Thomas William Chantrell (20 December 1916 – 15 July 2001) was a British illustrator and cinema poster artist.
Born the son of a circus performer in Manchester, England, he started work in advertising as an illustrator. During WWII he put his artistic skills to use designing propaganda posters for the war effort. After the war, he established a career in cinema advertising, and established his name designing posters for epic films such as The King and I (1956), One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Star Wars (1977), as well as Hammer horror films and Carry On comedy films.
Early life
Tom Chantrell was born in Ardwick, Manchester, the son of Emily and James Chantrell, 64-year-old trapeze artist and jazz musician. James had toured music halls around the world performing in a trapeze act called "The Fabulous Chantrells". Chantrell grew up in a family of girls, the youngest of nine children.
Chantrell displayed an aptitude for commercial illustration when, at the age of five, he was asked by his teacher at Armitage Street School to paint a picture of the character Tom from Charles Kingsley's book The Water Babies; the teacher was so impressed by the young Chantrell's artwork that she paid him one penny for the painting.
At grammar school, Chantrell's artistic skills were fostered by his art teacher, and at the age of 13 he won a national competition run by the League of Nations to design a poster promoting disarmament. He left school aged 15 and went to Manchester Art College, but quickly became disillusioned and left soon after to enter employment.
Career
Within days of leaving college in 1933, Chantrell found a position at a local advertising agency, Rydales, leaving a few months later to join another agency where he worked for about year. Chantrell's position ended after he was wrongly blamed for a substandard piece of work; after a violent disagreement with his manager, Chantrell was fired. Unable to find any more work in Manchester, Chantrell moved to London in 1934 to live with one of his sisters, Phyllis, in Hampstead.
He took up work at a printing company, where he developed his skills in silkscreen printing. After two years, he moved to a small design studio, Bateman Artists, on Carmelite Street, near Blackfriars Bridge. Batemans shared a building – and design work – with a larger agency, Allardyce Palmer, who sub-contracted Batemans work for industrial clients such as British Aluminium, and Percival Provost.
Allardyce Palmer had just won accounts with two emerging film studios, Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox; a cinema was not considered an especially glamorous industry at the time, the work was also passed on to Batemans. Through this association, Chantrell had the opportunity to start working on cinema advertising, designing his first film poster in 1938 for The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse.
Military service
He continued with posters until World War II, when he was called up to military service. Registered as a conscientious objector, he was assigned to the Non-Combatant Corps, later volunteering for duties with a bomb disposal unit of the Royal Engineers in Tunbridge Wells, and spent most of the war digging unexploded ordnance and mines out of beaches on the coast of Kent and Sussex.
In the army, Chantrell developed a disdain for authority after one notable assignment to defuse a flying bomb near Leysdown-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey; the commanding officer was later awarded an OBE, despite being absent from operations on leave. In his last year of military service Chantrell was transferred to a war propaganda unit, where he was able to put his artistic talents to the war effort. He was demobbed in 1946, and he returned to work at Allardyce Palmer, now located on Kingsway in Holborn. Here, he took on an increasing amount of work on designing cinema posters, beginning with Forever Amber (1947) and Brighton Rock.
1950s and 60s
In 1950 Batemans was bought out by Allardyce Palmer, and the merged agency continued to receive a lot of work through Warner Brothers' film distributor, British Pathé. Poster artist Tom Beauvais joined the company as Chantrell's assistant. In 1957 Chantrell was made art director of Allardyce Palmer's new Entertainments Publicity Division in Screen House on Wardour Street, Soho. Film work flooded in, and Chantrell worked on a number of epic films such as East of Eden (1955), The King and I (1956), Anastasia (1956), Bus Stop (1956), An Affair To Remember (1957) and South Pacific (1958).