Raymond Briggs

The children's author used comic-strip-like panels to explore the joys and struggles of workaday British life. With irreverent wit, he also interrogated ...

In “Father Christmas,” the only person the title character interacts with is a milkman. He did not like to leave England and lived in a slightly eccentric house in East Sussex, where he collected jigsaw puzzles of the Queen Mother. The living room ceiling was papered with maps. After his wife’s death, he spent four decades in a relationship with Liz Benjamin, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 2015. Growing up in a house without many books, he gravitated instead to the storytelling found in newspaper cartoons. During World War II, he was briefly sent to live with his aunts in the countryside. Mr. Briggs admired the Northern Renaissance’s emphasis on daily life — his studio wall included “Children’s Games,” by the Flemish master Bruegel — but he was not interested in painting with oil. His complaint “I hate winter!” was delivered on the toilet. In “The Snowman” — which, unlike Mr. Briggs’s other books, has no words — rounded frames house the emotional arc of a boy’s winter adventure. A film adaptation of “The Snowman,” which was released in 1982 and features the haunting song “Walking in the Air” in its symphonic score, was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated short film. “I don’t think about what children want,” Mr. Briggs told the BBC in 2017. Mr. Briggs often depicted domesticity and the routines of the working class. “When the Wind Blows” (1982), an argument for nuclear disarmament, shows a retired English couple blithely following the government’s precautions before they are killed in a Soviet attack.

Raymond Briggs, the illustrator best known for creating the popular children's picture book The Snowman, passed away on 9 August.

His characters, too, were instantly recognisable. Father Christmas is not the generously proportioned old buffer heave-ho-ing his way down the nation's chimneys ...

The earnings from his books and spin-off products (including a set of Christmas stamps for the Royal Mail) made Briggs a wealthy man. He had always been a staunch Labour supporter, but said he despaired of the party under Jeremy Corbyn. His misanthropic image may have been a private joke, for friends spoke of his kindness and generosity. The book outsold all his previous works, and spun off into stage and screen adaptations and an eclectic range of novelty gifts. His parents never punished him – even when he was brought home in a Black Maria after breaking into a golf club and stealing a set of billiard cues. Father Christmas Goes on Holiday (1975) was followed by Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), a book that enthralled children with its rude jokes and unsavoury footnotes as much as it appalled their parents. In January 1971, his mother Ethel died of leukaemia; her husband followed her in September the same year. When, after September 11, 2001, Briggs was asked by a newspaper to “do a When the Wind Blows-type of thing on it”, he declined. If there was a common theme in Briggs’ work, it was his humanitarian preoccupation with life’s underdogs and the tension between human dreams and disappointing, often painful reality. He won a place at Rutlish School (the grammar that was also John Major’s alma mater), where he was given daily elocution lessons to cure him of his working-class vowels. In his black comedy of nuclear holocaust, When the Wind Blows (1982), an ordinary couple survive a nuclear attack and are still obediently following futile government instructions, unaware that they are slowly dying. His own views on the traditional jollifications were positively Scrooge-like: “My ideal Christmas would be to go into a bomb shelter and not come out again until the all-clear sounded.”