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Giles - Reynolds News

First newspaper work with Reynolds News from 1937 to 1943

In September 1937, while living in Ipswich and looking for freelance work, Giles submitted “a new character comic strip” to the London Sunday newspaper Reynolds News. At this time Giles was still trying to establish himself as an animator, and the editor of Reynolds News, Sydney Elliott, recalled that he was “tying himself into knots in his own commercial studio”. Elliott offered Giles some work drawing editorial cartoons, the first of which appeared on 3 October 1937. They also discussed Giles’ proposed strip, which Elliott suggested should be drawn without captions or labels. Giles agreed, and the first of a long series appeared in Reynolds News on 9 January 1938, with the title “Young Ernie”.

GAP2029: Reynolds News 12 November 1939

Giles at Reynolds News: Giles collection BCAReynolds News was a left-wing paper, and Giles became close friends with two charismatic communists: the paper’s designer Allen Hutt, and a sub-editor named Monty Slater. Giles later claimed that he almost became a communist himself. In 1941 he certainly began cartooning for a communist magazine called Our Time, and, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he designed a poster showing British and Soviet soldiers attacking a German, with the text “FOR VICTORY IN 1942 / OPEN UP A SECOND FRONT IN THE WEST.” Giles always thought of himself as a “dirty red”, and a wartime visitor to his house noted that he had “much Soviet literature”. But his admiration for Soviet Russia was a romantic attachment that faded after the war.