IT is 60 years since the scratchy yet voluptuous form of a schoolgirl from St Trinian’s first appeared in print. But the anniversary of the unruly creation is unlikely to be celebrated by the artist.

Ronald Searle, 80 last year, had had enough of the girls of St Trinian’s by 1953. He killed them off that year in a book called Souls in Torment, in which he explained that the school had been blown up by nuclear experiments. He had nothing to do with the subsequent films although he designed the posters for them. His attention turned to the fiendish and orthographically challenged Molesworth instead.

The real St Trinnean’s, a progressive school in Kircudbright, Scotland, had in fact closed in 1946. It was attended by two daughters of a local artist whom Searle had known while training with the Royal Engineers.

Shortly after the first drawings appeared (dedicated to the local artist’s daughters), Searle set off for active service in the Far East, where his experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp produced drawings of a grimmer kind.

But he returned to his girls later, publishing the first book of drawings, Hurrah for St Trinian’s, in 1948. Then the comic writer Timothy Shy (the pen name of DB Wyndham Lewis) suggested they collaborate on a novel set in the school. This became The Terror of St Trinian’s - for the first time the full sordid story published in 1952. The arch humour and the setting may seem foreign today but some of the themes still resonate.

The “unspeakable” Rupert Rover, an inspector from the board of education - “a pale, clean-cut, tragic, Byronic young face, a careless mass of wavy dark hair, burning dark eyes” - causes a scandal when his eyes and lips fall on the lovely Chloe Languish, the blonde head girl of St Trinian’s, bound for Cambridge.

But Angela Menace, a buxom fifth-former, is determined to win him for herself. She forges a letter from him to the Times Educational Supplement (where else?) assuring the editor he “never felt aught but a contemptuous indifference” for Miss Languish.

Alas, letters by Mr Rover complaining this is an insolent forgery are rejected by the editor as unsuitable or due to lack of space. Miss Menace finally wins her man by promising Mr Rover a dowry of “twenty thousand sweet smackers” from her Papa - and burning down a wing of the school to create a diversion.

The story zips along but it is Searle’s drawings that make it come alive, from Angela sitting in her schoolgirl tunic smoking happily as she dreams of a great conflagration, to a girl lying on the ground attempting to puncture the tyre of the inspector’s Rolls-Royce.

The pictures may not be, as the cover blurb asserts, “a series of tableaux unsurpassed for beauty and terror since the brush fell from the tired hand of Michelangelo”. But as Posy Simmonds has said: “Searle is easily as good a draughtsman as Hogarth and Rowlandson, and his social observation as acute.”

Searle is still working, producing political illustrations for the French newspaper Le Monde, a collection of which should be published next year. He moved to France in 1961 and lives in Provence with his second wife, Monica. Last week he was opening an exhibition of his work in Germany.