- St Trinian's School
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For the 2007 film, see St Trinian's (film).
Cover of a modern re-issue of St Trinian's drawings
St Trinian's is a fictional girls' boarding school, the creation of English cartoonist Ronald Searle, that later became the subject of a popular series of comedy films.
The first cartoon appeared in 1942, but shortly afterwards Searle had to fulfill his military service where he was captured at Singapore and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese. After the war, in 1946 he started making new cartoons about the girls, but the content was a lot darker in comparison with the previous years.
The school is the antithesis of the Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil-type posh girls' boarding school; its pupils are wicked and often well armed, and mayhem is rife. The mistresses (as female teachers in Britain were known at the time) are also disreputable. Cartoons often showed dead bodies of girls who had been murdered with pitchforks or succumbed to violent team sports, sometimes with vultures circling; girls drank, gambled and smoked. It is reputed that the gymslip style of dress worn by the girls was closely modelled on the uniform of the school that Searle's daughter Kate attended, JAGS in Dulwich. The films implied that the girls were the daughters of gangsters, crooks, shady bookmakers and other low-lifes and the institution is often referred to as a "female borstal".
Contents
The real St Trinian's School
St. Leonard's Hall, Pollock Halls of Residence, Edinburgh University
Home of St Trinnean's School for Girls until World War II[1]
Rear of St. Leonard's Hall, Pollock Halls of Residence, Edinburgh UniversityThe 'real' St. Trinian's was based on St Mary's School, Cambridge, and the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge. Searle, growing up in Cambridge, saw the girls on their way to and from school on a regular basis and they were the original inspiration for the cartoons. Testaments to this fact can be found in the Perse School for Girls' Archive area where there are several original St Trinian's books, given to the school by Ronald Searle.
Some claim that the concept and name for St Trinian's came from St. Trinnean's school in Edinburgh, which was established by Miss C. Fraser Lee and opened on 4 October 1922 with sixty girls, at 10 Palmerston Road.
She practised the revolutionary Dalton system of education — where the emphasis was on self- rather than school-imposed discipline — which led to it being said that St Trinnean's was the school "where they do what they like".[2]
In 1925 the school moved from Palmerston Road to St Leonard's House near Dalkeith Road, and at the beginning of the Second World War moved again to Gala House in Galashiels. The school was closed in 1946 after the retirement of Miss Fraser Lee.
It is said that a family by the name of Johnston, whose two daughters attended St Trinnean's, were evacuated to Kirkcudbright, where they met sapper Ronald Searle. He drew a cartoon depicting his idea of the school attended by the girls. Searle spent part of the war in a Japanese POW camp. After the war Lilliput magazine published the cartoons. The first film was made in 1954.
10 Palmerston Road is now in private ownership. St Leonard's House is now called St Leonard's Hall, part of Pollock Halls of Residence for the University of Edinburgh; it is used for administration and conferences. One of the rooms within is called St Trinneans.
The school's existence became widely known when it advertised a reunion coffee party for old girls in The Scotsman in September 1955. By this time the fictional school was very well known; the typesetter incorrectly used Searle's spelling in the advertisement. In an interview with the Sunday Express the headmistress firmly denied that her girls were anything like their fictional counterparts, although the real Miss Fraser Lee was reputedly quite like her on-screen persona.[citation needed]
Books
- Hurrah for St Trinian's (1948)
- The Female Approach (1950)
- Back to the Slaughterhouse (1952)
- The Terror of St Trinians or Angela's Prince Charming (1952 - text by Timothy Shy, pen-name for D. B. Wyndham-Lewis)
- Souls in Torment (1953)
Films
In the 1950s, a series of St Trinian's comedy films was made featuring well-known British actors including Alastair Sim (in drag as the headmistress, but also playing her brother), George Cole as spiv "Flash Harry", Joyce Grenfell as Sgt Ruby Gates, a beleaguered policewoman, and Richard Wattis and Eric Barker as the civil servants at the Ministry of Education for whom the school is a source of constant frustration and nervous breakdowns. Searle's cartoons appeared in the film's main title design.
In the films the school became embroiled in various shady enterprises, thanks mainly to Flash, and, as a result, was always threatened with closure by the Ministry. (In the last of the original four, this became the "Ministry of Schools", possibly because of fears of a libel action from a real Minister of Education.) The first four films form a chronological quartet, and were produced by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. They had earlier produced The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), a stylistically similar school comedy, starring Alastair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, George Cole, Richard Wattis, Guy Middleton and Bernadette O'Farrell, all of whom later appeared in the St Trinian's series, often playing similar characters.
Barchester and Barset were used as names for the fictional county in which St Trinians School was supposedly located in the original films.
St Trinian's is depicted as an unorthodox girls school where the younger girls wreak havoc and the older girls express their femininity overtly, turning their shapeless schoolgirl dress into something sexy and risqué by the standards of the times: skirts are short and show the tops of the dark stockings that the girls wear, and busts are emphasized by the cut of the tunic and shirt of the uniform. St Trinian's is often invoked in discussions about groups of schoolgirls running amok.
The St Trinian's girls themselves come in two categories: the Fourth Form, most closely resembling Searle's original drawings of ink-stained, ungovernable pranksters, and the much older Sixth Form sexually precocious to a degree that must have seemed especially alarming in 1954.
In the films, the Fourth Form includes a number of much younger girls who are the most ferocious of them all. It is something of a rule of thumb that the smaller a St Trinian's is, the more dangerous she is — especially when armed, most commonly with a lacrosse or hockey stick — though none of them can ever be considered harmless.
In the first two films, St Trinian's is presided over by the genial Miss Millicent Fritton (Sim in drag), whose philosophy is summed up as: "In other schools girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared." Later there were other headmistresses, including Dora Bryan in The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery.
In December 2007, a new film, St Trinian's, was released. The cast included Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Russell Brand, Lily Cole, Talulah Riley, Stephen Fry and Gemma Arterton.[3][4] Reviews have been mixed.[5]
- The Belles of St Trinian's (1954, the first film)
- Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957, the second film)
- The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960, the third film)
- The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (1966, the final film of the quartet)
- The Wildcats of St Trinian's (1980, with Maureen Lipman taking on the Joyce Grenfell role)
- St Trinian's (2007)
- St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009)
The School's Coat of Arms
The coat of arms was originally shown as a black skull-and-crossbones on a field of white. This was later changed to a white Tau Cross (symbolizing the "T" in Trinian's) on a black field bordered white.
The School Motto
The school has no fixed motto but has had several suggested ones. The school's motto is depicted in the original movies from the 1950s and 1960s as "In flagrante delicto". The original theme song by Sidney Galliat (c.1954) implies that the school's motto is "Always strike first". A poem in one of Searle's books[6] called "St Trinian's Soccer Song"[7] states the motto is Floreat St. Trinian's ("May St. Trinian's Bloom or Flourish"), a sly reference to the motto of Eton (Floreat Etona - "May Eton Flourish").
The school song
The musical score for the St. Trinian films was written by Malcolm Arnold and included the school song, with words accredited to Sidney Gilliat (1954): [8]
- Maidens of St Trinian's, gird your armour on.
- Grab the nearest weapon; never mind which one.
- The battle's to the strongest; might is always right.
- Trample on the weakest; glory in their plight.
- St Trinian's! St Trinian's! Our battle cry.
- St Trinian's! St Trinian's! Will never die.
- Stride towards your fortune boldly on your way,
- Never once forgetting there's one born every day.
- Let our motto be broadcast: "get your blow in first!"
- She who draws the sword last always comes off worst.
St. Trinian's Football Song
The School Fight Song.
- Whack it up, girls! Bung the ball
- Thro' Life's goalposts at the call.
- Who can stay the Island Blood?
- Rub their bustles in the mud!
- Gallant hearts and bulldog pans,
- Floreat St. Trinian's!
In popular culture
Between 1968 and 1972, the British comic-book The Beano ran a series entitled The Belles of St. Lemons, which was inspired by the original St. Trinian's cartoons by Ronald Searle.[citation needed]
See also
- Category:St Trinian's films
References
- ^ Source: Downloaded from http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/scotgaz/features/featurefirst10257.html
- ^ Cant, Malcolm (1984). Marchmont in Edinburgh. J. Donald. p. 109. ISBN 0859760995, 9780859760997.
- ^ "Model Cole joins Trinian's film". BBC News. 11 April 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6544069.stm. Retrieved 6 January 2010.
- ^ "Lily's the belle of St Trinian's". Mail Online. Associated Newspapers Ltd. 11 April 2007. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=447757&in_page_id=1773. Retrieved 3 March 2010.
- ^ "St Trinian's (2009)". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster, Inc.. http://uk.rottentomatoes.com/m/st_trinians/. Retrieved 3 March 2010.
- ^ Searle, Ronald, The St Trinian's Story, Penguin, 1959, p50.
- ^ "St. Trinian's Soccer Song" by "Timothy Shy" (D.B. Wyndham Lewis)
- ^ Original St. Trinian's song (video). YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FMrXW82YMI/.
External links
- Ronald Searle & the St Trinian's Cartoons
- Link to the first movie
- About the creator
- Youtube video compilation of St Trinians girls.
St Trinian's School Books Hurrah for St Trinian's (1948) · The Female Approach (1950) · Back to the Slaughterhouse (1952) · The Terror of St Trinian's (1952) · Souls in Torment (1953) · The Curse of St Trinian's (1993) · The Terror of St Trinian's & other drawings (2000) · St Trinian's: The cartoons (2007)Films Original seriesThe Belles of St Trinian's (1954) · Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957) · The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1960) · The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (1966)1980 revivalThe Wildcats of St Trinian's (1980)21st century seriesSt Trinian's (2007) · St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009)People Categories:- Fictional schools
- 1946 introductions
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