Overview

The Sixties was an iconic decade, conjuring images of marked generational conflict and “sex, drugs and rock-n-roll”, but also of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), the “permissive” legislation and Britain’s counter-culture, as well as the social transformations of the period encompassing ecumenism, the advent of the women’s movement and the beginning of the Troubles. Better known as the creator of the BBC television series Captain Pugwash, John Ryan (1921–2009), through his weekly illustrations in the Catholic Herald, offered a topical interrogation of the British Catholic Church’s sometimes adaptive, though often inflexible responses to the changes and challenges of the period. This collection of Ryan’s cartoons provides a personal portrait of the extraordinary ups and downs of religion in the Sixties—encompassing the machinations of popes and cardinals, the testimony of expert witnesses, runaway priests, radical reformists and lay protest movements.

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9781789591392

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Reviews

This is a delightful and instructive guide to the rollercoaster events and intellectual dilemmas as they were perceived by a layman whose medium of expression allowed him to be wry, nuanced, and ambivalent. -- Glyn Paflin * Church Times * Ryan was a superb draughtsman, of course, but his work about the church was utterly persuasive because he lived and breathed his subject. ... [He] found much to tease about clergy and laity alike, but his cartoons were neither polemical nor biting; they did their work by being kind, funny and poignant. ... Sink or Swim presents a selection of Ryan's work on a range of issues, carefully chosen and set in their proper historical context. It is simultaneously endearing and intellectually rigorous, with much to amuse and to inform. -- Serenhedd James * Catholic Herald * Ryan poked fun at pretension both theological and clerical with a kindness and forbearance born of his own personal faith. This is a clever and hugely enjoyable presentation of the ecclesiology of a crucial era. ... Ryan's cartoons offer more than a nostalgic view of a time of bewildering change and challenge in the Church. Above all, when one looks at the sinfully vicious bile with which current culture wars are fought in the toxic swamp that is the Catholic blogosphere, they are a reminder of how critique can be offered with charity, and questions raised without attempting to destroy those questioned. More than a blast from the past, they remain a breath of fresh air. -- Gemma Simmonds * The Tablet *

This is a delightful and instructive guide to the rollercoaster events and intellectual dilemmas as they were perceived by a layman whose medium of expression allowed him to be wry, nuanced, and ambivalent. -- Glyn Paflin * Church Times *

Author Information

Alana Harris is a product of the Australian post-conciliar Church, but was immersed from an early age in the devotional life of ultramontane Irish Catholicism by her grandmother and mother. After her first degrees in Law and Italian Renaissance history at the University of Melbourne, she meandered through diverse careers as a reference librarian, corporate lawyer and civil servant. Formative conversations with a holy and quietly progressive Jesuit, followed by a Master of Divinity in an ecumenical seminary for Uniting Church Ministers, female Anglican clergy and Jesuit priests, brought her back to a reconfigured Catholicism. She undertook her doctorate on the reception of the Second Vatican Council and its impact on the devotional lives of English Catholics at Wadham College, Oxford and now teaches Modern British History at King’s College London. Her most recent books, Faith in the Family: A Lived Religious History of English Catholicism, 1945–1982 (2013) and The Schism of ’68—Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe, 1945–75 (2018), traverse territory covered in Sink or Swim. Isabel Ryan is the younger daughter of the artist and cartoonist John Ryan. She left school at 16, lived briefly on her wits in Paris, ran the information desk at the V&A Museum at weekends and dabbled with design at Chelsea School of Art. At 20 she did a stint as a dogsbody in a Soho design company, then worked in New York City running the office of a French architect rebuilding the Statue of Liberty’s flame. Advised by her father never to attempt to earn a living in the Arts world, she has been self-employed for 30 years doing exhibition display graphics for museums and galleries. As well as spending time with her family and her mother (“Mrs Pugwash”), she manages the John Ryan Estate archive, loaning out Captain Pugwash artworks to pirate-themed exhibitions. She curates displays of her father’s work and delights in demonstrating his vintage cardboard TV film animations to a live audience. Brought up a Catholic, with a staunch Anglican mother, she lapsed between the ages of 13 to 47 when, inspired by her family, she returned to the church.

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