Collecting Giles Cartoon Annuals Has Restarted
I am assembling Giles annual cartoon books. I began some years ago before we emigrated to Canberra and then didn’t pick it up again until not long ago. His cartoons were the beginning of a lot of my background awareness of twentieth Century history as he pictured the events in the news, often breaking down complicated stories into a simple picture with a humourous caption lampooning the situation. He almost invariably depicted the ordinary man, breaking the story down to the everyday level that anybody would be able to understand. He might be standing at the bbq and giving a comment on BSC or other food fright or sitting watching the football and giving his opinion on a sports scandal.
Central to a huge number of his cartoons was the Giles family. This comprised of Mr Giles, the classic small man who was from ordinary suburbia, middle aged, long married and long suffering at the hands of his progeny. These were mainly a couple of teenage daughters who, through the years brought home a series of unsuitable misfits who morphed from teddy boys to mods and rockers, hippies, punks to new romantics. His boy Ernie and his mate Larry from next door who are approximately eight and bring all kinds of havoc. Larry is the type of boy who would bolt a turbo charger onto a gas bbq and sit back and watch with a camera while somebody went to light it. Then there’s Uncle George and Aunt Vera and their baby who live with them. George never speaks, just sits nearby and smokes his pipe which belches like a charcoal bbq. Vera forever has a cold and is holding a hanky to her nose and bottles of remedies around her. The baby is always being tortured for experiments by Ernie and Larry. They may be in the background at a family bbq with the baby on a spit roast and Larry about to set the fire below.
Greatest of all is Grandma, the terrifying matriarch of the family clad in black with an ostrich head umbrella close to hand with which to beat any wrongdoer who come too close. These may include jockeys whose horse she wrongly backed or a shopkeeper who sold a malfunctioning product. She is often the one giving the punchline or the centre 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 60′s when the paper printed a series of articles on sex for teenagers, she is seen reading it and laughing uproariously with Ernie saying to his mum “Grandma says she could have written a better strip than that when she was a girl”. She is regularly the focus of the boys’ pranks, perhaps being served with a red hot coal from the charcoal bbq in a sandwich being delivered by Larry.
No matter the story, from the immediate post war era through the social upheavals and developments in society, government and anything else, the cartoons of Carl Giles maintained an irresistible humour bringing the most serious stories down to the comprehension of the man in the street. The Giles family, if at a family event like a camping holiday, going out in Mr Giles new boat or assembled around the gas bbq at a party, often provided the end product of the joke.
The annuals are still published to the present day, though Giles himself died in 1995, and still include previously unpublished cartoons and collecting them all is a worthy aim.
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