Voice of Britain
The Inside Story of the Daily Express

R Allen
Patrick Stevens Ltd, 1983

"Unsociable lot, these Germans, sir."
Holland 1944

"This is a lovely way to spend an evening . . ."
Holland 1944.

Lord Beaverbrook

"Mr Coote says that bloody lot can come down for a start."
Cartoon for front cover of Crusader, the Express Staff Newspaper. (June 1969)

"The trains are back and we're not playing 'I spy' this morning."
From the front cover of Daily Express on it's return from a newspaper strike. 24 9.71

"If you wish to remain a permanent member of this family—no politics or religion!" 24.02.81

Chapter 14

A man’s best friend is his grandma

 ‘Sunday without the Sunday Express? Colourless.’ So says a recent advertisement. But the Express without Giles? Unthinkable! In the years since the Second World War Carl Giles has become, for many, the very epitome of the Express. His cast of characters, the formidable grandma, the sickly Aunt Vera, Chalkie the skeletal school-master and the herds of appalling children, are all closer to the hearts of the readers than any other feature the paper has ever carried. The Giles annual is a regular best-seller (currently the print run is about 3/4 million copies) and is avidly collected even by those who never read the newspaper.

However, anyone who imagines that Giles is some kind of Fleet Street superstar could not be more wrong. In the first place he does not operate from London and only visits the place in order to appear at occasional official engagements. Younger members of the newspaper’s staff have often never seen him at all and even old friends, such as Osbert Lancaster, always preface remarks about their colleague with, ‘Haven’t seen him for ages . . .’.

 The elusive Giles long ago took refuge in East Anglia where he owns a farm in the village of Witnesham, just outside Ipswich. His cartoons arrive in London by train or, if necessary, dispatch rider. He dislikes publicity intensely, avoids the attention of TV reporters and newspaper journalists alike and has brushed off with some derision suggestions that he should write his autobiography.

 However, he is no lonely recluse. He certainly does not live a Howard Hughes existence of neurotic isolation. He is a naturally sociable person with plenty of interests outside newspapers and, although he can talk about Fleet Street informatively and interestingly for hours, on the whole he would really rather not. After some persuasion he did agree to be interviewed. I had tried to convince him that the story of the Express without Giles would be incomplete; a suggestion he politely dismissed.

 Nonetheless, a roaring hot June day found me trundling through the Suffolk countryside on one of those two-car trains which stop frequently at sleepy towns and villages scarcely large enough to show up on most maps. Giles was waiting at Ipswich station to take me out to his farm. White-haired, glasses, wearing a startling red and white striped shirt, he lounged at the wheel of his Range Rover smoking one of those long, thin brown cigarettes which masquerades as a cheroot. (‘I’ve given up smoking—these things don’t count.‘) As we drove through the town it became clear that this Londoner had adopted Suffolk as his real home, even his accent had, over many years, become infused with some of the warm East Anglian tones. He pointed out the town’s docks and the little back streets of terrace houses with affection. It was all a very far cry from the Fleet Street jungle. It was also a long way from his origins.

 Giles comes from a long line of jockeys, a profession which he never had much inclination to follow. He knew from a very early age that he wanted to draw, it was not a conscious decision, merely something which he was good at and wanted to continue doing. As a child he went to a large variety of schools but one he remembers with particular satisfaction was run by the Roman Catholic church. Not being a Catholic himself he had plenty of spare time. ‘They were always jumping up to go and pray,’ he remembers.

 His professional training started at 14 and he thereafter graduated through many great backroom studios in Wardour Street’s and Charing Cross Road’s film land. At 18 he was working for Alexander Korda. ‘That was the best training I could have had. They were marvellous places. I’d have worked there for nothing. All those people, some really great artists. You had the chance to see all the various styles—it was absolutely marvellous.’ In addition to getting experience in animation, working in London’s Charing Cross Road had initiated him into the realities of life. It was not very long before he was well used to the ways of the city, and the broad experience of life which it gave him was to become part of his stock-in-trade as a cartoonist.

 He eventually went to work drawing cartoons for the left-wing Reynold’s News, a paper run by the Co-op. It was there that he really came to sympathise with socialism. Today he is still a left-winger, or ‘dirty red’ as he calls himself, and believes firmly that trade unions have done more for the working class than organised religion ever achieved. Even so, he is not blind to the foibles of the Left and the excesses of some modern union representatives. It was a bit of trade unionism on behalf of himself and his fellow workers which caused him to leave Reynold’s News and go to the Express. For at the beginning of the war most of the capitalist papers were making up the wages of men who had been called away to fight. However, Reynold’s News, which was supposedly defending the rights of the working class, made no move to follow suit. Giles and some other members of staff went to see Alf Barnes (later knighted under a Labour Government) and put it to him that if he went into any pub in Fleet Street he would hear journalists deriding Reynold’s for its mean attitude to the staff which contrasted so badly with the treatment which was being handed out by the Press Barons on their Tory papers.

 Although their plea was successful, for Giles the victory came just too late—he had been approached by the Sunday Express in the person of John Gordon. It was the fact that the Express organisation had approached Giles which made all the difference. It forced them to offer him greater freedom than he could possibly have imagined to draw just as he pleased.

 ‘I’d never thought of working for the Express. But, even though I didn’t share its political opinions, that paper was like the Palladium to me and Christiansen was the great ringmaster. Also the freedom they gave me was something I couldn’t have got anywhere else. And they’ve stuck to it right through to today. I never submit roughs. I can’t work that way—I just sit down and draw the thing.’

 We arrived at the farm and were met by his wife, Joan. ‘My escalator’ as he cryptically calls her. ‘She organises me. If it wasn’t for her I’d never find anything. You know, you can ask her to find a letter or a Press cutting from years back and she goes straight to it. Amazing woman.’

 The house is large, modern and very comfortable. In the living room the walls are decorated with signed photographs of friends, mainly from the world of show-business—Dave Allen and Frank Sinatra grin cheerily across the room. And on another wall the familiar features of Jean Rook gaze down—she has always been a great fan of Giles’ work. Entertainers seem to hold a particular fascination for him; Johnny Speight is a regular visitor and Tommy Cooper and his wife are particular friends. ‘The thing about Tommy is that he never really tells jokes—he doesn’t need to. You just look at this great giant standing there and you begin to laugh. I only have to see him and I’m laughing.’

 One of his great delights is his workshop which is large and equipped with a huge variety of tools, many of which seem to have been collected purely for the delight he takes in them as objects which do a job well. Above all Giles gives the impression of being a very practical person who can turn his hand to most things. Certainly there is no air of ‘artiness’ about him. You imagine that he could build a piece of furniture, strip down an engine or draw a cartoon with equal skill. He likes cars and tends to accumulate them (we had to make a short foray to rescue a Mini which had somehow been separated from the herd and was safely returned to the company of the Lotus and the Range Rover).

 The only work which he leaves to others is the running of the farm. That is carried out by tenants. But the benefit of owning your own farm, apart from financial considerations, is that the house is surrounded by some superb countryside and although Ipswich is only a matter of minutes away by car, it might as well be a hundred miles.

 We decided to adjourn to the local for lunch. He mentioned that the pub was situated by the water where his boat is moored. ‘I have this disease, you see. It’s called sailing.’ Indeed sailing is the delight of his life, as I was very soon to discover. The pub was inhabited by people whose main aim in life was messing about in boats. Like Giles many of them were compelled to do other things in order to live, but it was soon obvious that in this community boats came first and all other considerations were a poor second.

 Although the locals were naturally pleased and proud to have a celebrity amongst them, they obviously regarded him first as a fellow sailor and boat-owner and only secondly as a cartoonist. I remarked on this. ‘Oh, yes. We don’t get any of that “Giles” nonsense down here. I know their lives and I’ve known all their families for years.’ The sun beat down on gently splashing water and bobbing boats. In the bar men stood around discussing important issues, like sailing and boats and whether the weather would hold and whether another pint would go down well. It all seemed a very long way from Giles’ other life.

 We returned to discussing the Express. Giles had arrived just as Tom Driberg was leaving for Reynold’s News. Thus the papers did a complete swap and, though Driberg was undoubtedly a very talented writer, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Express got the better end of the deal. However, Giles deeply regrets the passing of his old paper and remembers its idealism with great affection. He points out that many of the men who worked on it could, and at times did, make much more money working for the Tory papers but that they chose to stay at Reynold’s because they believed in what it stood for.

 What about his career as a war correspondent? ‘You know I spent years with WC printed on my hat. Isn’t that absurd? And you know what happened then? We got near the end of the war and some bright spark in Whitehall or somewhere thought, “WC? That’s a bad joke, let’s change it”. So they altered it to C. I ask you, who in the Army would walk around with C stuck on his hat? They all knew what that stood for!’

 How did he continue to draw funny cartoons when he was in the middle of a war? Surely there could not have been much to laugh at a lot of the time? ‘You do laugh, you know. And you get hardened to things. There’s a great tradition of war cartoonists going way back—people like Gillray, Rowlandson and Goya. But the thing which has really stayed with me was Belsen. It was really beautiful weather when we entered that place, just like today. And it’s a lovely village, you know, it looks like the stockbroker belt. All these lovely houses and well kept gardens and then three-quarters of a mile down the road was the concentration camp. We couldn’t believe it when we first saw it. Then they found Joseph Kramer, you know he was the one who had the lampshades made out of human skin. Well our troops soon laid into him. No one tried to stop them. But even that turned into a farce. They had to keep him somewhere and the only secure place they could find was a refrigeration plant which had broken down, so they stuck him in there. Then during the night the Royal Engineers managed to get the power going again and nobody thought of bloody Kramer sitting in his fridge! At least, everyone said it was an accident, ‘though I’ve often wondered. He was still alive in the morning though. Cold and stiff mind you, but alive. He was a great bull of a man, tough as anything.

 ‘Anyway, that was the worst thing we saw. Even real toughies like Alan Moorehead were upset by that. And some of them couldn’t control themselves with the Germans. Until then the war had just been war. People got killed, and some had their homes bombed, but the hate was controlled. But when the news of Belsen got out that really set people off. There was this little Australian reporter with us called Ronnie Monson—a real tough little back alley brawler but a great war correspondent who was in the thick of everything. We were in some bar one night when he got well plastered. Then he saw a German sitting there looking like every cartoonist’s image of the typical Nazi and he really let him have it. There he was laying into this bloke as hard as he could go and the rest of us were all sitting around just watching. Well, eventually someone pulled him off but then a bit later he went back and started to have another go. I certainly didn’t try to stop him. These people all maintained that they had no idea what was going on but no one swallowed that. But then Low did his cartoon of a great pile of bodies in a concentration camp with an arm hanging down limply and the caption “Don’t forget we too are Germans”. That’s what a lot of people were inclined to forget.

 ‘The thing which bothered me most was my own reaction. The first day you thought. “My God, I’ve never seen anything so terrible” and then after a few days you were stepping in things without a second thought. You didn’t really notice whether it was the remains of a person or just a lump of straw. It’s frightening when you start to become hardened to something like that.’

 What about after the war; how did the Giles’ cartoon family come about? ‘When the war finished everyone was fed up with the whole thing. After six years of it they all wanted something different and so I started the family. They were all well recognised types. There was Vera, the aunt who lives out of a bottle of Aspirin. Every family has a Vera somewhere. And then, of course, there was Grandma. Well, they like Grandma because she swears and doesn’t care what she says to anyone. From my point of view she’s the perfect instrument for getting away with murder. I can say what I like and, as long as I put the words in her mouth, the chances are I’ll get away with it. Several times I’ve thought she was past it and I’ve tried to kill her off but I always find that after a few days when she doesn’t appear I start to get letters complaining and asking for her to come back. The most surprising thing is that the letters don’t come from people of my generation or even from yours, they come from kids. I mean, kids these days don’t have grandmas like that—their idea of a grandmother is Brigitte Bardot.’

 The sailors felt that Carl had been nattering about journalism long enough—to the neglect of the important things in life. We were summoned to the bar where the talk was all of winds, sheets, rudders and cleats. It turned out that I knew the landlady. The landlady knew my publisher. We did our ‘isn’t it a small world?’ conversation whilst the sailing talk continued. Suddenly Marje remarked, ‘Do you know where Grandma comes from?’ I’d read somewhere that she was based on his own grandmother but I hadn’t got round to asking yet. She pointed out a small self-portrait of Giles which hangs behind the bar. ‘There,’ she said, ‘you can see the likeness in that, can’t you? Look at the line of the mouth,’ And there it was, immediate and unmistakable; Giles is his own Grandma!

 We started to drive back to Ipswich to take a look at the studio. I asked him about a Giles anecdote I had been told in the Express offices. Rumour had it that on one occasion he threatened to conceal a drawing of a surprising object (which shall remain nameless) in one of his cartoons. The upshot of this was that all his work had to be inspected to see whether the threat had been carried out.

 ‘No, that’s all bullshit. The truth is much better. I used to do it all the time. There are all sorts of things in some of those drawings—hanging from washing lines and God knows what else. I used to do it to tease the legal boy. Do you know him? Well, he’s still there. He looks like a barrister even without his wig. It’s his job to check everything for libel and so on. I used to make his life a misery. But sometimes I got caught out. There was some film starlet, visiting Berlin—maybe Loren or someone like that—and the RAF gave her a guard of honour. Every man in the line had this little bump in the front of his trousers. Well, that one came straight back on the train and I had to paint out the bumps—standing in the station parcels office—and still get it to London in time for the deadline. It was all in their mind of course, it was just the way the shadows fell on the uniforms!’

 We arrived at the studio in the centre of Ipswich. It was early evening by now and the place was deserted. In the outer office a secretary usually sits. One of her functions is to fend off enquiries on deadline days. Tuesday and Thursday are non-deadline days and the work can then be more relaxed but if there is a cartoon to be put on a train then nothing can be allowed to stand in the way.

 One of the walls of the outer room is painted entirely a greyish blue. Descending dramatically like lightning flashes from the top left-hand corner are three enormous splashes of vivid colour. As the eye follows them down it meets a couple of mop-headed Giles children who, sitting on a piece of wood suspended from the top of the wall, are busily signing ‘Picasso’. ‘It needed something to break that wall up. I couldn’t get away with doing that but they can do what they like.’

 The studio itself is large, light and airy. It looks out on to a busy Street (though the East Anglian idea of ‘busy’ is more leisurely and attractive than, say, Fleet Street). Giles has obviously adapted the studio himself. ‘This is where the workshop comes in. It’s much easier if you can just make what you need. This room was just a great square box of a place when I moved in.

 I mentioned the offices at the Express and the fact that he seemed much more comfortable working here.

 ‘Oh, those offices always were dreadful. Just look where they’ve put Jean Rook. Have you seen it?’

 We took a look at some of the work in progress. A Christmas card, next year’s annual cover and so on. Giles also gets very involved in doing work for all sorts of good causes which approach him. One of his favourites is the RNLI. In 1973 they gave him an award of which he is especially proud and now, down where he keeps the boat, he has often taken the helm of the local lifeboat when the RNLI has its annual celebration. It is an honour which he delights in and takes very seriously.

 However, the volume of work means that he is at the office from early in the morning until about nine o'clock at night. As with all the cartoonists and journalists I spoke to, Giles has to go through the ritual of reading the papers and listening to the news bulletins to try to brief himself before he draws his cartoons. The thing he tries to bear in mind is ‘What will they be talking about at the bus stops tomorrow’. His other self-imposed rule is that he never draws a cartoon which is primarily political, although many of his comments are concerned with political events. He has never believed that politics on its own makes good journalism. He points out that if politics alone sold papers, then the Morning Star, which has yet to discover jokes, would be the best-selling paper in the country.

 The interview was just about over, and I thanked him for his help with the book. But why had he never written his autobiography?

 ‘I could never be bothered with all that. Same as TV interviews. Everyone thinks they can go on television and be a success but then they sit there saying “Well, you know . . .“. I’ll tell you what; they soon think of something to say about you when you’re dead. They won’t need any help from me. Living in a small place like this I get to hear all the talk and it amazes me all the things I’m supposed to have said and done. It’s got to the stage now where if four or five weeks go by and I don’t hear anything really rotten about myself I make something up and send it round!’

 We went outside. A hot day had turned into a hot evening. The train for Cambridge didn’t leave for another hour. ‘Ah well,’ said Giles, ‘just time to look in at a couple of pubs.’

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Last updated: 2 October 2000