There is a five-page feature on Carl Giles - his life and work methods, etc.

LYNN BARBER REPORTING

Everyone knows the Giles family—
battleaxe Grandma, snuffling Vera, and all
those terrifying catapult-wielding children. But Carl Giles himself,
their creator, remains oddly elusive. He has just allowed
a collection of his cartoon originals to go on exhibition for the first
time, at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool until 5 May

Anarchy
and the Giles family

The great problem in interviewing Carl Giles is this: he will rave on for hours about almost any cartoonist you care to name—except Giles. Within 10 minutes of our meeting, he was enthusing about Gerald Scarfe and the late great David Low. When we went to his studio he showed me books on Ronald Searle and André Francois; he confessed that his “treat of the week” was Posy Simmonds in The Guardian, and he said that “the one before whom we all bow down and worship” was Trog.

But, come on, Giles, what of Giles? This isn’t supposed to be a seminar on 20th-century cartoonists: it’s an interview. “Grk,” he goes. “Humph.” Whenever you ask him any question about himself; he turns suddenly deaf and grumbles like a wounded seagull, “Grk grk.” He asks you if the food is to your liking (we had lunch at Ipswich Football Club) and if he can refill your glass. He does anything at all except answer. When I asked him about the evolution of the Giles family, he responded with a great rhapsody about Bill Brandt, the photographer. When I asked which of his cartoons he most liked he grked like a whole flock of wounded seagulls and insisted that I have some pudding. Later, on the way out to his farm, I was rash enough to praise Grandma while we were stuck at a roundabout—he put the Range Rover hard into reverse and hurtled backwards towards a line of traffic. I learned not to ask Giles questions about Giles while he was driving.

Still, once every half hour or so I managed to prise a little nugget of information from him. He was born over a tobacconist’s shop at the Angel, Islington, in 1916. His father came from a long line of jockeys—his grandfather rode for King Edward VII. But Giles himself grew too tall to be a jockey, so at 14 he left school and became a messenger boy for a Wardour Street film company. “I loved that. I used to walk out to the cinemas, even to Finsbury Park or New Cross, carrying the cans of films, and I used to hold them so that everyone could see the labels. I felt important.”

He has an amazing memory— “like a disease” he says—for the sights and sounds and smells of his boyhood. He can remember the names of every child in his first class at school, where they sat and what they looked like. He can remember the trams that clattered round the eight-line junction outside his home at the Angel—”Oh, and the smell, when you got a shower of rain on the dusty streets, and the smells came up like an orchestra, the trams and the oil on the rails and the electricity transformers. Lovely, lovely!”

He must have had a strikingly precocious talent because when he was just 18 Alexander Korda asked him to help on the first-ever British colour cartoon film with sound, Fox Hunt. “It was such great art,” Giles chuckles, “it never got further than the Curzon.” The editor of Reynolds News admired his work and wrote to offer him a job. But Giles was travelling round the country as an accordionist at the time, and his mother left the letter unopened on her mantel-piece for a year—nevertheless, the job was still open for him when he returned. Then came the War, and Giles was sent off as a war artist, to witness, among other things, the liberation of Belsen, which still haunts him. In 1943 he was snaffled by the Express where he has remained ever since.

As soon as he joined the Express he became a star—a status about which he still has mixed feelings. He was awarded the OBE in 1959 and a special award from What the Papers Say in 1982. But typically he did not go to the presentation dinner—he would have found it too grk-making. He has never appeared on television, and he is still deeply puzzled about why he has now allowed his work to be exhibited for the first time. “I suppose it must be because I like Liverpool.” When the Express held a big lunch to celebrate his 65th birthday, he debunked the whole thing by turning up in a monster mask, carrying a placard saying “Wife and 15 Editors to support”. He says he feels more at home in a four-ale bar than at a grand dinner party.

And yet, and yet... . There are some touches to his lifestyle that would seem out of place in a four-ale bar. For instance, he drives a 1983 Bentley Mulsanne Turbo (price £62,000) and has a Range Rover as his runabout. He owns a yacht, a Nicholson 38, and he still keeps the XK12O that he raced at Silverstone in 1952. At home on the farm he has signed photographs of Frank Sinatra, Margot Fonteyn, Tommy Cooper, Eric Sykes and a host of other celebs. He is discreet about his contacts with the Royal Family, but it is well known that they own several of his cartoon originals, and it was no surprise when he was invited to the Prince of Wales’s wedding.

He lives in a rambling farmhouse near Ipswich with his wife of 40 years, Joan. “My escalator,” he calls her, and when you ask why he says simply, “She transports me.” They have no children, though, according to Giles, they have “thousands” of nieces and nephews. Actually, Joan says, they have two, now grown up. “I don’t hate all children,” Giles explains. “I don’t mind the 40-year-old ones.” Nevertheless the Giles house seems to be built for children. The main living-room has games and toys all over the place—little wind-up monkeys and clockwork clowns, jigsaws, board games, a dartboard over the fireplace, a shove-halfpenny board, and a piano for singalongs. I suppose what it really is is a playroom for grown-ups. Much of the house and its equipment was built by Giles himself—the huge brick fireplace with enclosed aquarium, the vast and lavishly-equipped bar shaped like a boat. He is an expert DIY-er.

Three days a week are “cartoon days” when he has to work at high pressure to produce the next day’s cartoon—two a week for the Daily Express and one for the Sunday Express. On cartoon days, he gets up at six am, listens to the radio news and reads all the papers, national and provincial, looking for ideas. He must have his idea by 10 am when he drives to his studio in Ipswich to start drawing. The studio is in an office block in Ipswich town centre. It is neat and bright like an operating theatre, with immaculate racks of brushes and pens and pencils arranged on trolleys built by Giles himself.

The finished drawing (“It’s never finished,” grumbles Giles) has to be done by 3.30 pm at the latest to arrive in Fleet Street by six. In the old days, it used to go by train, and the people in Ipswich parcel office used to dash out to Giles’s car if they saw him stuck in traffic, but nowadays the cartoon goes to London by taxi.

Giles in the only place where he can really relax: his workroom. Some of the tools were his father's

In addition to the thrice-weekly cartoons, Giles also draws Christmas cards for charity (he has raised over £400,000 for the RNLI) and animated TV commercials for QuickBrew tea. Last but not least comes the Giles Annual, which regularly makes No. 1 in the Christmas bestseller lists. The first one was published in 1946 and sold 140,000 copies; the latest, the 39th, sold nearly half a million. Early Giles Annuals are now collectors’ items: the most valuable are nos. 5,7,2,3 and 1, in that order.

Originals of Giles’s cartoons can fetch as much as £3000 at auction, but he only ever donates them for charity. Some he gives to friends, but most are merely thrown haphazardly into a barn at home: “We could have a little fire one day,” he muses, “and solve the whole problem. Some of them are so bad. When I see them afterwards, I see all the mistakes.”

If there are mistakes in Giles’s cartoons it is a wonder: he is a meticulous researcher. One whole wall of his studio is taken up with reference books—on horses, ships, weapons, buildings, transport, uniforms. Then there are the filing cabinets of reference photographs — one “M” drawer I opened had Marmots, Mayors, Maypoles, Meteorology, Mice and Rats, Moles, Mongooses and Monkeys. Add to this his phenomenal visual memory which retains, for instance, “what sort of brickwork you get on what sort of building, and where the bricks break at the corners”, and his keen eye for new technology which notices the advent of a new street lamp, or a new railway shoe. “The only thing that never changes is level-crossing gates,” he says. He was highly relieved when policemen’s uniforms were standardised, so that they all had the same number of buttons on their tunics—before, the number used to vary with every county.

Whenever he does make a mistake, or try to alter anything, dozens of readers write in to point it out. He has once or twice allowed the Giles family’s potting shed to drift from one end of the garden to the other, or he has popped in an extra bedroom or even an extra great-aunt. Worst of all, he has even occasionally tried to kill off Grandma (Kill off Grandma / Is the world coming to an end?) but whenever he leaves her out for more than a fortnight, the fans write to inquire solicitously about her health. Giles claims to be mystified by the fact that young people like Grandma... “You don’t even see any Grandmas today; all the modern grandmas are young and glamorous and look like Sophia Loren.” But, of course, Grandma, like the children, represents a force of anarchy and rebellion which naturally appeals to the young.

Giles himself gets impatient when people ask him to put names to all the characters. “George,” he says vaguely, “they’re nearly all called George.” Actually, George is the bookworm with the pipe who is married to Vera of the dripping nose. They have the baby, George Junior, who sometimes writes rude letters in spattered ink.

Then there are the two grown-up daughters, Ann and Carol (Ann is the mother of the twins—father unknown!), and the youngest daughter, Bridget, with the gym-slip and pigtails. The youngest son is Ernie who looks like Dad in miniature and is invariably armed with some sort of offensive weapon. He is frequently assisted by his friend, Larry, whose face remains invisible beneath his shaggy hair.

Last but not least there is Chalkie, the death’s head schoolmaster who strikes fear into the hearts of his pupils. Chalkie crops up whenever Giles draws a school, but he also sometimes appears in the guise of a policeman, solicitor or other symbol of authority. Giles hates Chalkie. He was his own schoolteacher, Mr Chalk, half a century ago in Islington and he still remembers him with fear and loathing — “Sarcastic bastard,” he shudders. “In his class you weren’t allowed to make a sound. Even if you were dying to go to the toilet you couldn’t ask. Oo, he was a cruel man. I vowed to get my own back, and I did.”

But, with the sole exception of Chalkie, Giles’s cartoons are marked by great affection for his subjects. He despises cartoonists who rely on racial stereotypes or “smut, like a very thin man making up to a very fat woman” for their humour. “As a child in Islington, I might have called someone a Yid,” he admits. “But then I went to Belsen, and never again. I hate racist jokes.”

His political sympathies are well to the left of the Express’s but, as he says, “I see the Express as a huge stage, like the Palladium, with room for everyone.” In any case, he almost never draws political subjects. He admires those who do, but he lacks the venom to make a real political satirist. When I asked if he was a socialist, he joked “Yes—I’m the sort of socialist who drives a Bentley!” But then he added, seriously, “But I’m still enough of a socialist to wish that everyone could drive one.” He meant it too.

My day with Giles was a curious sort of odyssey, going deeper and deeper into the interior of Gilesland. It started badly on Ipswich station, where he said he wasn’t really meeting me at all— he’d changed the appointment. But then he relented and said we’d have lunch at the football club in town, and after lunch—having presumably discovered that I didn’t bite—he said we “might as well” go and look at his studio. Then he asked if I’d “care to” come out to the farm and meet Joan. Finally, after tea (and perhaps after having had me vetted by Joan), he asked, in the same deceptively casual way, whether I’d like to see his workroom.

It is a vast barn behind the farm, equipped with every conceivable sort of woodworking tool and machine. If I knew a hawk from a hand-saw I could tell you what they all were, but anyway there were millions of them. The benches and racks of tools stretched off into the distance as far as the eye could see. Giles told me it was his sanctum sanctorum. Joan told me it was the only place he could really relax. And eventually, after I’d been gawping at it for a bit, I suddenly recognised what it was: Dad’s potting shed. The dream potting shed that Dad in the cartoons would have if he were rich and famous like his creator, Giles. “This is where I’ll come if I ever retire,” Giles said. “Retire!” I howled. “You can’t retire. We’d all miss you too much.” “Grk,” he said, “grk.”