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Illustrator with long affection for life’s underdogs

Raymond Briggs author/illustrator b January 18, 1934 d August 9, 2022

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 a cantankerous 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 the traditional jollifications were positively Scrooge-like: ‘‘My ideal Christmas would be to go into a bomb shelter and not come out again until the all-clear 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, a technique that often involved setting the story within the trappings of suburban domesticity – complete with toilets, three-piece suites and cups of tea.

His characters, too, were instantly recognisable. Father Christmas is not the generously proportioned old buffer heaveho-ing his way down the nation’s chimneys, but a moody, foul-mouthed old soak fed up with the backbreaking physical 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.

But it was not a stance he sustained; he admitted finding most politics too confusing. When, after September 11, 2001, he was asked by a newspaper to ‘‘do a When the Wind Blows-type of thing on it’’, he declined.

If there was 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 the darker forces of 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. His parents never punished him – even when he was brought home by the police after breaking into a golf club and stealing a set of billiard cues. He was evacuated during the Blitz to an aunt in Dorset and missed the excitement when a buzzbomb fell near the family home in London, blowing out the windows.

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 daily 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 at the prospect – 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, regarding the Renaissance masters as melodramatic, though he liked the peasant scenes of Flemish painters such as Bruegel.

After leaving art school in 1957, he scratched a living as an illustrator, working variously in advertising, magazines, newspapers and books. Depressed by the poor quality of the books he was asked to illustrate, he decided to start writing his own, and was surprised when in 1961 one of his offerings was accepted for publication.

He continued to write as well 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 which he revisited the fairy tale to reveal the giant as a grumpy poetry lover.

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 who had been a few years ahead of him at art school. They moved to Sussex, where Briggs took a part-time teaching post at Brighton Art School. But 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 and both his wife (upstairs in bed) and father (driving his milk float) made posthumous guest appearances in Father Christmas, which won Briggs another Kate Greenaway Medal and established him as a fixture in the Christmas market.

Father Christmas Goes on Holiday (1975) was followed by Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), a book that enthralled children with its rude jokes and unsavoury footnotes as much as it appalled their parents: ‘‘Ooh! What a night that was!’’ says Fungus on the opening page. ‘‘The bed has almost dried up!’’ ‘‘I know, dear,’’ says his wife, Mildew. ‘‘It needs more slime.’’

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 frustrations and disappointments of childhood were also the theme of The Man (1992), in which a boy wakes up to find a tiny, bad-tempered, naked man beside his bed and has to take care of him. In The Bear (1994) a little girl is befriended by a polar bear and, like the boy in The Snowman, is taken on a journey through the night sky.

Many critics felt that Ethel & Ernest should have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for its combination of vivid characterisation and brilliant social observation. (Nick Hornby observed that ‘‘social historians have said much less at much greater length, and with much less warmth and affection’’.)

His later books included Ug, Boy Genius of the Stone Age (2001) and The Puddleman (2004). Selections from his columns for The Oldie magazine were published in Notes from the Sofa in 2015. Time for Lights Out (2019) was a rather melancholy collection of autobiographical reflections and fragments of poetry on death and ageing, accompanied by his distinctive pencil illustrations.

The earnings from his books and spinoff products made Briggs rich. Yet he cultivated a grouchy public persona. His misanthropic image 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 Labour supporter, but said he despaired of the party under Jeremy Corbyn.

After his wife’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. – Telegraph Group

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2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

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