Thursday 28 October 1976: my diary entry says it all: ‛Giles bonanza.’ I’d even drawn in the name Giles in the way it appeared on the front of the famous cartoon annuals, which I’d been collecting for the past twelve months...
When I first discovered the work of Daily Express cartoonist Ronald 'Carl' Giles, it didn’t occur to me to seek out vintage editions of his annual collections, and for a couple of years, I simply went out and bought each new album as it was issued, usually around mid autumn. I was always eager to see what this year’s cover would be, and whether it qualified as a ‛classic’. Then, in November 1975, I came across a small pile of older editions in a secondhand bookshop. One of them was older than me – the ‛yachts’ cover, spanning the years 1959-60, and uniquely the only edition ever to have the Giles name printed in black. Along with this came two other old editions: 1962-3 (Grandma teaching a parrot to swear) and 1964-5 (kids laying mines in a boating lake). They were priced at maybe 10 or 15p each.
I soon got to know the famous Giles family quite well, although some of their names remained a mystery for years to come. Grandma was the most famous of them all, based on Giles himself, to whom she bore a striking resemblance. The delinquent OAP was depicted boozing, gambling, generally misbehaving, sometimes put upon by the kids but always giving as good as she got, if not worse. She became a lightning rod for whatever scandal or outrageous fad was currently making the headlines: ‛If Grandma’s bought one of those new mini dresses, I’m leaving home,’ mutters young Ernie in a cartoon from 1966.
This example also illustrates perfectly one of the appeals of those vintage Giles annuals: each one was like an almanac for the year in question. Whatever was making the news, be it serious or trivial, whomever the current crop of celebrities and politicians might be, Giles and his eponymous family mirrored it all. As I began to collect the annuals, I started to piece together a whole social history of postwar Britain. I’d never heard of Christine Keeler or the Profumo scandal until I turned the pages of Giles 1962-63. To this day, much of my knowledge of 50s Britain – a decade I never experienced – is drawn from what I gleaned from old Giles annuals. The 1958-9 edition included a cartoon at a railway bookstall where two bobbysocked girls are asking for a copy of ‛Terry Dene’s army memoirs’. This would have been hilarious at the time, but was lost on me until many years later when I heard the story of Dene, a Brit rocker whose call-up for national service was brutally satirised in the press, leading to his discharge just two months later. The same edition also included many cartoons depicting the famously long, hot summer of 1959 – a meteorological event which preceded my birth by some eighteen months.
Moving into the mid 60s, some of Giles’ topical cartoons referred back to events of which I’d been dimly aware as a six or seven-year-old: the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1967; Ian Smith and Rhodesia; yachtsman Sir Alec Rose's single handed round the world voyage, and many others. Sometimes, Giles would comment on the lighter, ephemeral items in the news, such as a report from January 1966 of a gentleman who’d been causing traffic jams whilst walking his dog from the comfort of his very slowly moving car. Others are lost in the mists of time. I’m still not sure whether a cartoon about a flying bike that could hover one inch above the ground was based on a genuine news report, a figment of Giles’ fervid imagination or both.
The Giles universe, despite resembling our own world, obeyed its own set of physical laws. Animals could talk. Stinker, the mop-headed mute schoolboy, was able to create tiny duplicates of himself in the school science lab (reflecting the then current media interest in ‛test tube babies’). Items of clothing, most notably socks, retained the shape of their wearer after removal. Grandma’s snores were so loud as to interfere with the working of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. The moon was populated by TV antenna-headed aliens. Father Christmas was a ruffian who traded fisticuffs with the local vicar after their vehicles collided. Sputniks were wont to drop without warning into suburban gardens. And pylons, which Giles loathed, bestrode the landscape in insane profusion, their supports sometimes going right through the roofs of houses. Whatever was going on in our world, be it a stand-off between East and West, soccer violence or Bay City Roller mania, it all happened in Giles-world with even greater intensity and insanity.
One aspect of the Giles family that always intrigued me was their inability to remain in one place for longer than a single day. Their domestic surroundings were never depicted the same way twice. They’d be living in a particular house on Wednesday, but by the time of their next appearance, say on Sunday, the whole setting was altered, to suit whatever was happening in that day’s cartoon. This, of course, helped to add interest: seeing the same living room, the same kitchen and the same garden time after time would have become tedious, and Giles was anything but. He could easily have devised a ‛room set’ for the family, but chose instead to vary their circumstances according to the needs of a specific gag situation. If only real life could work like that…
After a year or so, I started to look at the real world in Giles terms: I’d turn a corner and be confronted by a steep street dwindling away into perspective and know immediately that the view was 'very Giles'. There are certain arrangements of trees and buildings that instantly suggest Giles. He lived in East Anglia, and the landscape is recognisable in some of his cartoons (Norwich is especially Giles-like) but he was equally at home depicting city landscapes and back-to-back urban squalor. The backgrounds often dwarf the characters. Huge, featureless high walls always make me think of Giles: there are a couple of examples close to where I live, one of which, on a very steep hill, looks for all the world like the setting for some imaginary annual cover. All it needs is the addition of his famous signature logo and Grandma... (scroll down to see it).
The 1976 ‛bonanza’ was the result of a half-term holiday visit to our favourite secondhand bookshop, owned by Royden Smith, in Burntwood Staffordshire. We’d been going there on occasional weekends since the summer, the shop being open on Sundays, which in 1976 was a remarkable thing indeed. The day’s haul comprised no fewer than six Giles annuals, two of them replacements for more battered copies; and the oldest of them meant that my Giles collection now reached back to 1957. Comparing the covers of those older annuals with the latest editions, I began to notice subtle differences in the printing quality. The further back one went, the more muted the colours became, and the printing itself had an almost watercolour look about it. One saw strange shades of pale blue, pink and yellow that seemed to emphasise the annuals’ antique 1950s qualities. Inside, the printing remained the same, but Giles’ drawings were more detailed in some of the older annuals, indicating that his cartoons had taken up greater space on the page.
I was so enthused by Giles that I even prevailed upon my parents to start taking the Daily Express, in which his cartoons appeared several times a week. By this time, the Express had reduced its pages to tabloid size, and one can see the corresponding reduction in detail in Giles’ drawings. After a year or so of collecting, I came to realise that there had been a high water mark in his career, lasting from the early 50s to the mid 60s. The later cartoons were still very good, but were often less elaborate, and featured fewer of his extraordinary perspective effects.
Although it was still relatively easy to turn up old Giles annuals at secondhand shops and jumble sales in the mid 70s, it was usually the more recent editions one came across. The 1967-8 edition (Twenty-Second Series), whose cover shows the family on safari in a Land Rover, became almost ubiquitous, and I can only assume that the quantity printed for that year outstripped all others by a long way. But some were next to impossible to obtain. The mid-50s editions, then all of twenty years old, had mostly disappeared, and the 1957-8 edition I picked up in October 1976 would be the oldest in my collection for a very long time. My all-time favourite cover, from 1956-7, was especially hard to find. I first saw it as a jigsaw puzzle, but the annual itself eluded me for years.
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| The 1956-7 Giles annual became a jigsaw puzzle in the mid 70s. Comparing this with the original cover, one can clearly see how the 'Giles' logo has been painted out on an overlay. The colours had also faded quite noticeably. |
Once the supply from jumble sales and junk shops had run dry, I turned to serious book collectors’ fairs, from where I picked up occasional early editions like the sixth and seventh series. By this time (the 1990s), one might pay anything from £10 to £25 for examples from the early 1950s. Series five was the hardest of all to obtain, and to this day I’ve never owned an original copy. Many of that year’s print run were, apparently, destroyed in a factory fire. Luckily, in later years, Pedigree books began to issue facsimile reprints on a yearly basis, which finally enabled me to complete my collection back to the very first edition.
The advent of eBay, and other online sources, really drove down the prices of old Giles annuals. Looking online today, I can see someone selling a copy of the far-too-easy-to-find Twenty Second series, priced at £33.98. Some hope. Copies can be had for as little as £3.95. Of course, the rare, older editions are still hard to come by, but haven’t gone up much in value in the past couple of decades. Series five, the rarest of the lot, is listed online for £80, which the same price I saw on a copy more than twenty five years ago. The first series goes for around the same figure.
You might think that the days of walking into a secondhand bookshop or antique centre and finding a pile of rare old Giles annuals are long gone… but perhaps not quite. Back in around 2012, while strolling around a vast antiques centre in Sheffield, I chanced upon a heap of Giles annuals, evidently from a house clearance, which included the 1957-8 edition and others from the same era – priced well below their market value, and all in near mint condition. Needless to say, I bought the lot.
The Giles annual is still published every year, or should one say reprinted, as the bulk of the content is comprised of cartoons that appeared way back in the original annuals. There were always ‛orphaned’ cartoons from each year, that were omitted from the collections, but these have now largely been accounted for across the reprint editions. Amazingly, there are still ‛new’ covers on some years’ editions – colour illustrations that were rejected for older editions, or produced for other purposes such as the RNLI. It’s only lack of space that prevents me from continuing to buy them: my personal collection peters out around 2007, and includes many, many duplicate editions.
For the record, the most expensive Giles annual I could find for sale online is a rare hardback (yes, hardback!) edition of the seventh series, produced as a trade presentation item. Yours for a mere £297. I’d like to know what Grandma would think about that...
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| Bearwood Hill Road, Burton On Trent – that huge wall and trees have always suggested a Giles annual cover... and so, with a little help from Photoshop... award yourself a bonus point if you know which annual the logo was scanned from (and no, it's not the obvious one). |