Introduction by Jean Rook

One reason I joined the Daily Express was to meet Giles. If I got to shake the hand which actually draws those marvellous cartoons, I wasn’t going to wash my hand for a week.

The morning I joined the paper, Giles’s obnoxious nephew, Giles mr., was on the front page, bawling “Down with Women’s Lib — Sack Jean Rook before she Starts!! ! *?!”

Since then, Giles has given me hell. I have six much-envied original Giles cartoons — all appallingly rude about me.

Giles is a living legend. And the loyalest of friends. He also has a very sketchy idea of time and place. Five times in five years I’ve booked a table at the Savoy to take him out to lunch, and five times he’s got the wrong date, forgotten, and rung up a week later to ask why I never take him out to lunch. -

Last Christmas Eve he rang me at home to ask why I hadn’t called at his home to pick up the cartoon of Good King Wenceslas — kidnapped by Yonder Peasant — he’s drawn me for Christmas.

When I told him he’d forgotten to ask me, and we live 80 miles apart, he said it was a pity I couldn’t run round and cheer him up, because there was tinsel in his cornflakes, and one of his relatives’ dogs had just leaked on the dining room carpet.

This Giles Annual, like all his work, is a classic. And, like all his work, will last.

My favourite cartoon is one he drew for my son, Gresby, now six, when he was a year old. It’s of a morose-looking, nappied baby, waving a placard — “Go Home Mum” — and addressed, “To Gresby — with Deepest Sympathy from Giles”.

I am sure it will hang on the walls of my son’s sons’ homes, and of their sons.

Like Giles, it is a treasure.