Most will know Ronald Searle as the man behind St. Trinian’s and the Molesworth books, but the point of his exhibition – ‘Ronald Searle: Obsessed With Drawing’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum – was to skirt around those and show that his was a varied and substantial career. Make sure to follow the exhibition the right way round (it’s easy to go round it the wrong way, if you enter through Gallery 15 as I did!) and you’ll get a sense of the progression and extent of his work. A constant trend is his dark-edged humour, which is understandable given his experiences during the war.

Sampled are his early cartoons for the Cambridge Daily News, the drawings inspired by his visits to the Fitzwilliam Museum, his covers for Paris Match and cartoons for Le Monde, examples of his Molesworth work and the brilliantly funny cat sketches. An interesting piece to include was one of the many photograph albums which he kept and filled with pictures he thought would make interesting subjects for drawing.

His eagerness for his work is nicely illustrated by the fact that for each commission he received from Paris Match, he would send in several drawings and allow the editors to make the final decision as to which they used. As the title ‘Obsessed with Drawing’ suggests, he was clearly a man brimming with inspiration, wit and application.

A quick glance at his bibliography shows the breadth and range of his work, a true testament to the fact that he loved to draw and would try his hand at all subjects. He collaborated with Rupert Graves, Tom Lehrer and the Hudson Bay Opera Company, to name a few examples, and worked on illustrated copies of Dickens and the Marquis de Sade.

Although Searle lived in France from 1961 onwards, he grew up in Cambridge. At just 15, he secured a paid job in the Cambridge Daily News as a cartoonist, and worked there until 1937, when he decided that his drawings would need to improve in order for him to get ahead. He studied at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin) before enlisting in the Royal Engineers at the outbreak of the war. He was stationed in Singapore in 1942, but after being captured by the Japanese just one month later, spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He kept drawing throughout his imprisonment; through sickness, extreme weight loss, malnourishment and beatings. Searle said later on that: “I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on.”

Indeed, it was after the war and his liberation that his career kicked off, with the series of drawings he had produced to document the horrendous conditions he had experienced during his imprisonment, drawings which had survived due to being hidden under the mattresses of his fellow prisoners while they were dying of cholera. His career only grew from then on.

Given that Ronald Searle had such a long career, I felt the exhibition could have done more to give an idea of what he was doing at all stages in his career. The exhibition didn’t mention, for example, his time as a prisoner-of-war, and so when I read about these details of his life afterwards I was a little shocked by their exclusion. A good exhibition should make you want to go away and read up about it afterwards, but I felt that in this case, the exhibition left a few too many gaps for Wikipedia to fill later on.

However, this exhibition is only one in a series celebrating Searle’s work. Also running in the Fitzwilliam at the moment is a complementary display of work by the caricaturists most admired by Searle, as well as two associated exhibitions in Anglia Ruskin. I have not been to these, so I can’t say whether or not they fill the gaps satisfactorily. Aside from this, the exhibition was concise and sharp, and certainly had me leaving in giggles at any rate.

‘Ronald Searle: Obsessed with Drawing’ runs until Sunday 31st January in the Shiba Gallery (14), Fitzwilliam Museum.