![]() Raymond Redvers Briggs was born on January 18, 1934, in his parents’ three-bedroom house in Wimbledon Park, London. The little boy who finds fleeting happiness in the friendship of a snowman, Father Christmas with his aches and pains, and the couple in When the Wind Blows, are struggling with the darker forces of loneliness and mortality. 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. ![]() ![]() 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. ![]() In The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984), Briggs’ take on the Falklands conflict, the dead lie forlorn as the title characters strut across the political stage.īut it was not a stance he sustained he admitted finding most politics too confusing. 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. Father Christmas is not the generously proportioned old buffer heave-ho-ing his way down the nation’s chimneys, but a moody, foul-mouthed old soak fed up with the backbreaking physical tedium of his job (Briggs envisaged him as a workman “a bit like my Dad, who was a milkman”).īriggs was sometimes described as a political writer and it was easy to see why. His characters, too, were instantly recognisable. ![]()
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