St. Trinian's creator Ronald Searle dead at 91

LONDON, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- Ronald Searle, the British cartoonist who created the St. Trinian's comic strip, has died in a hospital in Draguignan, France, his family said. He was 91.

"Ronald William Fordham Searle, born March 3, 1920, passed away peacefully in his sleep, after a short illness, with his children, Kate and John, and his grandson, Daniel, beside him," Searle's family said in a statement issued to the BBC. "He requested a private cremation with no fuss and no flowers."

Searle's iconic cartoons about badly behaved schoolgirls debuted in 1941 and spawned several movies, the most recent of which -- "St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold" -- was released in the United Kingdom in 2009, the BBC said.

Searle, who died Dec. 30, illustrated the Molesworth comic series written by Geoffrey Willans, and contributed cartoons to publications such as Punch and The New Yorker.

"We are all extremely sad to hear of Ronald's death. He was a marvelous, remarkable man and a great artist," Simon Winder of Penguin, the company that published St. Trinian's, said in a statement to the BBC. "I can think of nobody who did more to ridicule and undermine 1950s Britain, and St. Trinian's and Molesworth will endure forever as masterpieces of comic anarchism."