Arthur Humberstone

(1912-1999)

Arthur Roland Humberstone was born in Swadlincote, Derbyshire, on 17 April 1912, the son of draper Arthur William Humberstone and his wife Hettie. He grew up on the outskirts of Derby, with step-brother Frederick, 10 years older, from Hettie's previous marriage, and younger sister Mary. According to a later biographical anecdote:

     He attended the Derby School of Arts and Crafts, Green-lane, for two years, but he says he became recognised as an artist on his first day at school. He sketched the headmistress, who gave expression to her opinions by wrenching the page from his exercise book in a fit of rage!
[Derby Evening Telegraph 15 September 1951]

His first attempt at animation was at the age of 15, when he drew a running dog directly onto a strip of film. But animation was to remain a hobby: he started work as a typewriter mechanic.

He was a member of two amateur film-making societies, the first in Derby where he was involved in an ambitious, but unfinished, scifi film. He was subsequenty sent to work in Sheffield and on 16 January 1939 the Sheffield Star carried this story, by film reporter F H Martin, headed "Sheffield Animal World A.R.P. Colour Cartoon":

     AN air-raid battle with toad-stools as A.R.P. shelters, acorns as Mills bombs, crocodiles as battleships with frogs on the front signalling, and a massed attack by various flying insects, is the theme ot an ambitious animated colour cartoon now being made by a Sheffield man.
      I visited the projection theatre of the Parkhead Cine Society a few days ago and saw this remarkable cartoon in the process being prepared for the camera.

300 DRAWINGS SO FAR
     The artist and originator of the idea Mr. A.. H. Humberstone, who has been a member of the Parkhead Society about 12 months, showed me some of his drawings, which are marvels of precision of exact colouring.
      So far 300 drawings have been completed, sufficient for 50 feet of film. Mr A. Ramsay [sic] and Mr. C. Bell are the Photographers.
      This is certainly one of the most ambitious ventures ever undertaken by any cine society in the country.
      Some idea of the tremendous amount of work entailed in the making of a cartoon may be obtained from the fact that it takes 14 pictures for a bird to flap its wings.

SIX-MONTHS' TASK
      It is Mr. Humberstone's first attempt to make a moving cartoon. It will be in colour, and the black-and-white tryout has been quite smooth.
      Mr. Humberstone ls planning the story as he goes along. It ls hoped that the film will be completed in about six months. Flve thousand drawings. will be used, and the full film will be 400 feet, which will run for about ten minutes.
      Drawing is only a side-line with this clever cartoonist. He made it his hobby, and the subject fascinated him. The strange part about it is that he has never read any books on making cartoons for the cinema, nor has he had any tuition in this art.

PERSEVERANCE
      "I just picked it up as 1 went along," he told me, "I used to soak the celluloid in emulsion, and draw into the film direct. "That was the birth of the idea.
      "Then I stuck at it and the correct way came naturally. At.frst I thought I should get tired of it when I realised the colossal task of preparing thousands of drawings for a film which only ran a few minutes.
      "Then, as I progressed I became fascinated and got quite enthusiastic about it. It makes pienty of work but I like it."
      He sald the animators had a very trying Job. One frame was taken at a time. It was arduous work and in time they developed "animator's arm."
      Allowance has been made in the cartoon for the addition of a soundtrack and Mr. Humberstone has sequences which can be used with sound.

A TOPICAL SUBJECT
     "We thought A.R.P. was a topical subject,"' he added, "so we went ahead."

The spelling of Mr Ramsey's name was a typo – it should have been an 'e'. On 14 April 1939, in an article about the Society's activities, the Sheffield Star added:

     Mr. A. Humberstone is still busy with his cartoon. The first 50 feet have been shot and the resuts are more than satisfactory.

I have no further information about this film. ARP (Air Raid Precautions) was a topic of growing concern after the First World War, and with Germany's expansionist plans evident the government had set up an ARP Warden scheme in 1937. With the hope that war could be avoided, the subject may have seemed ripe for comic exploitation, but as events progressed it may not have seemed so funny. When Britain declared war and the threat became serious I imagine the cartoon project was permanently shelved.

Arthur's son Klive tells me that the 40-seater theatre still exists today. It is in the basement level of a residential house 331 Ecclesall Road South, Parkhead. He visited the property in 2012 and saw the small theatre along with the room/area where Arthur produced the early cartoons. At the time the house had belonged to Allan Ramsey, President of the Parkhead Ciné Society.

In late 1939 Arthur married Marie Joan Thimbleby, a confidential clerk (office administrator or private secretary), and they had two daughters and twin sons (the latter born in 1947).

When Gaumont-British Animation, J Arthur Rank's new studio being set up at Cookham by ex-Disney Director David Hand started advertising for trainee animators, in 1946, Arthur Humberstone seized the opportunity to turn his hobby into a career.

During the War the J. Arthur Rank Organization decided to evacuate the whole of their Wardour Street staff to the country for safety, and took over Moor Hall, a manor house on the River Thames at Cookham, Berkshire, where they built three barrack-style huts in the grounds to accommodate them. After the War it was the ideal site for the new cartoon studio. Arthur's application was accepted and he resigned his job as a typewriter mechanic and moved to Moor Hall. Joan remained in Sheffield.

With his self-taught animation skills Arthur probably thought he had a head start, so when David Hand dismissed his first line test as "not animation" he thought it was all over, and wrote to apply for his old job back. But his second attempt at the exercise won Hand's approval and he stayed on. (Hand used to tell the story of a scene he had done at the Disney studio, of Mickey's taxicab blowing a tyre [Traffic Troubles 1931] which Disney had rejected several times as not extreme enough. An angry Hand deliberately overdid the animation on his next attempt, to make Walt think twice, only to be told "You've got it! Why didn't you do it that way in the first place?". It is possible that Hand liked to use this approach to shock overconfident trainees into trying harder.)

Arthur Humberstone became an animator on the Animaland series. His credits are listed below, but it should be noted that the onscreen credits were limited to those who had contributed the most animation, or had been overlooked on a previous film, and are not totally reliable. It is possible Arthur contributed small scenes to other films.

With a guaranteed distribution and plans to move into feature production G-B Animation would probably have moved into profit in due course, but in 1950 the heavy expense of equipment and training meant it was still operating at a deficit. Rank's expansion during the 1940s meant that by 1949 it had built up a debt of £16 million, and reported an annual loss of £3.5 million. Drastic action was required, and subsidiaries that were not making a profit were axed. Gaumont-British Animation laid off non-essential staff in November 1949, and closed in early 1950.

His marriage to Joan had not survived the separation. Arthur returned to live with his parents in Littleover Hollow, Derby, and worked as a newspaper cartoonist for the Derby Evening Telegraph, producing a montage of cartoons commenting on local topics in a weekly panel titled Look at it this way, and a Sports cartoon for the saturday Sports Special.

But he was soon called back to animation. Halas & Batchelor had been approached by American producer Louis de Rochemont to make an animated feature of George Orwell's anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm. Needing to increase their animation staff for this project they took on some ex-Moor Hall animators, one of whom recommended Arthur. At his interview John Halas asked him what animals he liked. Arthur replied, "I like horses.." and was promply assigned the characters Boxer, the carthorse, and Benjamin, the donkey. He began work on the film on 17 September 1951. Although the feature was largely traced, painted and shot on rostrum cameras at the newly aquired Stratford Priory studio in Stroud, previously owned by Anson Dyer, the "Moor Hall-ites" worked in the London studio. Largely consisting of staff from the defunct Anson Dyer studio, most of the Stroud animators – with the notable exception of Harold Whitaker – continued to work on commercials and other short film projects.

After Animal Farm was completed Arthur continued animating as a freelance, mainly on commercials, for Halas & Batchelor and other companies including Rank Screen Services, Griffin Animations, Pearl & Dean, Larkins Studio, AB Pathé, Shaw Films Ltd, Animation Associates Ltd, Wallace Productions, and Live Line Ltd. He drew up the model sheets for the first Babycham TV commercials, making the chinese water deer (originally designed for the press advertising by John Emperor of the advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce) more suitable for the animation process.

In 1955 Arthur married Hilary Murcott and in 1957 they went to stay with her parents in Cookham, where their first son, Richard, was born. They subsequently bought a house in Wooburn Green, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, not too far from Cookham.

Twins Nigel and Clive were born in 1961. Now the Sheffield-based music creators behind the In The Nursery project, Klive and Nigel have inherited a wonderful collection of their father's career memorabilia, which they are collating and digitising. I am grateful for their assistance in the compiling of this biography.

In 1962 Arthur formed his own company, Arthur Humberstone Films Ltd to make a pilot for a proposed series of Enid Blyton's Noddy. After the film was completed the backer, Victor Broadribb, informed Arthur that he had decided not to fund a series and instead was putting the money into a pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, which promised quicker profits. More than disappointing for Arthur, who had gone £800 over budget on the film.

Arthur Humberstone Films Ltd was originally set up in the Colonade, Maidenhead, Berks, but in 1965 Hilary’s mother died and the family moved into Stone Ridge to look after her father, so Arthur moved the studio to Moor Works, the High Street, Cookham. He used it for freelance work, but after what he referred to as "the Noddy Saga" he does not appear to have taken on any other productions of his own.

Arthur Humberstone continued working as a freelancer, on advertisements and some episodes of the series Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space for Halas and Batchelor, and in 1967 joined the crew of TV Cartoons on Yellow Submarine.

In the 1970s Halas and Batchelor took on overflow TV series work from American studios Ranklin/Bass and Hanna Barbera, and Arthur worked on some episodes of The Osmonds, The Jackson 5ive and The Addams Family. He also worked on Halas and Batchelor's own TV series The Count of Monte Cristo.

Learning that Martin Rosen was making an animated version of Richard Adams' novel Watership Down Arthur sent some drawings on spec, and was invited to join the team at Nepenthe Productions, in a studio Rosen had set up in Whitfield Place, WC1. Rosen had parted company with his director, John Hubley and was planning to direct the film himself, and Arthur's character designs and action studies (he filmed rabbits at home and drew frame by frame action guides for the animators) became an important part of the production.

Arthur also worked on Bill Melendez Productions' TV special The Lion, the Witch and theWardrobe, a faithful version of C S Lewis's story but drawn in a rather loose, cartoon style.

In 1979 Martin Rosen started production on a second film based on a Richard Adams' novel &ndash: Plague Dogs. This time he decided to relocate to San Francisco, and invited members of the team who had worked on Watership Down to join him there. Arthur Humberstone was one of the senior animators who made the journey, working with American animators such as ex-Disney animators Retta Scott, who had animated the dog pack in Bambi, and Brad Bird, who had been fired from Disneys after criticising the direction the studio was going after Walt's death. (Rosen also sacked Bird, probably because Brad did not like the kind of realism that Rosen wanted.)

Returning fron the US, Arthur worked on the British series SuperTed for the Welsh studio Siriol Animation. He was now working from home, making the 300 mile round trip to Cardiff every few weeks to deliver completed scenes and pick up new ones. He prefered working in a studio to working from home, as he explained to David Jefferson in an interview for Animator magazine:

     'Working at home you don't get the inter-studio feedback. Someone saying. "Who did that? lt's great." Or adversely saying, "That's trash." So it keeps it alive.' Working at home does not mean you can relax the pace. 'lf there is a scene at the studio with the name Arthur on the cover and I don't turn up on time to pick it up, I am sure that if someone else turs up later that day looking for work they will say to them, "You had better take this:" and rub my name off', says Arthur. "You have to keep in touch by phone and inform the studio of any problems.' As a production nears its deadine the pressure to get it finished often builds up but Arthur likes this. 'When the pressure is there I work quicker and I think I also do better work. The worst thing a person can say to you is: "Don't rush yourself, there is no real hurry,' because invariably you will put it on one side and go off and play golf or something.'
[Animator issue 14, Winter 1985]

For the rest of the 1980s Arthur, now turned 70, animated for Bill Melendez Productions on the Charlie Brown series and other specials for US TV, and in 1989 on the British TV series The Poddington Peas for Cairnvale Productions. He was a key animator on the Cosgrove Hall Films' version of Roald Dahl's The BFG, in production between 1984 and 1987, and broadcast on ITV Christmas Day, 1989.

After he turned 80 his expertise was still being put to use, animating scenes for Telemagination's TV series The Animals of Farthing Wood.

Arthur Humberstone died on 31 December 1999, aged 87.

Filmography

Links to Other Sites

Animator Magazine: Arthur Humberstone senior animator 5-page interview with Arthur Humberstone by David Jefferson (2 pages are illustrations only) which appeared in issue 14, Winter1985.

Animationstudios Blog: A Treasure Still to Digitalize: Arthur Humberstone’s Private Archive A post from Nigel Humberstone on the archive collection.

BFIPLAYER: Noddy Goes to Toyland Proposed pilot for TV series.

Facebook: Arthur Humberstone Facebook page of posts from the Arthur Humberstone archive.

Side-Line: In The Nursery interview: 'When I listen back to the recordings – it’s like a time capsule.' 2022 Interview with Klive and Nigel about their album Humberstone, celebrating their father and other members of their family tree.

Flickr.com: Arthur Humberstone's Archive Currently contains family photographs and the newspaper strips frm the Derby Evening Telegraph, 1950.

In The Nursery (Bandcamp) Crusaders of Space Nine minute film of scenes from the unfinished amateur SciFi film made by Arthur Humberstone's Amateur Ciné Society in 1939, with an added track by Nigel and Klive.

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