Lancelot Speed

(1860–1931)

Born at Barnes, Surrey in 13 June 1860, the son of barrister William Speed and his wife, Fanny, Lancelot Speed was educated at Rugby School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied medicine. His ability at drawing led him to abandon ideas of a medical career and he went on to study at the Slade School of Art during the 1880s. He is best known for his book illustrations, particularly historical romance and fantasy, and his cartoons in Punch and The Illustrated London News.

Neptune Films

At the beginning of 1914, according to Malcolm Cook, he was asked to design the logo for the newly-formed Neptune Film Company, and also give advice on production design.

With the outbreak of the First World War the "Lightning Artist" film, where the camera is undercranked so that a drawing appears to be created very rapidly — a staple trick of Victorian cinema — was resurrected for the purpose of depicting patriotic anti-German propaganda cartoons. Speed agreed to make such a film for Neptune Films. Working with cameraman Claude L McDonnell, he planned a film showing the shelling of Rheims Cathedral as representative of the Kaiser's iniquity.

Bully Boy

The film, Bully Boy, starts as a typical 'Lightning Artist' film: Speed sketches Kaiser Wilhelm II as he was portrayed before the War, then deftly turns it into the image of the helmeted, villainous warmonger. On a new sheet he delineates Rheims Cathedral, and captions it "THE WORLD'S GREATEST GOTHIC WORK." His third sketch is of a massive artillery cannon, which he labels "THE WORK OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST GOTH!"

But the film is not just the series of sketches the audience might be expecting. It cuts back to the sketch of the Cathedral, the caption now covered by a black sky. The hand of the artist is no longer in evidence. Instead we see shells exploding around the cathedral (white starbursts and animated sheep's wool smoke) and masonry falls (animated cutouts) leaving it a hollow ruin.

Back to the Kaiser's image, where a caption appears, letter by letter, reading "Do I HEAR ANY CHEERS?". In response to the expected boos and jeers the Kaiser's moustache droops and his expression becomes despondent and fearful (cutout animation and repainting of parts of face). He reasserts himself and a little devil replaces the crest of his helmet (stop-frame progressive repainting, and cut-out animation of devil's tail). The Kaiser looks fiercer and his moustache turns back up - but his expression changes to one of fear as the devil's tail wraps round him (cut-out animation) and he is consumed (progressive over-painting) and reduced to a cooked sausage (animated sheep's wool for smoke).

The smoke from the sausage clears to reveal the likeness of Lord Kitchener. The image is completed (stop-frame progressive painting) then his expression becomes fierce, and he is consumed (stop-frame overpainting, and animated sheep's wool smoke) and replaced by a bulldog (stop-frame progressive painting, first the white silhouette then the line drawing detail). The bulldog looks at the sausage, his tail wagging, his ears pricking and his jaw opening (cut-out animation). The sausage starts to move away from the dog, but the British bulldog pounces and devours the German sausage (cut-out animation). The film ends with Speed's hand signing his name in chalk on a blackboard.

A carefully structured film

The shelling of the Cathedral at Rheims [I'm using the British spelling of Reims that was in use at the time] provided the propaganda opportunity to paint the Kaiser as a sacrilegious vandal, and Bully Boy shows careful planning. First the 'lightning artist' drawings, elaborate sketches that take up the majority of the film. The German monarch becomes a warmonger and the cultural value of the Cathedral is contrasted with the weapon of destruction by the wordplay of the captions. Then the sketches come to life. We see the Cathedral destroyed - the animation is simple but starkly effective. The Kaiser's changes of expression are more complex, leading up to the final totally animated scene where the leading players are transformed, as in a Harlequinade, for the triumphant pantomime ending of the bulldog devouring the sausage.

Bully Boy ends with Lancelot Speed in effect signing the film, but the final shot is the Neptune Films logo. This is also cutout animation, with the sea god rising from the waves. It may be that this logo was Speed's first introduction to animation, and that it had paved the way for the action in Bully Boy, but their seems no evidence to support this theory: the only pre-war live-action Neptune film online, The Little Match Girl, is unfortunately a Dutch print, lacking the original Neptune titles. But it would appear that Bully Boy was not Speed's first attempt at animation.

Bully Boy was released in early October 1914, to glowing reviews. In an article for The Bioscope (5 November 1914), after the release of Speed's second film French's Contemptible Little Army, Speed gives the following account:

For the better part of two years I have been experimenting exhaustively in trick drawing for the screen. I am daily making discoveries. Your audiences cannot realise the time devoted to a single 'move'; the sixteenth part of a foot of film takes, at times, as long as twenty minutes to prepare. I am, so far, satisfied if I can manage to produce a "Bully Boy" cartoon in a fortnight, and this takes less than ten minutes to show on the screen.

"The sixteenth part of a foot of film" is, of course, one frame. Speed and McDonnell went on to make a total of eight films in the Bully Boy series, still relying on the 'lightning artist' shots to make up footage but with increasingly confident use of cutout animation.

Neptune released seven Bully Boy films, No.7 Turkish Delight, being released on 5 May 1915. According to Gifford, the Trade Show for Bully Boy No.8 was scheduled for 21 May but was posponed to 25 June. By June 1915 Neptune Films was in trouble. With the number of films, both domestic and foreign, competing for exhibition greater than the number of screens, it could take a long time for even a good picture to make back its production costs. New companies with the additional start-up investment all too soon found themselves with cash-flow problems. Speed's producer Percy Nash quit the company in August and the Bully Boy series came to an end. The Neptune Film Company finally ceased production in 1917 and was wound up in 1921. It is not known if the 8th Bully Boy film was ever released, or indeed completed.

Barker Motion Photography

Lancelot Speed was hired by producer Will Barker of Barker Motion Photography as production designer on his epic version of H Rider Haggard's She . It is sometimes asserted that Speed had previously illustrated an edition of She but this does not seem to be the case. His only illustrations of Haggard's works appear to be the Viking saga Eric Brighteyes and the contemporary English melodrama Beatrice. However, his illustrations of other fantastic and historical romances, and his experience in production design at Neptune made him a natural choice.

It is possible that Barker may have considered offering Speed the opportunity to continue his animation work under Barker Motion Photography's banner - the company had been producing a cutout-animated series made by artist F Gandolphi, but this had come to an end. But if this was the case Barker was unsuccessful.

Speed Cartoons

Speed was keen to continue making animated films, but he decided to do it on his own terms and, free from Neptune's fortnightly release schedule, in his own time, which would allow him to concentrate on building a story. In 1917, under the banner "A Speed Cartoon" he produced Tank Pranks, a look at future designs for Britain's new weapon, and The U-Tube, in which the Kaiser's plan to invade Birmingham using burrowing troop carriers gets thrown off course. These were distributed by Jury's Imperial Pictures in February and May respectively. Punch, on 21 February, presenting an amusing misprint from The Times' list of officers’ commissions (the word should, of course, be rank), wrote:

This could indicate the popularity of "Tank Pranks" but might just be an opportunity to promote the work of a fellow Punch contributor. Either way the reader is expected to be familiar with the reference.

In 1918 Jury released two more films by Speed, not comic buffoonery this time but of a more serious nature. The second of these was commissioned by the Ministry of Information, and the title frame reads "A Lancelot Speed Film" rather than "A Speed Cartoon". No print has been found of the first, but I suspect that this too was government sponsored, and probably bore the same inscription.

The first of these films, Tommy Atkins, released in March, was Speed's longest film so far: at 800ft it ran about 14 minutes. The Bioscope for 14 March gives the following synopsis:

It is the story of the clerk who enlisted and Mr. Levinski (Mr. Smith & Co) wouldn't make him an allowance. He drills, fights in the trenches, is taken prisoner, escapes, and comes back an officer who kicks Levinski and his Russian partner out of the office, and the police tell them to enlist or deport themselves.

Unfortunately no print has been found, so the manner in which this tale is told can not be determined. It seems disturbingly anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic, but this was a serious issue during WWI. Many Russian escapees to the UK, distrusting authority and afraid of predudicial discrimination, had not applied for citizenship but lived and worked here as aliens. British Jewry had long favoured full integration as a curb on anti-Semitism but failed to convince Russian Jews to enlist in the War. The introduction of conscription in January 1916, applicable to British citizens only, increased popular resentment and in July Home Secretary Herbert Samuel, himself an Anglo-Jew, announced that Russians of military age settled in Britain would be required either to enlist in the British Army or to return to Russia and serve in their forces. There was left-wing objection to this policy as pandering to the anti-Semites, but it was widely considered necessary to prevent civil unrest. Planning the film in late 1917, was Speed just using this as a topical framing device for the story of an enlisted soldier, or was the film goverment sponsored to encourage enlistment and assure the newly conscripted that the system was now working fairly?

Britain's Effort, released in June, shows the increase in the nation's war effort by comparing, through symbolic imagery, the statistics at the start of the war in 1914 with those for 1917. At 1000 ft (nearly 17 minutes running time) it is Speed's longest film, although after a series of animated scenes showing the Kaiser's war plans and Britannia's rousing of the slumbering John Bull it soon settles for more static sequences of images showing relative sizes and quantities.

The last of Speed's own productions, Britain's Honour, would again seem to be made for the Ministry of Information, although again no print has been found, so this remains speculation. The film seems to be addressing the social challenges facing the post-war government, to judge from the synopsis that Gifford quotes, from The Bioscope 29 May 1919:

In addition to the heroes who have fought, worked and died in the cause of humanity, we are shown the victims of child labour, bad housing, disease, and other evils, the dragon that preys on humanity and that can only be vanquished by justice, truth, and right, aided by science rightly applied.

Pip, Squeak and Wilfred

The need for propaganda had stimulated British animation, but with the War over animators needed to find new subjects if they were to compete with the influx of American animated films.

If Lancelot Speed made any attempts to produce more cartoons they were certainly not picked up by any distributors. He had pioneered cut-out animation, a technique that was beginning to lose ground to the more visceral sequential-drawings method used in the US.

(By this I mean that the brain quickly registers that cut-outs are fixed parts being slid about, and sees cutout animation as a sort of 2-D puppetry — belief in the animation then becomes an intellectual exercise; whereas with sequential drawings there are no such limitations: the drawing really seems to move freely in three dimensions and "has" to be believed in.)

On Monday 20 May 1919 a new feature started in the The Daily Mirror newspaper. Titled The Children's Mirror it was a page for youngsters, consisting largely of a letter from 'Uncle Dick' (the Children's Editor and author of the page, Bertram John Lamb) encouraging children to write in, a serial story, jokes and a picture painting competition. Much of the letter related the adventures of Pip and Squeak, a dog and a penguin who live with "Uncle Dick" which were illustrated by Austin Bowen Payne, who had worked on several comics before the War, and was assigned to create artwork for the new page. Excitable Pip and pragmatic Squeak took on the roles of father and mother when a baby rabbit, Wilfred, joined the adopted family the following year.

Delighting children and charming adults, the characters soared in popularity and by the end of 1920 the strip was ripe for merchandising. It is not clear who proposed the idea of a cartoon film series. Perhaps Speed approached Astra Films with an idea of his own which they turned down but suggested they would be interested in a series using established characters; or perhaps Speed met Payne socially and they discussed the idea. It doesn't seem to been proposed by the The Mirror itself and it is unlikely that Astra would have decided to enter the animation field on their own behalf.

The series took the form of a serial in 26 episodes. The storyline was based on sequences from the Daily Mirror strip — the kidnapping of Squeak by Popski, the Bolshevik dog; Wilfred running away to seek adventure; a holiday at the seaside. The strip's account of the pets' adventures on a European tour was expanded for the rest of the series into a globe-trotting sequence, featuring the sort of exotic locations that were becoming popular in live-action films.

Since the production schedule allowed little more than a week per episode it seems likely that Speed delegated some of the work to one or more assistants.

According to Denis Gifford, the episodes were released weekly from 17 February 1921 to 11 August 1921. Gifford gives the episode length as 1000 ft, but two other sources (The Era in its Film Section guide for Exhibitors, and The Times in a brief promotional piece) give the episode length as 500 ft.

For more about the series see Astra Films.

Lancelot Speed is not credited with any further animation work and returned to book illustration. In January 1931 Florence, his wife of 48 years, died at their home in Barnet. Speed moved to Southend-on-Sea and then to Deal in Kent, where he died on 31 December 1931.

Filmography: Neptune Film Company

Filmography: Own Productions

Filmography: Astra Films

Links to Other Sites

Bully Boy BFiPlayer - Video

Sleepless (Bully Boy No.3) BFiPlayer - Video

Seas Dreams (Bully Boy No.4) BFiPlayer - Video

The U-Tube Imperial War Museum - Video

Britain's Effort Imperial War Museum - Video

The Wonderful Adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred: Ep. 11 The Six-Armed Image BFiPlayer - Video

Lancelot Speed Bear Alley - biography by Robert J Kirkpatrick on Steve Holland's blog site.

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