St Trinian's was a British gag cartoon comic strip series, created and drawn by Ronald Searle from 1946 until 1952. The cartoons all centre on a boarding school for girls, where the teachers are sadists and the girls are juvenile delinquents. The series was Searle's most famous work and inspired a popular series of comedy films that has outlived the short-running cartoon series.
Concept
The first cartoon appeared in 1941, but shortly afterwards Searle had to fulfil his military service. 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 type of posh girls' boarding school depicted by Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil; its female pupils are bad and often well armed, and mayhem is rife. The schoolmistresses 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".
St Trinian's is a 2007 British comedy film and the sixth in a long-running series of British films based on the works of cartoonist Ronald Searle. The first five films form a series, starting with The Belles of St Trinian's in 1954, with sequels in 1957, 1960, 1966, and 1980. The 2007 release, coming 27 years after the last entry and 53 years after the first film, is a rebooting of the franchise, rather than a direct sequel, with certain plot elements borrowed from the first film. Whereas the earlier films concentrated on the adults, this film gives the school pupils greater prominence. St Trinian's is an anarchic school for uncontrollable girls run by eccentric headmistress Camilla Dagey Fritton (the reboot continues the tradition, established by Alastair Sim in the original film, of casting a male actor to play the female headmistress, with Rupert Everett inheriting the role). St Trinian's received mixed reviews.
St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold is a 2009 British adventurecomedy film directed by Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson, both of who directed the previous film in the series. It is the seventh in a long-running series of films based on the works of cartoonist Ronald Searle, and the second film produced since the franchise was rebooted in 2007. A sequel, St Trinian's 3: Battle of the Sexes, has reportedly been in development since 2009, but has yet to be produced as of 2015.
Plot
One night, an unknown man telephones St. Trinian's and bribes a girl, Celia, to find an old ring in the school library. She is caught by the other girls, and forced to explain that the man offered her £20,000 for the ring. Annabelle, the new head girl of St. Trinian's, bartered for £100,000 from the man when he called back, but he refused and then proceeded to threaten them. Afterwards, the girls ask the headmistress, Camilla Fritton, about why the ring might be so valuable. She tells them a story about Pirate Fritton, her ancestor, who supposedly hid a great treasure somewhere in the world. He had two rings made, which when fitted together would reveal the location of the treasure.
I was a product of a British boarding school. In the Nineties I was at Heathfield, an all-girls school, from the age of 11 onwards. I was expecting St Trinian’s, all jolly hockey sticks, tree climbing, match teas and midnight feasts.
BornSarah Jane Woodall, the Londoner got her nickname following an incident where she was sent home from school for being naughty. As it happened, the author of the St. Trinian's books was in her ...
... comedy St Trinian's (2007). In the clip at the end of the film, the band appeared as the St Trinian's SchoolBand dressed up in the uniform and performed the school chant in front of the students.
The director, Max Hoehn, does indeed create a “school for lovers” on stage, though a whimsically surreal one. At first it’s all St Trinian’s meets Billy Bunter.
The woman, whose real identity has not been revealed but was given the name Alice in the documentary, recently claimed the St Trinian’s star assaulted her when she was 16 and at school, and he was 31.
Julian, then 21, was studying at the CentralSchool of Speech and Drama... I'd had a very St Trinian's-style Home Counties education and I'd gone from there to this very cool, vivid, art school scene.
... production and the National G&S OperaCompany has followed suit by setting it in a 1950s boys' public school with the female chorus as hockey and lacrosse stick-brandishing St Trinian's menaces.
Now 37-year-old Riley, who rose to acting fame playing a schoolgirl in St Trinian's films, is engaged to baby-faced actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster ... In the 2007 and 2009 St Trinian's films, she had a starring role as posh schoolgirl AnnabelleFritton.
The 90-year-old actress has previously called boarding school comedy The Wildcats Of St Trinian’s, in which she starred as headmistress Olga Vandemeer, the “worst film ever made” ... “No, no, I sought to earn a living ... .
The 44-year-old Army reservist says her success may owe something to her schooling at North ForelandLodge in Hampshire, a real-world St Trinian's, where she fondly recalls girls playing 'lax' ...
“The power of the paintbrush, as I would say.”The actress debuted her baby bump on the red carpet at the Raindance Film Festival in London in November 2022.She and Keenan, who ...
This tradition is reinforced in popular media representations of school in the UK, such as the St Trinian’s and Harry Potter films... To understand whether school uniform works or is beneficial, we have to consider what uniforms are meant to achieve.
This tradition is reinforced in popular media representations of school in the UK, such as the St Trinian's and Harry Potter films... To understand whether school uniform works or is beneficial, we have to consider what uniforms are meant to achieve.
