Carl moved from London to Badger’s Cottage in 1942 while still a cartoonist for the left wing newspaper ‘Reynold’s News, owned by the co-op. A number of the writers on the paper were Communist commentators. His views, widely held now were considered extreme left wing in the 1940’s. He was a small man, rather untidy, with un-pressed trousers and a quizzical face. He was going out with his cousin Joan, who he described as ‘The prettiest girl I had ever seen’, taking her for rides in his little sports car.
On 16th. April 1941 Joan Clarke’s home in Great Percy Street suffered extensive bomb damage. Joan and her mother Agnes salvaged what belongings they could and went to live with a relative. Joan and Carl were married at St. John’s Church, East Finchley on 14th. March, 1942. On that cold, bright night, a ragged band of Home Guard pals lifted their bayonets to form an arch. Following the somewhat rowdy reception at Joan’s mum’s house, the part escorted Joan and Carl to Liverpool Street Station to see them off on their honeymoon in the Dicken’s suite, which had two four poster beds, at ‘The Great White Horse Hotel’ in Ipswich. They then moved into ‘Badger’s Cottage’ in Tuddenham, renting from an absent naval officer.
His friends were not grand people with posh jobs and titles, they were the working men around and about Tuddenham, farmers, chandlers, poachers and scallywags. One such was Cyril Girling, (known as ‘Pockets’) the local grave-digger, who was a drinking mate of Carl’s at the Fountain. Digging holes for the dead of what Giles’s biographer refers to as ‘that dozy corner of East Anglia’ seemed not to have given him many social skills with the living, except of course the regulars at the Fountain, the favourite for nearly 50 years of Giles and his mates. They nearly fell out when Cyril was told he was to be Tuddenham’s Special Constable. He was issued with a ponderous looking uniform, including big shiny boots which made a heart stopping clatter, especially if you heard them in the dark. He would stand under the lamp by Mrs. Bywater’s house near the bridge, stamping his feet, watching out for subversive elements. Giles thought Cyril became a bit to big for these impressive boots when, driving home in his big black Humber, the headlights masked into slits, as required by the blackout, the ‘special’ stepped out into the road, waving him down. Slowly taking out his officially issued notebook, Cyril peered in at the window and boomed ‘Identification Sir, Please’.
‘You know who I am you silly old fool’. ‘It is my duty ……. ‘.
‘****** off’ Carl exploded. He was still seething with fury years after poor old Cyril died. He loathed self importance. He had served for three years in the Home Guard in Edgeware, and told many a tale of the incompetence and self importance of men who, in his opinion, shouldn’t be in charge of a bicycle. One of the officers referred to working men as ‘peasants’. Giles told him what to do!
Born in Edgeware in 1916, he was working as an animator in the cartoon studios of Alexander Corda that he had a crash on his motor cycle. He sufferd a fractured skull which left him in deaf in one ear and unfit for military service.
Giles delighted in the variety offered to a cartoonist by the arrival of three million ‘Yanks’ who invaded Britain during the war. Over 3,000 young men came to station 152 at Debach by ship, train, truck and air in a matter of weeks during May 1944, as part of the 493rd. Bomb Group, dubbed Helton’s Hellcats. One of their many problems was how to cope with narrow country lanes, warm beer and the reserve of native Suffolkers.
See ‘Debach’
‘One hundred and fifty aerodromes are urgently needed in England for the American Air Forces’ stated a notice in ‘The New York Times’. A few months later, across the Atlantic and via Glasgow, the 820th. Engineer Aviation Battalion, Corps of Engineers came to Debach.
The first batch of soldiers were black labourers, members of the engineering battalion who were bulldozing, grading and levelling concrete twenty-four hours a day to get the 8th Airforce’s Liberators into the air. Coming from Alabama, Virginia, Georgia or South Caroline they found themselves decamped from the lorries that carried them into a bleak and inhospitable countryside. They had no tents, only the emergency rations they carried, and no instructions. They slept in ditches, until a couple of days later their white sergeants and officers arrived, to build what became known as ‘The Maze’. Standing there, hand on his bike, was ‘Sheriff’ Moody, the quiet, soft spoken, pink cheeked blue eyed village policeman. It was not infrequently that he helped one of the men who was lost, or drunk or in some other kind of trouble, but he never brought the matter before the company commander. He was there as much as the Americans to see the job of building the airfield finished, for the safety of us all.
The engineers received a warm welcome three days later at the ‘Grunsbra’ Dog pub. Black men, the labourers, were not allowed to mix with the offers and non-coms.
On Saturday evenings the negro engineers cycled to the Tuddenham Fountain balancing bass fiddles, drums, trumpets, trombones and saxophones on their handlebars. The bass player had to angle his instrument at sixty degrees in order to clear the low ceiling with it’s Scotch thistles and fleur-de-lis impressed there by Elizabethan workmen. Giles struck up the opening bars on the piano and the six piece hot band went into ‘Fat Mama With The Meat Shakin’ On Her Bones’.
The lads came to use Carl and Joan’s home as their own, eating and often sleeping there. Giles loved the talk of far away cultures and interests, their masculinity, generosity of spirit, their laughter, style and uniforms. The house and pub was endlessly filled with laughter, the village people taking to them as well. The friendliness was even known back home in the States, as an American journalist wrote about Carl and the lads. A photograph taken at the Tuddenham Fountain, early in 1944 shows two of Giles’s GI friends, Butch playing the drums and John Louis facing the camera. In naval uniform is local lad, ‘Dotsie’ Offord. Another shows Joan Giles at Badger’s Cottage, their home in Tuddenham with Butch on her right and another friend, Ike on her left. Some used to take the train to London, to join Carl in the newspaper taverns around Reynolds News.
Many years later Giles recalled ‘They especially got on with me. They knew, you see, that their colour didn’t matter a damn’. In contrast, writes Cockney Johnny Speight, creator of ranting bigot Alf Garnet, and one of Giles close friends who was also based in this area during the war, ‘I was in a Suffolk pub one evening and there was a bloody riot. All these Americans were objecting to one of their black soldiers who had taken up with a local girl. She was white of course. They had him up at one end of the bar and they were going to lynch him. Bloody terrifying it was. Then this country bobby comes in, without even a truncheon – and elbows his way through. They simply all fell back and it went quiet, as they were confronted with the full majesty of the law. He just led the bloke out to safety, before the American Military Police could arrive with all their riot sticks and heavy gear.
When the black soldiers had finished their work they moved away, and white GI’s took their place. Giles had done paintings of his friends and they had been hung in the bar. It soon became clear that these pictures were causing offence to the white Americans and the landlady took them down. ‘It was a bloody disgrace’, said Giles.
Friends like fellow socialist Gordon Schaffer urged him to reject the offer from ‘The Old Buccaneer’ Beaverbrook, through editor of the Daily Express, John Gordon. Money could not lure him from a job he was completely happy with. But when the news editor of Reynold cut an inch or two of sky or pavement from Giles’s drawing he was furious. Gordon kept on making offers that it was difficult to refuse. Perhaps being a married man finally tipped the scales in favour of a better income. Whatever the reason, on 3rd. October 1943 a Giles cartoon appeared in the Daily Express. It was of Hitler, sitting in an armchair in a huge room, with Mussolini on a dog lead sitting on the floor at his feet. Hitler is telling Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, who is playing with a toy train, that it is all his fault that the Russians are breaking through on the Eastern Front. Behind him hundreds of Russians are coming through the door.
Giles was now sending his cartoons to the Express by train, from Ipswich. Lord Beaverbrook was back in the War Cabinet. On the 6th. June 1944 a huge sea-borne invasion established beachheads in France. On August 25th. the allies liberated Paris. Giles was summoned to London by his editor, Arthur Christiansen. Giles had been bitterly disappointed that his deafness had prevented him from entering the armed forces, and when Christiansen asked him to go to France as a War Correspondent he agreed at once. In September 1944 he climbed into a DC3 Dakota Transport, clad in khaki battledress, with fellow Express correspondent Alan Moorhead and flew from the grass dispersal area at Heathrow for Belgium. In the same aircraft was famous comedian Bud Flanagan, going to entertain the troops.
The noise was shattering. New arrivals just wanted to hide in doorways, not do any worthwhile work. Giles sent a letter to his readers. A) it is cold. B) it is wet. C) There may be worse places. D) But not many.He went on ‘conditions are beyond enduring, (but) you will find more genuine comradeship and spontaneous humor than at normal times’. He was in the thick of the fighting, the dying, the filth, blood, pain and desperation. He remained always the champion of the ‘ever resilient Tommy’. His cartoons caught the mood of the time, and were perhaps easier to digest than the serious and sometime frightening accounts of the journalists at the front. They certainly did a lot for morale. The one thing in all of this that really got on his nerves was having to wear a helmet with the white letters ‘WC’.
Giles’s experience during the war would fill a book. Indeed they do, in ‘Giles at War’ written by one of his great admirers Peter Tory. One of them he rarely talked about. Even Joan did not know that in a shoebox, high on a shelf, were photographs of the day he walked into Belsen with the liberating Allied army, nor a dagger given to him by the camp commander. The photographs he took, many of which he still had, were horrific. There were things that he saw that he could not bear to remember, though he never forgot.
He caricatured Hitler, Mussolini and all the most infamous war leaders (including our own!) almost regretting their demise as he lost characters for his humour. He wrote home to Joan ‘I’ve lostt Musso’. The only one in whom he never saw anything funny was the only one he ever saw in the flesh, Heinrich Himmler. In spite of strict security, Himmler, who had been picked up by a British patrol in Hamburg, bit on a cyanide pill. Giles saw him lying dead in his cell.
Viscount Montgomery said, on May 4th. 1945 ‘The forces surrendering will total over a million chaps… and that, gentlemen is a good egg…’ Giles was there, sketch book in hand to witness in his own way the surrender documents being signed. He said the German generals looked stunned. They just could not believe the events of that day. For the next few weeks Giles spent many happy evenings celebrating the new peace. He was so well known that wherever he went people would hail him, inviting him to join them, glad of a bit of humour after the grim days, hopefully behind them. Eventually home called. A pleasant, quiet friend, Bill Hollingsworth, a dispatch rider gave Giles a lift from Hamburg to Holland on his Harley Davidson. The bike was heavy with Giles’s booty, so much of it that he wasn’t allowed on a Dakota aircraft departing for England, he had to sail on a troop ship from Ostend to Dover where Joan was waiting to meet him.
He and Joan moved away from Tuddenham, first to Henley Road, and in 1947 to Hill Brow Farm, Witnesham, where they lived out the rich and varied lives.
The Chapman brothers, Phil, at Akenham Hall and Peter at Berghesh farmed the 200 or so acres, and later Buchanan, from Westerfield, who bought most of the farmland when Carl died in 1995. Hard working decent people, yacht chandlers, chimney sweeps, grave diggers, country coppers, level crossing keepers, traffic wardens, and of course publicans featured regularly in his cartoons. The lane called ‘Sandy Lane’ changing later to ‘Tuddenham Lane’ but was known locally as ‘Giles’s Lane’. Giving directions to an Ipswich Taxi driver you only had to say ‘near Giles’ No further instructions were needed.
He was a colourful, interesting character, never boring. He loved the countryside and took care of it, environmentally conscious before the phrase was coined. The stories told in the village would fill a book, and there is not enough space to adequately record his life here in Witnesham.
He had every tool imaginable in his workshop at Hillbrow Farm. One of his best friends, ‘Dotsie’ Offord said there was a fortune in those barns and sheds. Dotsie recalled how, when he was called up he had never left Suffolk. ‘Giles took me to the station himself to put me on the train’ he said, ‘and pressed a few bob into my hand. I was only a boy, and scared to death. During my time in the navy we all read and laughed at his cartoons. I was proud to know him, and loved the man, but no-one believed me’. The last time we saw Giles, 50 years later in the lane, he was in his wheelchair, tartan rug over his knees, being pushed by tireless and ever faithful Dotsie.
Brian Felgate played the piano at the Crowfield Rose. He told me Carl was always surrounded by crowds of people. Among those who stayed at Hillbrow were Dave Allen, Tommy Cooper, even Prince Charles dropped in from time to time, although not, I think, to the Crowfield Rose. Carl drove a Bentley Continental that was a gift from Lord Beaverbrook, the publisher of the Daily Express Newspaper: all a far cry from Communist days at Reynold’s News.
When Carl died the three trustees of his will were concerned about the vulnerability of the many original works and considerable number of artefacts lying around the farmhouse at Hillbrow. Within days everything (including even a couple of Kit-Kat bars) was swept off shelves, out of drawers and cupboards, including those in the barn, into cardboard boxes. There are 7,000 original drawings alone estimated to be worth 10 million pounds. In accordance with his wishes they were sent to the Victoria and Albert Museum. They have since been transferred (in two pantechnicons) to the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent. It is the largest complete collection of it’s kind. The Joint Information Systems Committee has funded a £1m two year project to archive the material and make it available to researchers. His common sense observations of ordinary people, his humorous comments on their disgruntlements or arguments, whether within the family or against politicians, English or Foreign, will be a lasting record of the lives of the people ofour villages, a microcosm of England.
Acknowledgements to: ‘Here we are Together’ by Robert S. Arbid, an American soldier in Britain,
The Right Book Club 1947.Kindly loaned by Roger Blunt of Burgh, Woodbridge.
‘Giles at War’ by Peter Tory, Headline Press, as well as several private contributors.
Complied by Barbara Butler, Witnesham.