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William Chappell (27 September 1907 – 1 January 1994) was a British dancer, ballet designer and director. He is noted for being a pioneering dancer within the companies that formed the basis of the modern British ballet, and was also a celebrated theatrical designer for more than 40 ballets or revues, including many of the early works of Sir Frederick Ashton and Dame Ninette de Valois. He also developed a distinctive writing style displayed in voluminous correspondence and in books on ballet, theatre design and on the life of his long-time friend Edward Burra.

The Oxford Dictionary of Dance described him as '..an enormously versatile talent'.^[1]

In a memorial tribute at the end of his life the dance writer Peter Brinston summed up Chappell's dancing career^[2] with the words:

'He was a creative spirit which helped to found the national ballet we have today.'

Chappell was born in Wolverhampton, the son of theatrical manager Archibald Chappell and his wife Edith Eva Clara Black (née Edith Blair-Staples). Edith, the daughter of an army officer, was raised in Ceylon and India; in pursuing a career in repertory acting, she moved away from her upper-middle-class roots and married twice to fellow actors, by the first of whom she had a daughter, Hermina, the second time being to Archibald Chappell, by whom she had two daughters, Dorothea and Honor, followed by Billy. Chappell was acutely aware of his apparently 'déclassé’ origins; whereas his mother's brother had maintained a conventional upper-middle-class life, being a tea-planter in Ceylon and able to provide his son, Patrick (who was close to Billy and spent time with his aunt's family in school vacations) with a private school and Oxford University education, Chappell studied at Balham Grammar School.^[3]

^[4] After his father deserted the family when he was still a baby, Chappell and his mother moved to Balham, London, where she pursued a career as a fashion journalist.^[5] Edith's daughter by her first marriage, romantic novelist Hermina Black, Chappell's half-sister, was living nearby in Wandsworth.^[6] Chappell studied at the Chelsea School of Art (Chelsea Poly) where aged fourteen he met fellow students Edward Burra , Barbara Ker-Seymer and Clover Pritchard (later de Pertinez) forging life-long friendships.^[5]

Clover de Pertinez recalls of their early meeting:^[7]

'Chelsea Poly was under the influence of Augustus John. Raggle-taggle gypsies were all the go. Not for me, though, or for Burra, Barbara Ker-Seymer and William Chappell. We aspired to the smooth chic and sophistication to be seen on the covers of Vogue by Erte and George Lepape, to be found in the novels of Ronald Firbank, Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Moraud, Jean Giradoux, and above all in Diaghilev's Russian Ballets.'

Chappell did not take up dancing seriously until he was seventeen when he studied under Marie Rambert,^[2] whom he met through his friend Frederick Ashton.^[5] This awareness of his background leads to a distinctive self-deprecating tone detectable throughout his writings. For example, in his book Studies in Ballet^[8] he finds he needs to justify his writing by listing 'any pertinent reasons I might have for raising my voice or flourishing my pen':

1. I had been a dancer myself.
2. I had worked with English and Russian companies.
3. I had suffered in ballet class under Rambert, de Valois, Nijinska and Sergueef.
4. I had created roles in ballet and performed in most of the classics.
5. I had worked in the same corps de ballet with Lichine, Shabelevsky, Jasinsky, Verchinina, and Ashton.
6. I had partnered Karsavina, Lopokova, Markova, Fonteyn, Argyle, May and Brae.
7. I had a wide and practical knowledge of ballet design and costume.
8. I knew dancers as people as well as performers.

Even this list is not complete. In his contribution to Peter Brinson's collection of talks The Ballet in Britain ^[9] under the heading Problems of Ballet Design he lists the various people with whom he worked, took class, rehearsed and performed which reads like a Who's Who of the 1930s ballet world.. For example, he states he was taught his role in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune by Woizikovsky.

Chappell recalls in his discussion Problems of Ballet Design in the collectionThe Ballet in Britain^[10] 'I was one of those monstrous children given to prancing around whenever anyone played the piano. I had a sort of urge for dancing'. He continues:

'Then I lost interest in the dance and decided I wanted to be an artist. I went to art school and was full of splendid ideas about becoming a painter - ideas, I am afraid, not founded on anything very much. While I was at art school a friend took me to see Marie Rambert. She was strict and firm, and made me do an arabesque. It was a very bad one; she banged me on the back and said,'Hold up your head!' Still, there were so few male dancers in those days she was delighted to have anybody, even me, so I started having classes ... after a while I decided I was not going to be a very good painter so I took my dancing more seriously and started going to her classes properly.'

Chappell notes that the only other male pupil Rambert had at the time was Frederick Ashton. Ashton and Billy Chappell were life-long friends. Their early careers were closely connected and Chappell played an important role in providing friendship and support at critical moments in Ashton's career. In 1928 Ashton had moved to Paris to work with the Ida Rubenstein Company. Ashton was lonely, living in Montmartre in a flat belonging to the composer Lennox Berkeley. Chappell was passing through Paris at the time with Burra and they called on Ashton. Ashton was insistent that Chappell, now training with Rambert, should join the Rubenstein company under Nijinska's formidable leadership. He recalled:

'He nagged and nagged at me until finally I agreed. I thought she'd never take me because I was hopeless - I was so untaught at that period and really wasn't any good. But I went along and made a terrible exhibition of myself and the next thing I knew I was in. It didn't really matter that I was no good as she was determined to have me for Fred's sake. She liked him so much that she was prepared to overlook my faults just to please him.'^[11]

Thus was formed a link between Ashton and Chappell and Najinska (and hence her brother Vaslav Najinski) who brought with her a complete - revolutionary - philosophy of dance, ballet and movement. Ashton recalled for Julia Kavanagh^[11] the excitement and demands of the Najinska class:

'Her classes were fascinating. They were never the same. She'd decide to do everything in waltz rhythm one day or everything in Spanish rhythm or syncopated rhythm. She brought the music to class, all worked out. But the pianist didn't sit going tum, tum, tum, she came with tomes and would one day do a whole class of Chopin with the most wonderful adages, another say a whole class of Bach, another day there'd be a whole class of nothing but tangos.'

For two years Chappell and Ashton toured Europe with Ida Rubenstein's company under the direction of Massine and Nijinska. Chappell returned to London in 1929 to dance with Rambert's Ballet Club (later Ballet Rambert), the Camargo Society and Ninette de Valois's Vic-Wells Ballet becoming one of the founding dancers of British ballet. Throughout the 1930s he created more than forty roles for Rambert and Vic-Wells including:

• The Rake's friend in de Valois's The Rake's Progress
• The popular song in Ashton's Facade
• The title role in Ashton's The Lord of Burleigh
• The recreation of two Nijinsky roles, Le Spectre de la rose and the faun in L'Apres-midi d'un faune^[2]

He was the first dancer to partner Margo Fonteyn, who, in her autobiography ^[12] recalls:

'At fifteeen-and-a-half my romantic heart was as soft as butter. It was not long before I developed a crush on William Chappell, who was so much the kindest of the awe-inspiring adults around me and who had such blue eyes. He was gentle, he never shouted, and would reprove Helpmann for some of his biting obervations with the words, 'Don't mock people, Bobby - it's wicked'... Happily for me, the crush coincided with the rehearsals of my first principle part, in a ballet called 'Rio Grande - or a Day in a Southern Port. Billy Chappell was a sailor and I was the girl he picked up. Thus I was provided most opportunely with an excuse to regard him affectionately while acting my role.'

Rio Grande was the first production to showcase Burra's designs on stage - choreographed by Ashton and performed by the Carmargo Society premiered on November 29, 1931.^[13]

His flair as a designer was encouraged by Rambert and for this he is also remembered. In parallel with his dance career he designed more than 40 ballets or revues, including many of the early works of Ashton and de Valois including:

• Antony Tudor's Lysistrata
• Oxbridge partnership Norman Marshall & Geoffrey Wright's revue Members Only (With Charles Hawtrey and Hermione Gingold at the Gate Theatre Studio, 16A Villiers Street - 1937)^[14]
• Ninette de Valois' The Wise and Foolish Virgins, Bar aux Folies-Bergère and Fête polonaise (music by Glinka - 1941)
• Ashton's Les Rendezvous (music by Auber - 1936), Les Patineurs (music by Giacomo Meyerbeer, arranged by Constant Lambert - 1937) and The Judgement of Paris (music by Lennox Berkeley - 1938)
• Giselle and Coppélia for the Sadler's Wells Company
• Costume design for Ashton's Capriol Suite, (music, Peter Warlock's arr. sixteenth century peasant dances) and La Péri (music by Paul Dukas - 1931)

also

• The Blue bird (The Enchanted Princess), (music by Pyotr Tchaikovsky for the Vic-Wells Ballet - 1936)
• Frank Staff's The Seasons (music by Glasunov for Tudor's London Ballet - 1940) and the dance suite Tartans (music by William Boyce - 1940)
• Mona Inglesby's Amoras (music by Elgar for the International Ballet - 1941) and costume design for Everyman (music by Richard Strauss, arranged from the original scores by Ernest Irving - 1942)

His designs for Les Patineurs remained in the repertory and his conception for Les Rendezvous, although frequently revised, continues. He brought his vast experience of ballet design to opera, musical theatre, revues and drama, as both director and designer.^[2]

Chappell's work has appeared in costume design exhibitions for example in the 2013 show British Ballet Design of the 1930s held at Saffron Walden ^[3]

Chappell has been credited as directing the following productions:

• The Lyric Revue (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith and the Globe Theatre, London with Dora Bryan, Graham Payn and Ian Carmichael - 1951–1954)^[15]
• High Spirits (revue) (London Hippodrome with Cyril Ritchard and Diana Churchill - 1953)^[15]
• Sheridan's The Rivals (Saville Theatre, London with Laurence Harvey - 1956)^[15]
• Noël Coward's South Sea Bubble (Lyric Theatre with Vivien Leigh - 1956)^[16]
• Arthur Macrae and Richard Addinsell's revue, Living for Pleasure (Garrick Theatre with Dora Bryan, Daniel Massey, George Rose and Lynda Baron - 1958)^[15]
• Wolf Mankowitz's Expresso Bongo (Saville Theatre with Paul Scofield - 1958)^[15]
• Frank Loesser's Where's Charley? (Palace Theatre, London - 1958/59)^[17]
• Terence Rattigan's Joie de Vivre (Queen's Theatre, London, music by Robert Stoltz, lyrics by Paul Dehn with Donald Sinden, Joan Heal, Joana Rigby and Robin Hunter - 1960)^[18]
• On The Avenue (revue) (Globe Theatre Beryl Reid and George Rose - 1961)^[15]
• Passion Flower Hotel (Ambassador) 1965
• George Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem (Chichester Festival Theatre - 1967).^[19]
• The West End revival of Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden (Theatre Royal Haymarket, London with Gladys Cooper and Joan Greenwood - 1971)^[15]

• The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1966)^[20]

Chappell played the part of the court painter Titorelli in Orson Welles' The Trial (1962 film), based on the Kafka novel of the same name (along with many of the other actors in the film, his voice was dubbed by Welles himself).

At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was the first male dancer to join, spending the duration of the war, firstly in the artillery and later as a second lieutenant entertaining the troops.^[2] His first eighteen months of service, and his feelings about being in the Army, are recounted in an essay The Sky Makes Me Hate It commissioned by John Lehmann and published by him in Penguin New Writing Number 13 of 1942.

In his book Studies in Ballet he describes an occasion in North Africa when his company had no transport and had to march to their destination about eighteen miles away. He used this story to illustrate the benefit of ballet training to legs and feet, allowing a middle-aged man to arrive fresher than men nearly half his age, who had only received the routine Army physical training. He also emphasised the importance of a long unbroken tradition and continuity in the training of male dancers. He was of the opinion that the war was a factor that had caused chaos in the Sadler's Wells Company and rendered valueless years of work. He contrasted the treatment of the ballet in England and in Russia, where male dancers were considered important enough in their work to be kept in it.

Chappell's personal life was bound up with that of close friends. For example, Barbara Ker-Seymer's biographer^[21] writes that Barbara 'having turned her back upon her family' surrounded herself with a close-knit group of friends:

'These became a life-long surrogate family, far more beloved and important than any blood relatives. At its core were three gay men: the artist Edward Burra, the ballet dancer William Chappell and the choreographer Frederick Ashton'.

He was invited by writer and lecturer on dance Peter Brinson to take part in a series of eight lectures on 'The Ballet in Britain' at Oxford University where he entertained an academic audience with his thoughts on problems of ballet design. Other speakers included Dame Ninette de Valois director of the Royal Ballet, Marie Rambert, Arnold Haskell, William Cole and Douglas Kennedy^[22]

Since his teenage years, Chappell was a frequent visitor to Rye, East Sussex, at first to Ed Burra's family home at Springfield and in later life renting homes either in Romney Marsh or in Rye. In 1970 or thereabouts Burra bought Chappell a house in Rye at 23 Rope Walk. On Burra's death, in circumstances not entirely clear, it appears that unknown to Billy, his friend Ed had left the house to him. Chappell lived there for the next 23 years, until his death in 1994.^[23][2]

• Nijinsky (1980) - credited, along with Elisabeth Schooling, for the sequences that feature the restaging of L'Après-midi d'un Faune^[24]
• The Trial (1962) - as the painter Titorelli^[25]
• Expresso Bongo with Paul Scofield (BBC recording of Saville Theatre, London production, 1958) - Director^[24]
• The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) - dance arranger^[26]
• Moulin Rouge (1952) - dance director^[27]
• Flesh and Blood (1951) - Dancer (uncredited)^[24]
• Golden Arrow (1949) - costume designer^[24]
• The Winslow Boy (1948) - costume designer^[24][28][29]
• Le Lac des Cygnes with Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann and the Vic-Wells Ballet Company on BBC Television (13 December 1937) - as Benno^{[24][30][31][32]}
• Job with Robert Helpmann, and the Vic-Wells Ballet Company (now The Royal Ballet) produced and choreographed by Ninette de Valois on BBC Television (11 November 1936) - as Elihu/The Three Messengers.†^[24][31][32]

† This was the second broadcast of ballet on British television following the official start of the BBC high definition television service on 2 November 1936.

• Development of the Ballet, William Chappell, in New Writing and Daylight (Summer 1943) Edited by John Lehmann. Hogarth Press. London (1943)
• The Sky Makes Me Hate It, William Chappell, in Penguin New Writing Number 13 (April - June 1942) Edited by John Lehmann. Penguin Books.
• Words from a Stranger, William Chappell, in Penguin New Writing Number 19 (October - December 1944) Edited by John Lehmann. Penguin Books.
• Studies in Ballet, William Chappell, John Lehmann Ltd, London (1948) ISBN 978-1340914226
• Fonteyn: Impressions of a Ballerina, William Chappell, Rockcliff Publishing Corporation Ltd, London (1951)
• Problems of Ballet Design, William Chappell in The Ballet in Britain, Edited by Peter Brinson, Oxford University Press (1962)
• Edward Burra: A painter remembered by his friends, William Chappell, HarperCollins Distribution Services (1982) ISBN 978-0233974507
• Well Dearie!: The Letters of Edward Burra, William Chappell, Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd, London (1985) ISBN 978-0860920762
• Thoroughly Modern: The Pioneering Life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, Photographer, and her Brilliant, Bohemian Friends, Sarah Knights, Virago (2023) ISBN 978-0-349-01151-6

• List of people from Wolverhampton
• Edward Burra
• Costume designs acquired by Rye Art Gallery

• William Chappell at IMDb
• William Chappell as Elihu in 'Job', by Gordon Anthony. National Portrait Gallery.
• Sir Frederick Ashton - 'Foyer de Danse' (1932) on YouTube Filmed at the Mercury Theatre, London, by Walter and Pearl Duff. Choreography: Frederick Ashton, inspired by Degas' ballet paintings. Costumes: William Chappell, after Degas.
• Gale, Matthew (October 1997) Tate Gallery Artist Biography: William Chappell 1907-1994
• Painting of William Chappell by Edward Burra
• Edward Burra, episode of BBC's Culture Show series, broadcast 21 October 2011. References to Billy Chappell and photograph at 5:16 on YouTube
• See also: https://www.liliums-compendium.co.uk/post/william-chappell-muses-and-the-beau-monde