Assembling A Collection Of Giles Cartoon Annuals Has Started Again
I am collecting Giles annual cartoon books. I started some years ago before we went to Australia and then didn't start again until not long ago. His cartoons were the source of a great deal of my background facts of twentieth Century history as he illustrated the goings on in the news, often dissembling down complicated stories into a simple picture with a humourous caption lampooning the situation. He almost invariably pictured the small man, reducing the story down to the ordinary level that anyone could comprehend. He may be working at the bbq and passing an observation on BSC or other food fright or sitting watching the football and giving his take on a sports scandal.
The key to a large number of his cartoons was the Giles family. This comprised of Mr Giles, the essence little man who was from anywhere suburbia, middle aged, long married and long suffering at the hands of his children. These were chiefly a couple of teenage daughters who, over the years took home a series of unsuitable misfits who morphed from teddy boys to mods and rockers, hippies, punks to new romantics. His son Ernie and his pal Larry from next door who are approximately eight and make all kinds of havoc. Larry is the kind of boy who would attach a turbo charger onto a gas bbq and sit back and watch with a camera while someone went to light it. Then there is Uncle George and Aunt Vera and their baby who live with them. George never speaks, just sits in the corner and smokes his pipe which puffs like a charcoal bbq. Vera forever has a runny nose and is holding a tissue to her nose and bottles of remedies around her. The baby is always being captured for experiments by Ernie and Larry. They couple be in the background at a family bbq with the baby on a spit roast and Larry about to light the fire below.
Greatest of all is Grandma, the fearsome head of the family attired in black with an ostrich head umbrella close to hand with which to beat any scoundrels who stray too close. These may include jockeys whose horse she wrongly backed or a shopkeeper who sold a malfunctioning product. She is regularly the one delivering the punchline or the hub of the story, often as she opines upon a story she's reading in the Daily or Sunday Express. An example would be from the nineteen sixties when the paper published a series of features on sex for youngsters, she is seen reading it and laughing mightily with Ernie saying to his mother "Grandma says she could have written a better strip than that when she was a girl". She is regularly the butt of the boys' pranks, perhaps being provided with a red hot coal from the charcoal bbq in a sandwich being delivered by Larry.
No matter the occasion, from the immediate post war era through the social revolutions and shifts in society, government and anything else, the cartoons of Carl Giles maintained an irresistible humour bringing the biggest emergencies down to the understanding of the man in the street. The Giles family, if at a family event like a caravan holiday, going out in Mr Giles new boat or assembled around the gas bbq at a party, regularly set up the end product of the joke.
The annuals carry on to this day, though Giles himself died in 1995, and still feature previously unpublished cartoons and collecting them all is a worthy aim.
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