Introduction by - Nathaniel Gubbins

FROM Dean Swift to Giles the men who have made you laugh most have been the savage men.

Thoughtless people have lumped them all together under the title humorist, which would include knockabout comedians, jugglers and clowns.

But the laughter-makers who have been remembered, and who will be remembered in the years to come, are the satirists
the men who hate.

Among the things they hate are stupidity, injustice, intolerance. If they have suffered from any of these, or all, so much the better for their art.

This hatred, combined with a possibly subconscious desire for perfection in an imperfect world, produces men like Giles.

I don’t know what it is that Giles hates most. Maybe, it’s ugly and wicked children. Maybe it’s hunting squires and hard-riding women. Maybe it’s ancient aunts in hideous hats who always arrive for Christmas, or whenever there’s a picnic or a free holiday.

Whichever it is, cartoonist Giles has had his revenge on them all.

Mingled with his savage hate is a compassion reserved mainly for the father of the Giles cartoon family.

Never in the long history of domestic misery and injustice has a blameless man been blamed for so much; never has an undeserving parent been cursed with so many revolting children.

Yet, although caricatures are normally effective only if they are wild exaggerations, it has been noticed with alarm by several observant people, including John Gordon, that the Giles cartoon family are not caricatures at all. The country is stiff with people like that.

My own special delight in Giles, apart from his horrible children, is his draughtmanship.

So far as my knowledge of art goes, no cartoonist, either here or in America, can depict in black and white such vast forests and mountains, such magnificent churches and noble castles, such squalid back yards, such grim factories, such trees and rivers and—yes—such trams and buses.

Although he has none of the dullness of exactitude, when Giles draws a precipice you are quaking on the edge of it; when he draws a flood you are shivering in the middle of it; when he draws a snow scene you could pick the snow off the window sills and throw snowballs.

If these gifts were not enough to make his work of permanent value, and therefore worthy of inclusion in any library, a Giles book of cartoons is also a day by day, week by week record of English history as it. happens. Look at the cartoon and look at the date and you will find you are living recent history over again.

Moreover, there is always the delight of the second or third look at a Giles cartoon.

You may think you have seen it all at a glance, but if you look again you will find that one of the Giles children is up to something you hadn’t noticed before, either setting the house on fire, or preparing to blow auntie sky high with dynamite, or hurling the baby to destruction from the top of a tower.

I am glad to take this opportunity of expressing my warm admiration for an incomparable black and white artist, a great satirist and social commentator and therefore a great hater of all stupid people and things.

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