Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

Three original P.O.W. drawings by Ronald Searle

as given to Lieutenant E. N. Dickinson, Indian Army Service Corps, who was onetime incarcerated in the same camp as the artist, comprising ‘Prisoners at Work on a Cutting’, signed ‘Ronald Searle, Thailand 1943’; ‘Thai Bullock Cart’, signed and dated as before; and ‘Natives Going Up Country’, signed and dated as before, all in pencil, charcoal and crayon, and approximately 200mm. by 125mm., generally in good condition; together with a copy of Forty Drawings by Ronald Searle (Cambridge University Press, 1946), and a portrait photograph of Lieutenant Dickinson (Lot) £1000-1200

Ronald Searle, the artist and cartoonist, is best known as the creator of the St. Trinian’s School and Molesworth series. Less well known is the fact he endured several years as a guest of the Imperial Japanese Army following the fall of Singapore, initially as a resident of Changi Prison, and later of a camp in the Kwai Jungle, working on the Siam-Burma “Death Railway”. Here, at the risk of severe punishment and a probable death sentence, Searle documented the appalling conditions in a series of drawings that he hid under the mattresses of prisoners dying of cholera. By the war’s end he had completed around 300 images, many of which today are held by the Imperial War Museum - thus evocative and shocking scenes such as the above described ‘Prisoners at Work on a Cutting’ are today rarely found outside institutional collections. Rare.