Raymond Redvers BriggsCBE (18 January 1934 – 9 August 2022)[1] was an English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author. Achieving critical and popular success among adults and children, he is best known in Britain for his 1978 story The Snowman, a book without words whose cartoon adaptation is televised and whose musical adaptation is staged every Christmas.[2]
Raymond Redvers Briggs was born on 18 January 1934 in Wimbledon, Surrey (now London), to Ernest Redvers Briggs (1900–1971), a milkman, and Ethel Bowyer (1895–1971), a former lady's maid-turned-housewife, who married in 1930.[9][10] During the Second World War, he was evacuated to Dorset before returning to London at the end of the war.[11]
Briggs attended Rutlish School, at that time a grammar school, pursued cartooning from an early age and, despite his father's attempts to discourage him from this unprofitable pursuit, attended the Wimbledon School of Art from 1949 to 1953 to study painting, and Central School of Art to study typography.[12]
After briefly pursuing painting, he became a professional illustrator,[1] and soon began working in children's books. In 1958, he illustrated Peter and the Piskies: Cornish Folk and Fairy Tales, a fairy tale anthology by Ruth Manning-Sanders that was published by Oxford University Press. They would collaborate again for the Hamish Hamilton Book of Magical Beasts (Hamilton, 1966). In 1961, Briggs began teaching illustration part-time at Brighton School of Art, which he continued until 1986;[14][15] one of his students was Chris Riddell, who went on to win three Greenaway Medals.[16] Briggs was a commended runner-up for the 1964 Kate Greenaway Medal (Fee Fi Fo Fum, a collection of nursery rhymes)[17][a] and won the 1966 Medal for illustrating a Hamilton edition of Mother Goose.[1] According to a retrospective presentation by the librarians, The Mother Goose Treasury "is a collection of 408 traditional and well loved poems and nursery rhymes, illustrated with over 800 colour pictures by a young Raymond Briggs".[3]
The first three important works that Briggs both wrote and illustrated were in comics format rather than the separate text and illustrations typical of children's books; all three were published by Hamish Hamilton. Father Christmas (1973) and its sequel Father Christmas Goes on Holiday (1975); both feature a curmudgeonly Father Christmas who complains incessantly about the "blooming snow". For the former, he won his second Greenaway.[1] Much later they were jointly adapted as a film titled Father Christmas. The third early Hamilton "comics" was Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), featuring a day in the life of a working class bogeyman.[18]
The Snowman (Hamilton, 1978) was entirely wordless,[1] and illustrated with only pencil crayons.[19] The work was partly motivated by his previous book; Briggs wrote that "For two years I worked on Fungus, buried amongst muck, slime and words, so... I wanted to do something which was clean, pleasant, fresh and wordless and quick."[20] For that work Briggs was a Highly Commended runner-up for his third Greenaway Medal.[17][a]
An American edition was produced by Random House in the same year, for which Briggs won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, picture book category.[21] In 1982, it was adapted by British TV channelChannel 4 as an animated cartoon, with a short narrated introduction by David Bowie.[22] It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1982, and has since been shown every year on British television (except 1984).[23] On Christmas Eve 2012 the 30th anniversary of the original was marked by the airing of the sequel The Snowman and the Snowdog.[24]
Briggs continued to work in a similar format, but with more adult content, in Gentleman Jim (1980), a sombre look at the working class trials of Jim and Hilda Bloggs, closely based on his parents. When the Wind Blows (1982) confronted the trusting, optimistic Bloggs couple with the horror of nuclear war, and was praised in the House of Commons for its timeliness and originality. The topic was inspired after Briggs watched a Panorama documentary on nuclear contingency planning,[15] and the dense format of the page was inspired by a Swiss publisher's miniature version of Father Christmas.[25] This book was turned into a two-handed radio play with Peter Sallis in the male lead role, and subsequently an animated film, featuring John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft.[26]The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984) was a denunciation of the Falklands War.[27]
Personal life and death
Briggs's wife Jean, who had schizophrenia, died from leukaemia in 1973, two years after his parents' death. They did not have any children.[28]
At the end of his life, Briggs lived in a small house in Westmeston, Sussex.[27][29] His long-term partner, Liz, died in October 2015 having had Parkinson's disease. Briggs continued to work on writing and illustrating books.[30]
Briggs stated that he used to be a staunch supporter of the Labour Party, although he lost faith in the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.[31]
Briggs won the 1992 Kurt Maschler Award, or the "Emil", both for writing and for illustrating The Man, a short graphic novel featuring a boy and a homunculus. The award annually recognised one British children's book for integration of text and illustration.[32] His graphic novelEthel & Ernest, which portrayed his parents' 41-year marriage, won Best Illustrated Book in the 1999 British Book Awards. In 2016, it was turned into a hand-drawn animated film.[33] In 2012, he was the first person to be inducted into the British Comic Awards Hall of Fame.[34]
With surprising page-turns, felicitous pauses, and pitch-perfect dialogue, Briggs renders the drama and humour of child–adult and child–bear relations, while questioning the nature of imagination and reality. As a picture book presented in graphic novel format, Briggs's work was ground-breaking when first published and remains cutting edge twenty years later in its creative unity of text and picture.[35]
^ abcToday there are usually eight books on the Greenaway Medal shortlist.
According to CCSU, some runners-up were Commended (from 1959) or Highly Commended (from 1974). There were 99 distinctions of both kinds in 44 years including three for 1964, three 1978. There were 31 high commendations in 29 years including Briggs alone for 1978.
• Only Chris Riddell has won three Greenaways. Among the fourteen illustrators with two Medals, Briggs is one of seven with one book named to the top ten (1955–2005) and also one of seven with at least one Highly Commended runner-up (1974–2002), led by Helen Oxenbury with two Medals and four HC.
Nicolette Jones, Raymond Briggs: Blooming Books (Jonathan Cape, 2003). Extracts from the published works of Briggs with text commentary by Jones.
Richard Kilborn, The Multi-Media Melting Pot: Marketing "When the Wind Blows" (Comedia, 1986)
D. Martin, "Raymond Briggs", in Douglas Martin, The Telling Line: Essays on Fifteen Contemporary Book Illustrators (Julia MacRae Books, 1989), pp. 227–42
Elaine Moss, "Raymond Briggs: On British attitudes to the strip cartoon and children's book illustration", Signal (1979 January)
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