ARTHUR HUMBERSTONE FILMS LTD

(1962)

In 1962 animator Arthur Humberstone set up his own company, Arthur Humberstone Films Ltd, to make a pilot for a planned TV series of Enid Blyton's Noddy. In an interview for Animator magazine he told David Jefferson:

     'The ten minute film was made for £5000 which was a shoestring budget even in those days, considering the amount of animation that went into it, the trace and paint, and we used big name voices such as Dereck Gyler[sic]. The person who was putting up the money went to other studios to get quotes for the series and one in France wanted £20,000 per episode After I finished the pilot I got a letter from the backer telling me that the money he had earmarked for the Noddy series had been put into a pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, because he saw a chance of a bigger and quicker return on the investment there.'
     Arthur came out of that losing £800 of his own money. The film did get a limited release in 1981 when P.M. Films of Beaconsfield put it out on Super 8 for the home movie buffs. Collectors may be interested to know that the print quality is first class because it was taken from a master print which had been held in storage by Humphries Laboratories since they had done the original processing in the sixties.
[Animator issue 14, Winter 1985]

Arthur stuck very close to the style of the original illustrator of the Noddy books, Harmsen van der Beek, with one bizarre exception – PC Plod (voiced by Deryck Guyler) is dressed as a speed cop, in crash helmet and gauntlets, rather than as a traditional British 'bobby.' I imagine this was a change imposed by the backer in a mistaken attempt to make the character more international, for foreign sales.

Noddy's friend and mentor, Big Ears the brownie, was voiced by Bernard Cribbins. Guyler also voiced the Judge, so it is probable that he and Cribbins voiced the other male characters.

With the exception, of course, of Noddy, who was voiced by a woman. It is claimed on the internet that the voice of Noddy, and the female characters, was Kathryn Beaumont, the British actress who went to Hollywood as a girl and voiced Alice in Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland and Wendy in Peter Pan. However, this seems unlikely as, according to her biographies, after working for Disney she enrolled in high school, then the University of Southern California, where she graduated with a degree in education and worked as an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles for the next 36 years.

I have found no explanation for the assertion Beaumont voiced Noddy. Klive and Nigel Humberstone have kindly sent me a list of actresses on record in the Humberstone Archive as having been paid to ‘test' for the voiceovers: Gillian Norton, Anne Lancaster, Olwen Griffiths, Ysanne Churchman, Gabrielle Blunt and Paddy Turner. All were actresses known in the sixties for their work in film, television and radio. Of the six it is notable that Gabrielle Blunt (Catriona Macroon in Whiskey Galore) wore her hair long, and thereby bore a slight resemblence to Kathryn Beaumont – was she perhaps the voice of Noddy?

The studio was initially situated in the Colonade, Maidenhead, Berkshire, but in 1965 Arthur and family moved to Cookham, and so he relocated his studio to Moor Works, the High Street, Cookham. He continued 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.

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