GILES cartoons

Every Christmas my Dad got a Giles Cartoon Annual. It had cartoons by a man called Carl Giles that he had drawn for a newspaper.

The cover of the book always told a tale. After you saw what was happening on the front cover, you could turn it over and see what happened next or what had caused the problem on the front.

Here is a typical Giles scene.  It is a lovingly and expertly drawn picture of a traditional vicarage garden party.  The thin woman in purple is Aunty Vera who is always ill.  The older woman in black is the notorious Grandma.  Seeing Grandma Giles at a vicarage tea-party (if you know anything about her shocking antics) is funny in itself.  Everyone is being very well-behaved and playing the genteel sport of croquet...

...then you see a typical cartoon bomb hurtling into the ancient porchway of the vicarage.  Very out of place - so you flip the book over to see where it came from.

It was Stinker that did it.  Stinker is one of the anarchistic eight-year olds that Giles liked to draw.  You can see him with his thick black thatch of hair being cheered on by the junior school riff-raff behaving like football hooligans.

And what happens next?  That is left to our imagination.  But the humour is certainly black.  Bombs going off and people being killed are not seen as funny by most people. We must assume that Stinker's bomb failed to explode.  Giles was a humane man.  He had seen the horrors of the Second World War and hated violence.  You can see what he thought of dictators, thugs and bullies in his cartoons.

The black and white cartoons inside the annual were about things that had happened in the news during the previous twelve months.  There were cartoons about the goings on of our Queen or other world leaders and cartoons about things that affected ordinary people's everyday life.  I was too young to understand what the main topic of his cartoons was, but I LOVED to study the pictures.

There were funny details in his cartoons.  Absurd fashions, naughty children, accidents about to happen.  I enjoyed seeing his Giles family best of all.  Carl Giles certainly influenced my drawing style.

It is a case of something not intended for children that is fascinating for them.  Like Star Wars and my four year-old son...