And as you say, every morning you woke up and more of your friends had died. Uh you obviously felt

Presenter21:37

that that was what was going to happen to you.

Presenter21:40

How what was the nadia for you? How bad did it get? How ill did you become?

Ronald Searle21:48

Well, we were all ill. I mean, you can't be in the jungle without being ill. The problem with the jungle is it's very beautiful, but in it you've got insects, and those insects bring uh life or death. Uh we were eaten alive, if you like, uh all the time we were working.

Ronald Searle22:08

Most of the time we were working eighteen hours out of twenty four a day, breaking rock, constructing a railway through a jungle which is supposed to be probably the most impenetrable jungle on this planet.

Ronald Searle22:23

But the terrifying thing was that you were with your friends.

Ronald Searle22:28

people you grew up with, or people you joined the army with, and you wake up in the morning and find that each side of you one of your friends was dead.

Ronald Searle22:39

Inevitably you were covered in

Ronald Searle22:42

Miserable, irritating.

Ronald Searle22:45

Painful skin diseases, apart from the fact that you were working physically and your food was almost non-existent.

Ronald Searle22:54

You still have to retain some sort of optimism. And curiously enough, the thing that kept me going was if I could only.

Ronald Searle23:02

Draw.

Ronald Searle23:04

and show people what it was like, I would have achieved some sort of object in the short life I was probably going to have. But I was convinced I was coming back with those drawings.

Presenter23:15

Be well.

Ronald Searle23:15

Uh

Presenter23:16

Yeah.

Ronald Searle23:16

Absolutely. I I I was sure that it was as when I say lack of imagination. I didn't believe it.

Presenter23:20

But your colleagues weren't. I mean, they've one of them well, several of them have said since, but Russell Braddon in particular, who was a a a friend and fellow survivor, said that you were a very sick boy by late nineteen forty-three. You and you had, we know, malaria, regular bouts of these tropical source, berry, berry, you were down to sick stone, you couldn't walk because you'd been beaten. I think he expected to wake up and find you dead, didn't he?

Ronald Searle23:45

Yes, but that was the norm.

Presenter23:47

Hmm.

Ronald Searle23:48

The horrible thing is that you've seen pictures of Belsen, you've seen pictures of what happened in Yugoslavia, Croatia, pictures long after the war, in in our own recent uh history.

Ronald Searle24:02

What people are capable of doing and what the result can be. People can be reduced to nothing.

Ronald Searle24:09

And still have the will to survive. And what's so fabulous is that the human body can suddenly revive.

Ronald Searle24:17

You can go through all this and you can still come out of it, so that when you come back to England your sister says, Oh, you haven't changed much.

Presenter24:27

What about, you know, the the the the other impression we have, most particularly from the film you mentioned, Bridge on the River Kwai, we get the impression that that the men found a kind of sense of pride in building this railway.

Ronald Searle24:38

No, nonsense

Presenter24:39

It's a rubbish.

Ronald Searle24:40

Absolute rubbish. No, no, really rubbish. This is sort of uh a Frenchman's idea Frenchman's idea how the Englishman would behave. Jolly good chaps and all that, you know, ha let's build a bridge, we must do it, good chap you know.

Presenter24:53

But is there room for fellow feeling, or is the need to survive a completely selfish business?

Ronald Searle25:00

Fellow feeling was absolutely fabulous. One thing that one learned was that the that human beings could be so marvellous to each other.

Ronald Searle25:09

It can be so horrible to each other.

Ronald Searle25:11

But um under these circumstances survival really depended on the attachment you had with your fellow prisoners.

Presenter25:21

We have a very strong picture of what it was like because.

Ronald Searle25:21

We have a

Presenter25:25

Three hundred. Three hundred, which is amazing really, of the thing of the pictures that you drew survived, although obviously you drew many more than that. Where did you get the paper, the pencil? How did you keep them? Surely, again, it was a a kind of punishable offence.

Ronald Searle25:39

Well, it's punishable if every point is that everyone had a book.

Ronald Searle25:42

And in every book there's a fly paper.

Ronald Searle25:45

and people would tear out the fly pages of the book, and people gave me the paper, or gave me the fly paper, and I made my drawings on any any rubbish that I could find.

Presenter25:56

And you were drawing, as you said, because it was your lifeline. It was how you knew you were still you inside this ravaged body. It was a a lifebug. But did you also have in mind that you were creating a record?

Ronald Searle26:03

Yeah.

Presenter26:10

of these events.

Ronald Searle26:11

Oh, very much so. He's I wanted to create a record. I wanted

Ronald Searle26:15

to be a camera. And that's it. I am a camera. If you like, it began my career as an artist reporter, but it wasn't directly that that

Ronald Searle26:28

Decision. The decision basically was: I had to let people know what was happening.

Ronald Searle26:34

I was convinced that some one had to put down on paper exactly what was happening but what was never explained to us what was never apparent was that this was the clash of two cultures.

Ronald Searle26:46

The Japanese culture is so removed from our little territorial culture.

Ronald Searle26:53

Under Japanese culture, Japanese military tradition, to be a prisoner was the lowest of the low. They died before they were taken prisoner.

Ronald Searle27:02

If you accept to be taken prisoner,

Ronald Searle27:05

Drop dead if it's what you were expected to do.

Presenter27:09

Record number five.

Ronald Searle27:11

Long before all that happened, when we were children in Cambridge,

Ronald Searle27:15

One of the marvellous things that my parents did was every Saturday night, although we really had to scrape up the money, was to go to the local music hall, which was the new theatre in Cambridge.

Ronald Searle27:26

In this particular week it was Louis Armstrong and his band.

Ronald Searle27:30

And this particular record

Ronald Searle27:33

To me, it is one of the most marvellous. A thing I'd love to take with me onto a desert island, and I can listen to it all the time.

Ronald Searle27:42

Anytime.

Ronald Searle27:44

It's euphoric.

Ronald Searle27:45

I see trees of green.

Ronald Searle27:50

Red Roof is changed.

Ronald Searle27:53

I see them blue.

Ronald Searle27:57

Five minutes.

Ronald Searle27:59

And I think to myself.

Ronald Searle28:04

What a wonderful world!

Presenter28:10

Louis Armstrong and what a wonderful world. So you came back home to the UK.

Presenter28:16

Uh Ronald Searle, you recovered really reasonably quickly, physically, anyway.

Presenter28:21

Um and by the age of thirty you were living in London, you were married, you were the father of twins and you were keeping up a pretty hectic professional schedule, weren't you? Cartoons and drawing for punch, Sunday Express, Tribune, travel books, advertisements, memorably for Lemonheart Rum, of course. Um Walt Disney an animations, I think, as well. You were really fulfilling all of your very early professional dreams, weren't you?

Ronald Searle28:49

Not really. I was in a state of panic.

Ronald Searle28:52

And if you suddenly come back and find yourself married and with two children,

Ronald Searle28:57

Your freelancing?

Ronald Searle28:59

You belt away taking any job that's available. I mean, the thing is, you have to earn money. It was really a marathon.

Ronald Searle29:07

to keep going, to keep keep your head above water. And there comes a breaking point, and and the breaking point came, f finally. When you come out of the sort of world that I came out of, which was a world of total unreality, into a post war Britain,

Ronald Searle29:25

The whole thing was not only transitory, it was ephemeral.

Presenter29:29

But you essentially you decided to turn your back on it, both professionally and personally, because in nineteen sixty one

Ronald Searle29:35

Because in nineteen sixty

Presenter29:37

You wrote a note, your wife and children were away from home. I think the twins were, what, fourteen by then, something like that. You wrote a note.

Ronald Searle29:44

14, yes they were.

Presenter29:45

And you just said I've gone.

Ronald Searle29:47

Yes, I think it was the best decision I ever made. It took a long time for the relationship between myself and the children to sort itself out. But in fact, the decision was correct, I think. The thing is that, all right, it was brutal. But I think a decision like that has to be brutal. You are a very well-known personality at that time in England. You suddenly decide to disappear and to start from zero.

Ronald Searle30:15

It didn't worry me because I'd been to zero

Ronald Searle30:18

Before.

Ronald Searle30:19

When you've been the lowest of the low, you can never go down lower.

Presenter30:23

But you wanted to start again and you didn't care what anyone you left behind would say about you. I mean friends and colleagues obviously had of you.

Ronald Searle30:31

No, totally eccentric.

Ronald Searle30:33

It was really a if you like, it it was survival again, if you if you like. It was a question of survival. And I I decided that I'm I'm sorry, but I had to abandon my wife, abandon my children, abandon my house, abandon my r career, abandon my reputation, the lot, and start from zero.

Presenter30:50

Record number six.

Ronald Searle30:52

Well at that point we come to Marvellous Monica.

Ronald Searle30:58

We'd met in Paris before I left England and when I came to France and I joined Monica, that was forty

Ronald Searle31:09

42, 42, 44 years ago, I think. Yes, I think so.

Presenter31:09

Forty-two, forty-two, forty-four.

Ronald Searle31:14

And I think it's going to work out.

Ronald Searle31:18

Record number six.

Ronald Searle31:21

is something which is

Ronald Searle31:23

nostalgic for both Monica and myself because I worked enormously on reportage in America. And we'd go there always in the winter, snow would be falling, ice all over the place. We'd land up in this beautiful wooden house of the eighteenth century house.

Ronald Searle31:43

and put on the discs. And one of the discs I remember particularly was Moon River, sung by Johnny Mercer with Henry Mancini and his ghastly orchestra.

Presenter31:59

Boy Began a boy

Presenter32:02

I'm crossing you in style someday

Presenter32:09

Oh dream.

Presenter32:12

Make it.

Presenter32:24

Johnny Mercer and Moon River with Henry Mancini and his orchestra and chorus, and that was recorded in nineteen sixty. You spent uh Ronald Searle in the nineteen sixties, as you say, travelling the world, you and Monica together really, doing your reportage work and so on, and you'd earlier on you'd covered the Kennedy and Nixon elections and done cartoons of them and

Presenter32:44

who later did Eichmann's Trial in Jerusalem. A mass of serious work, and many light hearted books, too, followed, and work for the New Yorker, and those wonderful anthropomorphic snails and cats. Too much work to dis discuss or go through here, but

Presenter32:59

Much of it in the nineteen seventies was collected together in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, wasn't it, for a major retrospective. Weren't you the first living foreigner to be accorded this great French honour?

Ronald Searle33:12

Well, I must say it was an honor actually because it's rather like having three floors in the British Museum or three floors in the Victorian Abbott Museum with all its showcases, its brass showcases which date from about the eighteenth century, with all its marble staircases.

Ronald Searle33:30

No, it was a great honour actually.

Presenter33:32

But the point about the retrospective is a serious one, isn't it? Because it's happened here in France, it hasn't happened in Britain, despite the fact that there are those

Presenter33:41

who know not only are you uh the major satirical draughtsman that you are, but uh they would say that you're as important in the history of the genre as Gilray and Rolandson. Do you do you feel

Presenter33:54

in a sense passed over by your fellow countrymen.

Presenter33:58

They're not

Ronald Searle33:59

Not really, and one doesn't demand anything. I'm very aware of my roots. My roots are English, and certainly, as far as as far as uh humour is concerned, one can't escape from the fact that

Ronald Searle34:10

The origins

Ronald Searle34:12

Of the area one is working in was Hogarth, Gilray, Rawlinson, Crookshank.

Ronald Searle34:17

A great two centuries or a century and a half of

Ronald Searle34:22

genius creation. The thing is that I'm working in a media in which I wish to express myself to the maximum. I'm not parochial. I don't think about the recognition side at all. It's absolutely true. I'm working in isolation. If there's a reaction, it's marvellous.

Presenter34:40

But if you suddenly hear that one of your drawings is sold for ten thousand pounds

Ronald Searle34:45

I say, yeah, who got the money?

Ronald Searle34:48

Why did I sold it for five guineas?

Ronald Searle34:53

No, no, I don't think that's I don't think that's one could take that really.

Presenter34:58

By code number seven.

Ronald Searle34:59

Ah, yes.

Ronald Searle35:01

It's very personal. You know, New Year's Eve in 1969, Monica was diagnosed as having a cancer that was

Ronald Searle35:10

they said incurable, and they gave her six months to live. At that period, in the sixties and seventies, in France, cancer was really rather like having V D or AIDS. It was not spoken of openly at all.

Ronald Searle35:28

And she was then approached by French television to say, would you mind doing a programme?

Ronald Searle35:36

Speaking openly about cancer as a

Ronald Searle35:39

As a problem.

Ronald Searle35:41

And she fought this and still is still fighting it. And uh one lovely thing was that the whole background music uh to this programme was this piano concerto number twenty one of Mozart.

Ronald Searle35:57

And so the reason we've chosen Mozart is simply because not only is it an extremely personal thing for us too, but because it's a

Ronald Searle36:06

It changed in France a little, I think, judging by the reaction of the public and the press. It changed the attitude of the French towards this particular horror.

Presenter37:14

Part of the second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. twenty one in C major, played by Daniel Barenboim with the English Chamber Orchestra.

Presenter37:23

So Monica has now defied the prognosis by several decades, and I think seen off a few doctors in the process. You, Ronald, are in your mid eighties and still working in the main, as I said, in the introduction for Le Monde, exposing political chicanery here from your

Presenter37:39

Provençal Erie. And you said, you know, that um everything goes back to the memories that you can never escape being a prisoner of war sixty years ago now, of course. We're celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of V J Day soon. Do you keep in touch even now with other survivors and do you feel the need to talk to them?

Ronald Searle37:57

Oh yes.

Ronald Searle37:59

Oh, absolutely, yes. There aren't many of us left now, unfortunately. I think the last news I had, I think we're we're probably down to about twelve, I think, of two hundred and forty or something like that. In my own company, I think I was almost the last one. But I mean, for example, I have a great friend who is a farmer, and we speak to each other once a week and discuss cows or discuss this and that, you know. But there's a sort of

Presenter38:28

But you don't discuss it.

Ronald Searle38:30

Oh, never. No. If a a book comes out, uh we discuss whether the book bears any resemblance to the reality or not. But it basically we just talk w we discuss the fact that we're there.

Ronald Searle38:46

And uh it's a consolation to know there are still one or two people with whom you've shared that sort of experience, who are still around to guard the memory in that sense.

Presenter38:56

Because no one else could ever understand.

Ronald Searle38:58

Well, the problem is, you see,

Ronald Searle39:00

If all your generation, everyone you knew, died when they were nineteen and twenty.

Ronald Searle39:06

You've got the biggest present in the world. You live from day to day thinking, My God, you know, I should have died when I was nineteen and I'm eighty five now. How many presents can one have in one's life? I mean, every day is a present. And I'm obviously making for me, I'm making the best I can of every second I have of my life.

Ronald Searle39:26

Including hmm.

Presenter39:28

I know where you're going.

Ronald Searle39:29

The fact that I don't drive, someone said to me that I'd said that champagne was my engine oil.

Ronald Searle39:37

Okay, fine. I don't drive. Let let's have it let's have Indian oil.

Ronald Searle39:42

In the bottle, huh?

Ronald Searle39:44

As far as I'm concerned, one of the great pleasures of living in France is that we can get our bottles of champagne straight from the supplier, and that the day is over and the glass of champagne is bubbling, and off we go into the next day. You know, there's still a pleasure to be had out out of clinking the odd glass here and there. And there's one reason why I've chosen the next record, but for me it's the champagne song from Fledermaus.

Ronald Searle40:14

Rather sums up exactly the vision of Monica and myself in the kitchen.

Speaker 140:20

Shampano, Kunis Alarbaine, Sampania, Shampania!

Ronald Searle40:49

Shusan, Shusan, Shusan.

Speaker 240:52

Uh

Presenter40:56

Yeah.

Speaker 140:56

Do you guys

Presenter40:59

Uh

Speaker 141:01

You should borrow the race

Presenter41:09

Champagne song from Johann Strauss's Die Pfledemaus with Regina Reisnick, Erika Koert, and Waldemar Kmint, with the chorus of the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna State Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karrion. If you could only take one of those eight records, Ronald, which one would you take?

Ronald Searle41:26

What are those records? Why is it the last one?

Presenter41:27

I don't know.

Ronald Searle41:28

No problem. I mean, uh if I want to have an uplift uh stuck on an island, uh there's no doubt about it. Champagne even listening to it, I don't have to drink.

Ronald Searle41:39

Well egg is in the air.

Presenter41:41

And what about your book? As you know, you get the Bible in China.

Ronald Searle41:44

Ah, yes. Well, you know, I thought about there's a lot and you know, I I I'm fascinated by history and fascinated by people. And I thought, well, what I'd love to have is a recent publication which is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But the problem is it's in sixty volumes. So I thought if you could persuade Oxford to bind it into one book.

Ronald Searle42:05

It'd be rather like a concertina, but I'd like to take that as my my one book.

Presenter42:10

And your luxury, what would that be?

Ronald Searle42:12

Oh, champagne. No, I had thought actually I had thought that my luxury would be a mosquito net, because I know that when you're stuck on an island, you're going to be eaten alive anyway by insects. Then I thought, oh, to hell with that, let's have champagne. Because what I would do is I would drink this I would have the best possible bottle of champagne, probably crystal rotor, and then I would write a note, put it into the bottle, throw it into the sea saying, please send another one.

Presenter42:37

Ronald South, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island descs.

Presenter42:50

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.