The real herge, p.2
The Real Hergé, page 2
Although the Belgian government was in exile in France, it instructed the civil servants to stay in their roles and continue their duties during the Occupation, although Parliament was shut down. Many businesses and universities followed suit and closed their doors, while coal miners and farmers continued to work.
A lack of effort was considered to be ‘passive resistance’ and the Germans would send in managers to operate factories that were underperforming. They also deported able Belgian workers to Germany for forced labour jobs – around 120,000 people were deported by 1918.
Georges left his previous school for Ixelles Municipal School Number 3, which was a free school, as his family could no longer afford to send him to a fee-paying establishment. Indeed, the whole country was struggling at this time with disruption in industries, and a significant lack of food. Georges’ neighbourhood of Etterbeek was surrounded by the German military barracks, and so German soldiers were a common sight. It was a difficult and fearful time for the family, and for the rest of Belgian society. The Germans acted brutally, and the soldiers’ mistreatment of civilians during this time is often referred to as the ‘Rape of Belgium’.
The German army was angry at how the Belgians had fought back during the Schlieffen Plan to capture Paris, and there were rumours within the camp that Belgian civilians had tortured and maltreated German soldiers.
The Germans replied violently to this by destroying a series of historic buildings, as well as orchestrating large-scale attacks, executing around 6,000 French and Belgian civilians between August and November 1914, in random shootings of groups of people, which had been ordered by junior German officers. Anyone suspected of any activity that would derail the German war effort was summarily shot, and high-profile Belgian figures, such as politicians and historians were imprisoned in Germany as hostages. It was a fearful time for the country, marked by brutality and uncertainty.
The Remis moved home a few times during this period, no doubt trying to find the safest place to shield their family, and in 1917 they moved again, this time back to 34 rue de Theux, Elisabeth’s family home. The Remis bought out the other siblings’ shares of the property and moved in. They allowed the other siblings, as well as Elisabeth’s mother, Antoinette, to continue to stay at the house, which was surrounded by fields and countryside. They felt the safest option was for the whole family to stay together, given the situation.
The Remis lived here with Antoinette and other members of the family, including Georges’ uncle, Charles Arthur, whose nickname was Tchake. Charles was Elisabeth’s younger brother and ten years older than Georges.
The author Benoit Peeters alleges it was at this point that Georges was the victim of sexual abuse by Charles. The rumours arise from unnamed family sources and hints from letters, such as the one that Georges would later write to his secretary, Marcel Dehaye, during one of his depressive episodes. He would write vaguely and indirectly about his childhood and disturbing images that were forever etched into his mind.
The truth of this will certainly remain forever hidden, as this is not something that Georges would later talk about in depth. As with many other personal matters, he would keep anything painful very much to himself and a few close friends.
Whatever the truth, Georges’ childhood was not an overly happy time for him, but on the surface, he was like most children, and would spend hours playing outside with his friends and his younger brother; despite the war and family troubles, life went on. When the weather wouldn’t allow him to roam the streets and fields, he would hole up inside using his vivid imagination to conjure up adventure stories and illustrate them with detailed sketches.
He loved nothing more than spending quiet hours drawing the new machines of the time such as trains, cars and planes in intricate detail, distracting himself from the brutality of war and a rather distant, aloof family.
When 1918 came around, the First World War ended and left Belgium and the rest of Europe relieved, but in ruins. The priority now was to repair the ravaged country and get back to life as usual.
Georges was nearly 12, and his parents began to think about secondary schools for their eldest boy, and so in 1919, secondary education began for the restless artist at the Place de Londres, a secular school in Ixelles. Here, he continued to hone his artistic skills, sketching out scenes along the edges of his school books.
However, he did not thrive in the new school and his grades suffered, so much so that it was suggested that he should leave to become an apprentice alongside his father, but he stayed and persevered at the school.
One of the reasons for his poor grades during this period was that this was the time the young Georges discovered a pastime that would have a lasting effect on his life – Scouting. He joined the Belgian Boy Scouts while the worldwide organisation was still very much an emerging phenomenon. The group wholly captured the imagination of the young boy and many more like him.
Scouting began just eleven years earlier in the UK, after the 1908 publication of Scouting for Boys written by Robert Baden-Powell. Baden-Powell had always loved the outdoors, but it wasn’t until the 1880s when he was a military officer stationed in British India that he took an interest in military scouting, and in 1891 he published Reconnaissance and Scouting.
In 1899 Baden-Powell was in South Africa during the Second Boer War, and found himself besieged in the small town of Mafeking by a much larger Boer army. Here Baden-Powell became aware of the Mafeking Cadet Corps – a group of youths that supported the troops by carrying messages, which freed the men for military duties and kept the boys occupied during the long siege. He found the group incredibly inspiring.
Meanwhile, Baden-Powell was becoming a celebrity back in the UK, as newspapers reported heavily on the siege and a rapt public followed the army’s every move. When the siege was broken Baden-Powell returned to the country a national hero.
The youths who had helped the troops had so impressed Baden-Powell that he was motivated to tell others about the skills they had used. He wrote another book – this time a small instruction manual about military scouting and wilderness survival called Aids to Scouting.
His sudden fame fuelled the sales, and the book was particularly popular with young boys. He was inspired to write another version, specifically for his new demographic, and in 1908 the result was Scouting for Boys, which focused on survival techniques and left out the more military subjects. He focused on a different kind of hero instead – the heroes of the wilderness, such as backwoodsmen and explorers, followed later on by sailors and airmen.
Baden-Powell published Scouting for Boys in six fortnightly parts, setting out activities and programmes which existing youth organisations could use as a basis for their activities. The reaction was phenomenal.
In a very short time, Scout Patrols were created up and down the UK, all following the principles of Baden-Powell’s book. In 1909, the first Scout Rally was held at Crystal Palace in London, which 11,000 Scouts attended.
Baden-Powell soon retired from the army and in 1910 he formed The Boy Scouts Association, and later The Girl Guides. By the time of The Boy Scouts Association’s first census in 1910, it had over 100,000 Scouts.
The Boy Scout Movement established itself throughout the British Empire soon after the publication of Scouting for Boys. By 1908, Scouting was established in Gibraltar, Malta, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In 1909 Chile was the first country outside the British dominions to have a Scouting organisation, and in the same year the Scouting phenomenon spread to Belgium. The first Scout troop was founded in Brussels by Englishman Harold Parfitt. The Belgian version of this, the Boy Scouts of Belgium, was founded in 1910 in Brussels, using the British badges, rules and uniforms.
The scouts were a wildly popular, renegade phenomenon – empowering young boys, and later young girls, to learn new skills, to be independent and most of all, to go on adventures.
By the time Georges was 12, the scouts were more established, but still a relatively new and exciting group. A young Georges, bored of his grey neighbourhood that was overcoming the effects of the war, tired of his reserved parents and lack of freedom, couldn’t wait to join.
In 1919, Georges enrolled in the Belgian Boy Scouts, and his life changed forever. The scouts opened up a world of adventure to him that he had only previously read about. The group Georges joined was a secular troop, as was his school at the time, which was unusual in the very Catholic area where he lived, and this exciting group left an indelible impression on the budding artist.
‘My childhood seemed to me very grey,’ Georges said in 1973. ‘Of course, I have memories, but these do not begin to brighten, to become coloured, until the moment I discovered Scouting.’
Soon, however, Georges’ father, Alexis, was encouraged by his boss, the old-fashioned traditionalist Henri Van Roye-Waucquez, to change Georges’ school to a Catholic establishment, and even offered to pay the fees for them as he thought it would offer a better education.
Buckling under the pressure and keen to further their social standing, his parents moved him to Saint-Boniface secondary school, a Roman Catholic institution.
A year later, Georges was also forced to leave his Scouting group and instead join the Saint-Boniface secondary school’s group, which was part of the Baden-Powell Association of Scouts of Belgium, but run by the Catholic Church.
Georges was upset to leave his group behind where he had made strong friendships, but also later spoke of the secular Scouting group as severely anti-religious and punctuated by brutal fights. He even alleged to one interviewer that there were group masturbation sessions in which the older boys led the younger ones to follow.
He slotted happily into the new Catholic Scouting group and it was here that he found adventure, companionship and fun. He was a natural leader, inspiring the other scouts and soon became troop leader of the Squirrel Patrol, earning the name ‘Curious Fox’ (‘Renard Curieux’).
With the Scouts, he travelled to summer camps in Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Spain, and in the summer of 1923 his troop hiked 200 miles across the Pyrenees. Georges loved the camping trips. He was, as his nickname suggested, a curious child and enjoyed exploring. He later said, ‘We were getting away; camping and discovering the world. It was camaraderie, sport, adventure. I was a passionate Scout. The Pyrenees were the Tibet of my youth.’
His experiences with Scouting would have a significant influence on the rest of his life, sparking his love of the natural world, and providing him with a moral compass that prized personal loyalty and keeping one’s promises above all else.
He would also meet friends that would stay with him for life, such as José De Launoit, who he would eventually work with at Studios Hergé, as well as Philippe Gérard, who would act as a scriptwriting consultant sometime later.
However, there were issues with the new Scouting group, too. There were allegations of abuse within the troop, where one of the scoutmasters would apparently trap angry horseflies under a glass on the skin of the young scouts to see how many bites they could stand. Georges, while having a deep love of Scouting, developed a hatred of authority and order, often repeating to himself, ‘I am sure that God does not exist’.
As an escape from this, he would while the hours away sketching anything and everything that crossed his path. He would sketch on any piece of paper he came across, from his school books to scraps, which his friends, realising how talented Georges was, would preserve for years to come.
Aside from giving him the freedom to see his friends and have exciting adventures, Scouting most importantly gave him his first few crucial opportunities to publish his artwork. While he was sketching and doodling in a cartoon style one afternoon, one of his scoutmasters, René Weverbergh, noticed his incredible talent. Weverbergh encouraged the young artist, and printed one of his drawings in the newsletter of the Saint-Boniface Scouts, Jamais Assez (translated as ‘Never Enough’) which was Georges’ first published work.
Weverbergh became involved in the publication of Le Boy-Scout, the official publication of the Belgian Catholic Scouts, and encouraged Georges to submit illustrations, which he would then duly publish. The first of these drawings appeared in the fifth issue of the magazine in 1922. Georges had just turned 15 and he wrote and illustrated an article on the lasso, something that would reappear in his work time and again.
Georges was involved in the Catholic Action movement, which was a group whose aim was to encourage a Catholic influence on society, but he would always say he ‘never really had what people call faith’. Catholicism surrounded him, however, through school, scouts and the Catholic Action group, and embedded in him a strong sense of morality and the idea of sin, which he would struggle with as he became older.
It also gave him numerous opportunities to be published. He contributed many illustrations to Le Blé qui Lève (The wheat that grows), a Catholic publication for young Belgian people, as well as posters for events and adverts for Le Campeur, a Scout newspaper.
Drawing was taking up more and more of his time as he focused on publishing his work, but he managed to balance this with his studies at school. Indeed, he was very successful, winning accolades for excellence and he completed his secondary education at the top of his class. Despite his achievements, he was considered a corrupting force by his teachers, who were not so fond of the budding artist, due to his strong mischievous streak.
In 1924 Georges and his friend François Denis found a man hanging dead from a tree in the woods. A true entrepreneur, upon discovering this sight, the young Georges collected the rope and sold off pieces to his schoolmates for 25 centimes per centimetre. Clearly his Catholic morality did not interfere with business matters!
It was at this time that Georges started to try new ideas with his signature. He used a range of different options before settling on Hergé, which was created from reversing his initials to ‘R.G’. For the young cartoonist this solved many issues; he could save his real name for the great art he had planned out for his future and he got rid of the ‘Remi’, which erased the family he was less than happy with and gave him true independence, a fresh slate with no history to hold him down. This new signature was used in the December issue of Le Boy-Scout for the first time and so ‘Hergé’ was born.
Chapter 2
Hergé finished school winning prizes for excellence, but without a plan for his future. University was not even considered and he was expected to get a job, preferably in the office with his father – but Hergé had no intention of taking on such a dull role.
He was still sketching constantly and had a girlfriend named Marie-Louise Van Cutsem, who was a childhood family friend. The pair were very much in love and often talked about getting engaged, but the girl’s father was unimpressed with Hergé and his artistic ambitions. The young doodler was not good enough for his daughter and he soon put an end to the relationship, leaving the pair heartbroken.
Although his love life was faltering, it was around this time that Hergé got his first important career break. His work for Scouting publications led to a dream job for the 17-year-old – a role on Le Boy Scout, the national scouting magazine. For the young man whose main passions were Scouting and drawing, this was the perfect role and he eagerly set to work. One of his early illustrations for the magazine was a Scout Patrol Leader named Totor, an early prototype of Tintin.
Scouting was an incredibly important part of his life at this stage, and instilled in Hergé the Scouting instincts and morals that would filter through all of his future work.
Hergé’s mentor and old scoutmaster, René Weverbergh, was a journalist on the staff of Le Boy Scout, and was very impressed with the 17-year-old’s work. He subsequently recommended him to Le Vingtième Siècle, a major Catholic newspaper, where Hergé worked initially in the subscriptions department, starting on 1 September 1925.
The offices of Le Vingtième Siècle were set in a large building in the centre of a fashionable area of Brussels. The newspaper was well known as a hub for financial and political news, told through a very distinct Catholic slant. Strong Catholic morals were at the centre of the agenda. It was nationalistic, hostile to Communists, democracy and non-Catholics alike, and never printed anything that went against Catholic customs.
Hergé had lived in a very Catholic area all his life, and having been raised as a Catholic by his parents and attended a Catholic school, this paper was a comfortable place for him, despite his lack of faith. However, the work bored him to tears and he spent his free time indulging his passion and continued to draw for Le Boy-Scout and other small newspapers.
At one point, the job became too much for him. He was so disenchanted with the monotonous duties at Le Vingtième Siècle that one day he simply failed to turn up. This would become a familiar hallmark of his working pattern – once he didn’t enjoy something, he would always find it extremely difficult to carry on. He was summoned back to work at the newspaper, and he duly complied, but he soon found a new way to escape, by enlisting for military service in August 1926.
Hergé thought this was the answer he was looking for – the comradery and activities of the scouts, time to draw, and a way out of the dull subscriptions department he had been languishing in.
But military service was not the enjoyable escape he had hoped for. He was bored and wrote letters home to his family to complain about the vile hygiene of the barracks, the filthiness and the stench. He missed his family, particularly his mother. He described himself as a soldier boy, and struggled being so far from home.
Luckily for Hergé, he was allowed to leave the barracks and return home fairly soon, where he continued his military service until he was discharged in 1927. As he reached the end of his stint of military service, the thought of going back to work at the subscriptions department for Le Vingtième Siècle was too much for the easily bored Hergé, so he arranged a meeting with the editor, Abbot Norbert Wallez, to discuss his future.
