Popular Fun Activities

I have taken up again my bid to collect all the Giles’ cartoon annuals. This is something I initiated years ago and which stopped when we emigrated to Australia and since we returned in 2003, I didn’t . I had only really got started and so far have twelve of fifty editions, the earliest of which goes back to 1953/54 and was the 10th series. The first 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 books at home throughout my boyhood and I used to adore reading them, normally once a year. The humour and detail of the drawing cast a important light on my comprehension of 20th Century British history after the war years. The Giles family lived 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 go through the newspapers and choose his theme for the day and start to draw. When he had finished he would take it to the station where he lived in Ipswich and put the cartoon on the train where someone from the Daily Express would collect it and take it to the printing works to be published in the next day’s paper.

These days, Giles life would probably be very different. For a start he could employ Internet Business to deliver his work via a scanner and email. It could almost be viewed to be doing a kind of Online Jobs but there would be more. As a current day cartoonist he would have a website to give fans more information, show selected cartoons that maybe had not been published, sell Giles products and in all probability make him a very rich man.

That’s not to say that he didn’t become wealthy. The Express paid him very well to deliver 3 cartoons per week to them, ?400,000 a year in 1955 – that compares to today’s Premier League wages for the time. Many readers only bought the Express on the days that Giles cartoons were published. But what made Giles special?

For a start he drew the Twentieth Century. The Giles family, though by no means in every cartoon, chronicled how the United Kingdom 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 always being frightened 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 grandly tortured by the other boys, usually with Ernie and Larry, the mop haired boy from next door, shown for instance endeavouring to ignite the fire under a roasting spit that Vera’s baby way bound to. There was Mr Giles, a small working class man with ambitious plans and a sailing obsession, married to Mother who actually keeps everything together against the chaos and anarchy, often 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 anger.

It was the understated joke, gentle sarcasm of the world as it looked to Giles that delivered the killer joke and when 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 seen? What would he have made of the Internet Business? He covered in 1960 the introduction 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 MI6 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 illustrate, in a style that rarely altered down the ages, how the people and society of the times could be mocked, and take the sting out of painful days.

I shall end 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 along 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.

Filed under: Hobbies on June 30th, 2010