Wednesday 10 August 2022 10:07 PM Snowman creator Raymond Briggs dies aged 88 trends now
He didn’t like snow or the cold. He loathed Christmas. He couldn’t stand most children, or anyone under middle age, really. And yet Raymond Briggs, who has died aged 88, was the author of The Snowman, that Christmas perennial beloved by generations of children and their parents.
He was never a father and regarded himself as ‘a creative sociopath’, pinning a clinical definition of the term to his study wall. The words that best described him, he said, were ‘self-absorbed, impatient, intolerant and grumpy’.
From the beginning of his career, his intricate comic-strip books filled with detail and wit were intended to confound, even to revolt, his young readers. Death, decay and grief were mainstays of his stories.
He didn’t like snow or the cold. He loathed Christmas. He couldn’t stand most children, or anyone under middle age, really. And yet Raymond Briggs, who has died aged 88, was the author of The Snowman, that Christmas perennial beloved by generations of children and their parents
Briggs is probably best known for his animated Christmas story The Snowman, which was later made into a film
A fierce streak of anger burned through many, most notoriously When The Wind Blows — a depiction of a nuclear attack on Britain, imagining the slow, painful death of a couple, just like his parents, from radiation poisoning. That book with its nursery-rhyme title came in 1982, after the success of The Snowman.
The horror of thousands of parents at the time, not to mention his publishers, is hard to overstate. It was as if Roald Dahl decided to write Charlie And The Chainsaw Massacre.
But Raymond was also the creator of an extraordinarily moving memoir, a life story of his parents Ethel and Ernest, whom he adored. Much of the sadness and pain that permeated even the gentlest of his stories stemmed from losing them. Indeed, Raymond always dated the start of his life not from his birth in 1934 in Wimbledon but to the moment his father first set eyes on his mother.
Ethel was a lady’s maid shaking a duster out of an upstairs window in Belgravia, in 1928. Ernest was a milkman, cycling by, who stopped at a zebra crossing and looked up. Being a cheeky chap, he waved at her. Next morning, she was waiting for him to ride past, and she flapped the duster again. This happened every day for a week until on the Sunday he turned up on the doorstep in his best suit and tiepin, with a bunch of flowers.
Briggs was also responsible for the much-loved character Fungus the Bogeyman
From the beginning of his career, his intricate comic-strip books filled with detail and wit were intended to confound, even to revolt, his young readers. Death, decay and grief were mainstays of his stories
‘This waving’s been going on long enough, duck,’ he said. ‘How about coming to the pictures with me?’
One of 11 children, brought up in a two-bedroom terraced house in Sydenham, South-East London, Ethel regarded her family as quite posh. Well, they were compared to Ernest’s upbringing in Earlsfield, South-West London.
He liked to joke that his childhood streets were so tough, the police wouldn’t patrol there. When one unwary bobby did try to break up a pub fight, the locals sat on him, stole his whistle and blew it to see if any more constables dared come.
Briggs briefly pursued a painting career before settling down as a professional illustrator and taking up a job in the advertising trade in the 60s. He illustrated his first collection of nursery rhymes, The Mother Goose Trilogy in 1966 which earned him the Kate Greenaway medal
Briggs, who was born in Wimbledon in 1934, enjoyed a long and successful career and is best known as the creator of his 1978 hit The Snowman which has sold millions of copies worldwide
Author and illustrator Raymond Briggs has died aged 88, his publisher Penguin Random House said
Though he never experienced it himself, this background of poverty had an indelible effect on Raymond. He saw how hard his parents worked to better their lives and give him a good education. As the generation gap between them yawned, he often felt guilty for it.
He laughed at his father for using the kitchen sink to wash his face and hands — ‘Blimey, son, I can’t wash in the bathroom, not in this state. I’m filthy!’
Ethel was suspicious of every new household appliance, most of all the telephone. The first time it rang, she shrieked: ‘Oh quick, Ernest, it’s going off!’
But he was also in awe of his parents’ bravery during the Blitz. A bomb landed on their street, blowing the front door down. And on a visit to the allotment in 1944, he and his father had to sprint for shelter as a V1 ‘doodlebug’ rocket fell. Ernest threw himself over his son, protecting the boy with his own body.
Raymond was an only child: the doctor who delivered him warned Ethel, who was 39, that ‘she’d better not have any more’. ‘At least it saved me the bother of having brothers and sisters,’ he said. ‘I remember Dad telling a relative how Mum had “thrown all her love” into me.’
When he won a place at the local grammar school, his mother was intensely proud, telling neighbours that her son was studying Latin and playing ‘rugger’. While she wanted education to lift him out of humble surroundings, Raymond felt a deep affection for his home, even if he wasn’t aware of it at the time.
Ignoring his father Ernest's advice that it would be an unprofitable pursuit, Briggs showed a flair for painting at the Wimbledon School of Art from 1949 to 1953 and later studied typography at Central School of Art
In that world, men in caps whistled on their way to work and a fresh pint of milk stood on every step, delivered by Ernest. Decades later, he would draw that London so vividly that it seemed to be just a bus ride away.
All his life, he could not forgive himself for the times he let his parents down. In his teens, he was caught breaking into the local golf club and was brought home in disgrace in a police van.
Worse, once he became a student at art college (‘There’s no money in that, son,’ warned Ernest), he grew his hair long and refused all his mother’s pleas to comb it. ‘When I went to art school,’ he said, ‘I got terribly snobbish. I hated the fact Mum hung up the washing in the kitchen.’
His parents were Victorians and he belonged to the rock’n’roll era. The gulf could not have been wider.
After National Service as a draughtsman with the Signals Corps, he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London to study painting.
Here, he met artist Jean
