St Trinian's School

St Trinian's School

St Trinian's is a fictional girls' boarding school, the creation of English cartoonist Ronald Searle, that later became the subject of a popular series of comedy films.

The first cartoon appeared in 1941, but shortly afterwards Searle had to fulfil his military service where he was captured at Singapore and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese. After the war, in 1946 he started making new cartoons about the girls, but the content was a lot darker in comparison with the previous years.

The school is the antithesis of the Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil-type posh girls' boarding school; its pupils are wicked and often well armed, and mayhem is rife. The mistresses (as female teachers in Britain were known at the time) are also disreputable. Cartoons often showed dead bodies of girls who had been murdered with pitchforks or succumbed to violent team sports, sometimes with vultures circling; girls drank, gambled and smoked. It is reputed that the gymslip style of dress worn by the girls was closely modelled on the uniform of the school that Searle's daughter Kate attended, JAGS in Dulwich. The films implied that the girls were the daughters of gangsters, crooks, shady bookmakers and other low-lifes and the institution is often referred to as a "female borstal".