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Illustratorwith enduring affection for the underdog

Raymond Briggs, who has died aged 88, was famous as the author of illustrated Christmas stories for children – with a difference. Briggs’ Father Christmas is an old curmudgeon who complains about the ‘‘bloody reindeer’’ and ‘‘work, work, work’’; The Snowman comes to life for a lonely little boy but melts in the morning; Fungus the Bogeyman is a repulsive monster hero who revels in slime, body secretions and rot.

Briggs made a fortune out of Christmas but his tales were deeply subversive of the conventions of the festive season. His own views on it were positively Scrooge-like: ‘‘My ideal Christmas would be to go into a bomb shelter and not come out again until the allclear sounded.’’

Briggs’ chosen medium was the strip cartoon or, more accurately, strip illustration. His technique was to take a fantastical situation and apply what he called ‘‘common sense and literalness’’ to make it believable, often setting the story within the trappings of suburban domesticity – complete with toilets, threepiece suites and cups of tea.

His characters, too, were instantly recognisable. Father Christmas is not the portly old buffer heave-ho-ing his way down chimneys, but a foul-mouthed old soak fed up with the backbreaking tedium of his job (Briggs envisaged him as ‘‘a bit like my dad, who was a milkman’’).

Briggs was sometimes described as a political writer and it was easy to see why. In his black comedy of a nuclear holocaust, When the Wind Blows (1982), an ordinary couple survive a nuclear attack and are still obediently following futile government instructions, unaware that they are slowly dying. In The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984), Briggs’ take on the Falkland Islands conflict, the dead lie forlorn as the title characters strut across the political stage.

If therewas a common theme in his work, it was his humanitarian preoccupation with life’s underdogs and the tension between dreams and disappointing reality. The little boy who finds fleeting happiness in the friendship of a snowman, Father Christmas with his aches and pains, and the couple in When the Wind Blows are struggling with loneliness and mortality.

Raymond Redvers Briggs was born in Wimbledon Park, London. His father, Ernest, was a milkman and staunch socialist; his mother, Ethel, had been in service and put great store by deference and gentility.

Though his own views were probably closer to his father’s, Briggs understood that his mother often got to the heart of the matter. In a scene in Ethel & Ernest (1998), his cartoon memoir of their lives, Ernest is reading an article about the recently published Beveridge Report. ‘‘The Welfare State!’’ he cheers. ‘‘We’ve won!’’ Ethel responds: ‘‘It will all have to be paid for.’’

An only child, Briggs had a happy if rather lonely childhood. He was evacuated during the Blitz to an aunt in Dorset and missed the excitement when a buzzbomb fell near his home in London.

He loved drawing from an early age and would send his parents illustrated letters from his aunt’s house. He won a place at grammar school, where he had elocution lessons to cure him of his working-class vowels. His interest in drawing survived, and he conceived the idea of becoming a cartoonist. His parents were appalled – his mother had always wanted him to have a ‘‘proper job in an office’’ – but they agreed to support him through art school.

He did not excel as a painter and never really appreciated fine art, though he liked the peasant scenes of Flemish painters like Bruegel.

After leaving art school, he scratched a living as an illustrator, working in advertising, magazines, books and newspapers. Depressed by the poor quality of the books he was asked to illustrate, he began writing his own, and was surprised when in 1961 one was accepted for publication.

He continued to write aswell as illustrating other people’s work, winning his first critical success in 1966 when his illustrations for The Mother Goose Treasury won him the Kate Greenaway Medal. He had further success with Jim and the Beanstalk (1970).

In January 1971, Ethel died of leukaemia; Ernest followed in September the same year. Their deaths marked the start of the bleakest period in Briggs’ life.

In 1963 he had married Jean Taprell Clark, a painter hemet at art school. Jean had schizophrenia and was in and out of mental hospitals for much of their marriage. In 1973 she died two months after being diagnosed with leukaemia. They had no children.

The darker themes of his work were often traced back to this period.

Briggs took the narrative illustration one step further in The Snowman (1978) by omitting words altogether. The book outsold all his previous works, and spun off into stage and screen adaptations.

The earnings from his books and spinoffs made Briggs rich, yet he cultivated a grouchy public persona. This may have been a private joke, for friends spoke of his kindness and generosity.

He was appointed CBE in 2017. Away from his books, Briggs was a keen gardener, obsessive about compost heaps and bonfires, and enjoyed walks, jazz and angling. He had always been a staunch Labour supporter, but said he despaired of the party under Jeremy Corbyn.

After Jean’s death, Briggs lived alone in his cottage in East Sussex, but had a ‘‘lady friend’’ (‘‘just Liz, no second name, she doesn’t like getting too involved in press stuff’’). She died in 2015. –

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