He has a feel for working class life, with its difficulties and sometimes comic predicaments. Many typical traits of Briggs’ later work were present, above all a genuinely felt sympathy for working people (Briggs’ father appears once in the story as his milk round and Father Christmas’ delivery route cross paths in the early morning). Devised in comic book fashion, Briggs took an iconic, mythical figure and depicted him as an ordinary worker doing an often tedious and repetitive job. This led Briggs to throw himself single-mindedly into his work. His parents died in 1971 and his wife soon after in 1973, from leukaemia. In 1963 Briggs married painter Jean Taprell Clark.Ī breakthrough came for Briggs in 1966, with The Mother Goose Treasury, for which he contributed almost 900 illustrations and received his first Kate Greenaway medal. His tuition was much admired and appreciated by a generation of artists. To Briggs’ astonishment, the editor had it published.Īround this time, he also got a part-time job as a lecturer teaching illustration at Brighton School of Art, which helped him survive when commissions dried up. Prompted by the poor quality of some of the novels he was illustrating, he produced his own, The Strange House (1961), an adventure story, and gave it to an editor friend hoping for some constructive criticism. By the time he had completed his higher education at the Slade School of Fine Art, he was already receiving commissions from publishers and advertising agencies. After deciding to study oil painting instead, Briggs focused on figurative drawing.Īs part of his national military service, he worked in the Royal Corps of Signals, where he was mostly required to draw electrical and radio circuits. His interviewer, who considered cartoons the lowest form of art, told him it was neither a serious nor proper ambition.

Despite parental misgivings, at 15 he enrolled at Wimbledon School of Art, hoping to train as a cartoonist. But he found the compulsory elocution lessons elitist and disliked its emphasis on his least favourite subject, sports. Despite outward appearances, however, anxieties over the ever-present threat of death and destruction cannot have failed to leave a mark on the impressionable boy (already 10 years’ old when the war ended) and undoubtedly accounts for these themes looming so large in his later work.Īfter the war, Briggs won a scholarship place at Rutlish Grammar School, Merton. Briggs said he enjoyed what he later described as a happy but uneventful childhood. Ethel, a young parlour maid working in the affluent central London district of Belgravia, had apparently been shaking out her duster from an upper window as Ernest passed by on his bicycle and confidently returned what he mistook to be a friendly wave.Īt the age of 6, during World War II, Briggs was twice evacuated as one of the millions of children, who along with expectant mothers and the infirm, were sent away from heavily populated areas of England to escape the Nazi air raids. Their first meeting was wonderfully portrayed by their son many years later in the wordless opening sequence of the book Ethel & Ernest: A True Story (1998). His parents met at the height of the depression. He also provided the artwork for several other authors.īriggs was born in London, in 1934, the only son of a milkman and a former lady’s maid. His relatives praised the “kind and thoughtful care” of the hospital’s staff.ĭuring a career spanning almost 60 years, Briggs wrote 26 picture books or graphic novels which he illustrated in his highly original style.

Raymond Briggs, best known for his books Father Christmas (1973) and The Snowman (1978), died August 9 of pneumonia at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, where he spent his final weeks.

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