Introduction by Alan Titchmarsh MBE VMH

The GiIes Annual appeared in my father's Christmas stocking every year when I was a nipper and after he had read it from cover to cover I would settle down with it in front of a roaring fire.

I suppose I would have been ten or eleven when I really began to appreciate the sharp topicality of Giles's humour but long before that I had leamed to love his drawings because I knew two of his characters ‘intimately'. Grandma was just like my grandma and Vera was a dead ringer for my Auntie Alice. Like Giles's cartoon characters they lived - and bickered - together in a tiny terrace house. I can only think that Giles must have bumped into my relatives in their home town of IlkIey, Yorkshire at some point - how else could he have captured them so well? Oh and then there was ‘Chalky' the schoolmaster who I'm convinced was modelled on our local verger.

I still remember every detail in Giles's cartoons. One in particular depicted a farmer at the Smithfield Show trying to board an overflowing double-decker bus at the end of the day. ‘I'll have to get on', he explained to the conductor. ‘Me Aberdeen Angus be gorn upstairs'. Why that particular one should remain lodged in my mind I've no idea except that it struck me as being very funny.

Guess cartoons are timeless even when they portray historic events. Now I'm not sure if that's a contradiction but what I do know is that they still make me smile and all these years later I remain lost in admiration for the man's mastery of his craft.