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Giles - The origins of Grandma

Giles’ creation of his most famous character.

Detail from GA0211: 11 September 1947Giles gave Grandma his own surname, and it is from “Grandma Giles” that we know the name of the whole family. Giles liked to claim that she was an amalgam of his own Grandma Giles, and his maternal grandmother, Nanny Clarke. Grandma, he claimed, “represents all my grandmas, who were strictly the bull's-eyes-and-embrocation variety.” But this explanation does not bear scrutiny. Grandma Giles was far too respectable to be a model for his cartoon character, for Giles confessed that she “was a church-going lady and didn’t drink”. Nanny Clarke was rather more extrovert, but was simply too motherly to have been the model for Grandma.

The truth is that Grandma was an amalgam of two elderly women, but they were both from Giles’ own cartoons. The first was a cheeky figure in a black dress, who had flowers or a bird on her hat, and appeared in Giles’ cartoons long before he joined the Sunday Express. This figure has been identified in drawings which Giles did for Reynolds News, Our Time, and the monthly AEU Journal. The second figure was a far angrier women whom Giles started drawing in the Daily Express in 1947 as the grandma of his Family. It was this figure who appeared in “The Giles Family Tree” of 1951, and who seemed to be borrowed from Charles Addams’ cartoons of his creepy family in the New Yorker. On one occasion she even carried a shotgun.

Detail from GA0146: Daily Express 4 January 1947The final “Grandma Giles” was a combination of these two characters, with a little of Giles’ horseracing background thrown in. According to Giles, Grandma’s conversation covered ailments, horse-racing, and “little else”. The first definitive Grandma cartoon has been traced to the Daily Express of 16 March 1950, where she is shown sitting with auntie Vera watching racehorses training through a powerful telescope. “Spying?”, she says to an irate owner who has challenged her: “You'd do some spying if you'd lost your old-age pension every week during the steeplechase season.”