I started work on my book British Film Posters: An Illustrated History in Jan 2002, largely prompted by the death of Tom Chantrell in July 2001 and the sense that there was an unexplored history there worth investigating.  The first draft was completed in July 2003 and I then spent the next two years trying to persuade someone to publish it, finally getting lucky when Rebecca Barden arrived at the BFI in June 2005 (our first meeting was just a week after the 7/7 bombings and travelling into town still felt distinctly edgy).  The final edit was approved in Nov 2005, and was as up-to-date as I could then make it, containing details like WE Berry’s collapse in Dec 2003, Eric Pulford’s death in July 2005, and the (prophetic) contemporary closure of Fred Zentner’s Cinema Bookshop etc etc.  So what else has been lost in the two decades since I (quite literally) closed the book on this story?  Twenty years on, it’s time to finally draw a line under the whole thing.  Who will survive and what will be left of them?  Let’s find out.

My book’s Acknowledgements page lists about sixty interviewees 2001-2003, and it is a sad fact that of these less than ten now remain—I spent the following years attending a depressingly regular series of funerals.  With most of the major artists I tried to get an obituary published in the press if possible, and a few of these are still available online.  Running through the key losses alphabetically, we have:

Chris Achilleos (died Dec 2021)

Fred Atkins (Oct 2010)

Tom Beauvais (April 2024)

Vic Fair (Feb 2017)

Mike Francis (June 2023)

Roger Hall (Dec 2006)

Peter Lee (Printer – July 2014)

Brian McIlmail (Publicist – May 2021)

Sam Peffer (March 2014)

Arnaldo Putzu (Sept 2012)

Alan Wheatley (Publicist – Aug 2023)

Mike Wheeler (Publicist – May 2012)

… there are of course many, many others less celebrated (but no less significant) who all deserve a mention, but we need to keep this essay to a reasonable length.  Having said that, three notable names who contrived to completely pass me by at the time are Guy Peeters, Jack Hubbard and Ted Verrum.  Peeters attended Somerset College of Art 1958-60, so was presumably born c.1940.  He worked at UK Advertising in the 1960s illustrating MGM quads like Cincinnati Kid (1965) and The Comedians (1967), then later seems to have specialised in girls’ comic illustration for DC Thompson / IPC 1977-81, eg Jinty, Nikki, Mandy, Bunty, Misty, Debbie etc etc.  But any further detail is currently lacking, and it seems highly unlikely he’s still alive.

Jack Hubbard (1913-1985) apparently worked for a host of British distributors including Fox, Gala, Eros, New Realm and British Lion, though very rarely signed his illustrations—Alyse and Chloe (1970) is one of the few boasting his signature.  He began his career as a cartographer in the Royal Artillery while stationed in India, beginning to work in film publicity after the War initially for Fox (he allegedly came up with the Cinemascope logo) alongside Tom Chantrell and Andrew “Jock” Hinchliffe.  Hopefully more biographical detail will emerge over time, as he was clearly prolific (I was initially misattributing some of his work to his freelance contemporary Fred Payne).

Edward “Ted” Verrum was a contemporary of Pulford and Chantrell, and thus likely born c.1915.  He apparently died in 1975, though—as with every other biographical detail—this is currently unconfirmed.  He worked for Rex Publicity over the 1950s-60s (based in their New Bond Street offices), and is now chiefly remembered for painting the ABC circuit’s straplined double-bill posters (which typically adapted existing Chantrell designs, though Verrum does seem to have occasionally put together his own unique illustrations, e.g. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning).  But he otherwise remains a tantalising blank, and—as with Peeters—further dedicated research is now badly overdue.

Moving on to the the key companies involved, we can usefully start with National Screen Service.  In late 1986 the US parent-company was bought-out by senior executive Peter Koplik, and as a direct result the UK wing was ALSO quickly sold (in Dec) to a management buyout.  Undoubtedly influenced by this downsizing and its implications, both NSS’s two established printers—Lonsdale & Bartholomew and WE Berry—jointly abandoned film posters at the end of the year.  (We’ll get to their replacements in a moment).

Media-giant Carlton bought NSS-UK in June 1998, closing the company’s old Wadsworth Road office (to move just around the corner to Horsenden Lane) and installing new MD Paul Logan (ex-Carlton Screen Advertising), who ran the firm for ten more years until it ceased trading in Dec 2008 (formally dissolved Nov 2010).  Logan cannily used half his redundancy cash to cheaply purchase some of the abandoned office equipment and (together with two colleagues) set up the wittily-named Logan’s Run Print Management, doing exactly the same thing (on an even MORE reduced scale) until liquidation in Nov 2018.

[Carlton had—via its 1988 subsidiary Technicolor Inc—similarly bought out the US NSS in Sept 2000, apparently shutting it down within months though precise dates here are elusive].

Printing.  When my book hit the shops in Dec 2006, three of its older printers were still (just about) in business: Kent Art, Bovince and Broomhead Litho.

Kent Art of Chatham merged with Marstan Press (of Bexleyheath) in June 2007, ceased trading that Nov, and were dissolved in April 2010.  Bovince in Walthamstow similarly went into administration in July 2008 (with 34 job losses) and were dissolved in Nov 2009.  The original Broomhead Litho had been dissolved back in 1993, but Alan Broomhead’s offshoot repro-outfit Laserscan continued (at the old Lytham address) until it too went into administration in Aug 2015, dissolving June 2017.

Meanwhile, in 1986 NSS’s new print-buyer Graham Rowsell had to swiftly find replacements for the departing Lonsdale & Bartholomew and WE Berry, and told me he chiefly used two newer firms: Mills & Allen Printing (litho) and Capital Print & Display (silkscreen).

Mills & Allen Printing had a rather convoluted history.  They were established in 1972 (initially purely as a holding company for Leonard Ripley & Co in Vauxhall), becoming active and opening their own purpose-built works in West Drayton in 1983 after Ripleys shut down.  In 1993 they were bought out by Christian Huggonet’s expanding ‘Affiche Europeenne’ conglomerate, changing their name to Kingsway Press (an old M&A subsidiary) as part of the takeover.  In June 2006 (in line with the whole group) they were rebranded Impression UK Ltd, but went into administration in Nov 2016, dissolving Jan 2020.  The works site (backing onto the Grand Union Canal at Colham Bridge) was cleared in 2017, and replaced by the new Millstream House / Otter Way housing development.

Capital Print & Display were even more controversial, established in 1984 and opening their main Stratford works on Marshgate Lane four years later.  This ironically ended up directly under the proposed footprint of the 2012 Olympic Stadium, and the London Development Agency (LDA) bought the site from Capital’s owner David Gill in 2006 for approx £12m (including compensation).  CP&D relocated to Brentwood in July 2007, with the final LDA payments being handed over in June 2008.  Mere weeks later Capital were declared insolvent and went into liquidation in March 2009.  Multiple lawsuits to recover the missing money began, and in July 2009 Gill (no doubt reluctantly) settled out of court.  Presumably due to all the ensuing legal back-and-forth, CP&D itself was not finally dissolved until Sept 2018.

The joint-exit of Lonsdales and Berrys in 1986 also marked the end of an era in which printers formally identified their posters by discreetly adding their name somewhere along the lower-border.  Broomhead doggedly carried on with the tradition right up to the end of 1990, but following their departure all film posters printed in the UK became totally anonymous, and yet another element of their distinctive character was quietly lost.

[To be quite fair, one obvious point to make here is that rapidly-changing technology required major investment which many of the older firms were understandably reluctant to risk.  Double-sided printing—where the back features a pale mirror-image of the front at 30% saturation for HD lightbox display—arrived in 1988 and required specially-coated Silk papers to be fully effective.  At the same time, posters destined for pasting-up outdoors (a tiny percentage of any run nowadays) began to be printed on so-called ‘Blue Back’ stock, where the reverse is coated with an opaque blue dye to prevent older displays underneath from showing through when it rains.]

Collecting.  Turning now to the dedicated Collecting-scene, this too has inevitably seen dramatic changes.  Looking at the traditional forums of (A) Fairs and (B) Shops (and solely dealing with London, to try and keep things manageable):

(A)  London Fairs

(i)  Camden Electric Ballroom.  Run 1989-2008 by Philip Nevitsky (b.1942), who sold them on his retirement to Paul Brown of Midnight Media.  In 2017 Brown switched their location to Conway Hall on Red Lion Square in Holborn.  There’s a fun video of Phil’s final (May 2010) Manchester fair here:

http://stardust—memories.blogspot.com/2010/04/stardust-memories-documentary-film-by.html

(ii)  Westminster Central Hall.  Run 1990-2012 by Ed Mason (d.2016) who sold them on his retirement to Thomas Bowington of Bowington Management (a small actors’ agency).   In 2018 Bowington switched their location to the Royal National Hotel (off Russell Square), where they essentially became themed Autograph events for his agency’s elderly client-list.

(B)  London Shops  (six in total, listed in order of closure)

(i)  Cinema Bookshop, 13-14 Great Russell Street.  An institution.  Run 1969 – July 2005 by Fred Zentner, and closing just in time for its disappearance to be noted in my book (the unheralded beginning of a domino trend).

(ii)  Rare Discs, 18 Bloomsbury Street.  Originally (c.1970-1996) “58 Dean Street Records” and specialising in soundtrack LPs / mixed film memorabilia.  Between 1980 – July 2005 the two shops were sequentially run by twins Philip & Martin Masheter, well-known faces on the London scene.  Rare Discs seems to have closed within a week or so of the Cinema Bookshop, with both proprietors simultaneously citing that month’s Congestion Charge-hike (from £5 up to £8) as the final nail in the coffin:

https://www.westminsterextra.co.uk/article/c-charge-blamed-as-two-independent-shops-close

(iii)  Flashbacks, 6 Silver Place, Soho.  Run 1986 – Feb 2007 by Richard Dacre.  Discussed in my book and ironically closing just ten weeks after publication.  There’s a lively insider-account of its demise here:

https://chrisnthat.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

 

(iv)  Stage and Screen, 34 Notting Hill. 1998-2008.  Part of Brian Abrams ‘Music and Goods Exchange Ltd’ W11 empire (est. 1967).  Film memorabilia was previously sold upstairs in the old Music and Video Exchange (round the corner at 14 Pembridge Road).  Various characters ran S&S for Abrams during the decade it was open, including Guy, Rob and Andy.  Following closure, the posters were briefly transferred to the Berwick Street MVE for about a year, but had vanished entirely by the end of 2009.

(v)  The Cinema Store, 4B Upper St Martin’s Lane.  Originally a smaller shop (on Monmouth Street in Covent Garden) and run 1994 – Jan 2016 by Neil Palmer.

(vi)  The Vintage Magazine Shop, 39-43 Brewer Street.  Another institution.  Run 1980 – Sept 2016 by Danny Posner (1931 – 2018) and his partner Angela Maguire.  The loss of Vinmag was, in particular, felt to be symbolic of the decline of Olde Soho.

One obvious point to make here is that the original fairs and shops—all of which have now definitively gone forever—were operating on a quite different level to what came later.  They were neither fashionable nor expensive, and were run by a group of grouchy veterans who frequently turned surly misanthropy into a virtual art form.  The internet briefly popularised—and then rapidly crushed—their respective businesses, at a point when all were fast approaching retirement anyway.  A collecting era really is finally over, and older fans will feel increasingly lucky to have been part of it.  The unique thrill of visiting PLACES and meeting PEOPLE can never be matched by anonymously sniping stuff online, though the latter admittedly involves far less effort.  Which is perhaps the point.

So, in finally drawing a line under this story, how can we sum all this up?  What is the long-term significance of the era in question, and is it possible to coherently summarise it? I believe it is, and will now attempt to do so.  Pay attention, I will say this only once.

It is obviously unfashionable to assess the cinema purely as an INDUSTRY, but that is surely the only meaningful approach when considering its advertising.  That being the case, what are the key stages in cinema’s industrial development here in the UK?  Well, the projection of moving images via celluloid film is mastered in 1896, but it takes a further thirty years for what we might term Modern Cinema (ie feature-length, 70mins+ narrative films featuring synchronised sound) to emerge.  1927 is thus a key date, not just for the technical breakthrough of Sound, but also our accompanying Quota Act which at a stroke creates a stable commercial base within which ambitious entrepreneurs can operate—i.e. we are obliged to start making our own films to show in our own purpose-built cinemas, and simple supply and demand rapidly takes over.  By about 1931 all the Hollywood majors have (reluctantly) set up UK subsidiaries and are buying into the emerging British combines.  By about 1936 a distinctive UK advertising style (based on our unique “landscape quad” poster format) is emerging.

But then the War intervenes.  Paper Rationing is introduced in April 1940 (and not fully repealed until March 1949), with any old posters that happen to have been stored away methodically gathered together to be taken to the pulping mills for recycling.  Very, very few British film posters from before 1945 thus survive, and the end of the War essentially marks the basic starting-point for collectors.  1946 also ironically marks the absolute height of British cinema-going, with 1,635m admissions to the country’s 4,723 cinemas.  This means that on average everyone is visiting the cinema once a week, and there is one cinema for every 8,600 customers.  It is vital to appreciate the overall history of British cinema from this point as a steady, inexorable decline, with the absolute nadir being reached forty years later.

The period 1945-1985 is thus remarkably stable overall, marked chiefly by progressive retrenchment and a stubbornly conservative reaction to the apparently irreversible slide by the (atrophying) vested interests controlling the business.  There is little new investment and critically no new ideas to combat the emerging competition from both television (ITV launches in 1956) and subsequently home-video (VHS launches in 1978).  The only major landmark occurs in 1970 with the loosening of censorship (via raising the “X” age-bar from 16 to 18) and simultaneous tripling of most remaining circuit cinemas, which jointly creates both a fresh exploitation market AND a convenient dedicated venue (i.e. the tiny resulting Screen Threes) in which to promote it.  But by this stage everything is transparently on its last legs, with most cinemas surviving on one or two hits a year and running at a loss the rest of the time.

And by 1984-85 the gig is finally up.  Admissions have dropped to 54m with only 660 cinemas still open.  On average everyone is now visiting the cinema just once a year and there is one cinema for every 85,000 customers.  In the space of just four decades admissions have dropped by a staggering 95% and six out of every seven cinemas have closed.  The Quota Act is finally abolished as redundant, and with it the statutory controls which at least provided some long-term stability.  In terms of the advertising aspect, 1985 also sees the debut of Desktop Publishing and the means to commercially print large-format computer design work.  It takes a few years for this to gain traction in the equally conservative advertising world, but by the launch of Photoshop in 1990 the use of old-skool hand-assembled artwork on British film posters (or what we might loosely characterise as a traditional Craft-based approach) is effectively dead.

But in a peculiar irony, at its absolute lowest point green shoots of rebirth appear.  The UK’s first Multiplex cinema (the ten-screen Point complex in Milton Keynes) opens in Nov 1985 and is an immediate success, sparking a wave of competitive building across the country which by 2000 means an astonishing 75% of British screens are new-build, encouraging the audience to rapidly return. The final stage in this process of reinvention is the introduction of digital projection, which races in even faster than the multiplex boom—in just eight years, 2005-2013, UK cinemas go from 100% film to 100% digital.  The loss of celluloid (whilst effectively invisible) is hugely symbolic, as it represents the last physical element that made cinemas unique.  The concurrent introduction of Home Streaming allows immediate private access to what was once solely available in a controlled social context, and the whole notion of cinemas as dedicated palaces of film—home of the great popular art-form of the last century—has been further (and now perhaps irreversibly) eroded.

So, what does all this MEAN?  That there is a clearly-defined forty-year period 1945-85 in which British film posters form a coherent and important artistic tradition.  The starting-point is 1945 simply because almost nothing any earlier survives, and the end point is 1985 because a pivotal industry-crisis finally sweeps away all that has gone before.  The combined effect of the loss of the Quota and apparently terminal audience-decline creates a perfect storm in which key participants decide it is time to finally bail out.  NSS is sold-off in 1986 and its two veteran printers Lonsdales & Berrys accordingly cut their losses (“no prospect for growth” as Peter Lee put it to me) and quietly exit.  Advertising budgets have been so reduced that bespoke British campaigns can no longer be afforded and the top UK illustrators have largely priced themselves out of a contracting market.  Everyone—Chantrell, Pulford, Peffer, Paul, Putzu etc etc—either retire (Tom, Eric & Sam), die (Eddie), or fly home (Arnaldo) within a few months of each other in 1985.

So, forty years 1945-85.  Not all that long really, with an identical length of time having now passed since it ended.  Considered in this light, it’s helpful to try and assess the precise volume of material we’re talking about, and these two tables:

https://terramedia.co.uk/reference/statistics/film/film_registrations.htm

https://terramedia.co.uk/reference/statistics/film/film_registrations_2.htm

… are invaluable.  Being based on Quota figures, they divide the stats into the three basic Registration-categories: First Features (72 mins+), Second Features (34-71 mins) and Shorts (under 33 mins).  Shorts can be ignored as the figures are misleadingly inflated by the endless “cinemagazine” series (Pathe Pictorial + Rank’s Look at Life etc etc) which were churned out weekly until 1969.  Second features are also tricky to evaluate, as only some would have had dedicated posters printed—many (likely the majority) would have gone out unadvertised.  So—to keep things simple—in terms of posters it’s really only First Features that count from our point of view.

If we look at the figures from this angle they’re really remarkably consistent.  Immediately after the War we’re in the low 200s, but from 1949 onwards we’re screening 300+ films a year, and stay at that general level until 1978, when the rot begins to set in and we drop back down into the 200s again.  The full forty-year total 1945-85 is c.12,500 films, or an average of about 312 a year—i.e. around six a week.

[It’s instructive to compared this to the current situation, where since 2000 the digital revolution outlined above has pushed annual totals up to a staggering 821 films released in 2016, despite audiences stubbornly flatlining over the same period at a level roughly equivalent to that of 1972].

So there we have it.  This isn’t about promoting any kind of supposed Golden Age—good and bad films have always been around, and always will be.  But what the cinema in this country had 1945-85 was a quite unique period of unchanging commercial stability which is why I believe the posters from that era are so important as a visual reflection of it.  They were designed and printed by a small group of traditionally-skilled artisans (Chantrell / Pulford / WE Berry / Lonsdale & Bartholomew etc etc), who—due to that very stability—in many cases spent practically their entire careers doing little else, and thus critically invested their resulting work with real personality and character.  And that world has now definitively gone forever, although many of us have lived through at least the tail-end of it.  Lucky us, eh?

© Sim Branaghan    February 2025