Graphic Journey Blog

Harry Willock: Behind the curtain / Part two

Ink Studios logo created in scraperboard by Harry Willock 1968

In 1968, Alan Aldridge and Harry Willock set up Ink Studios, with (now Lord) Bernard Donoghue as finance director. They had a studio above Zwemmers Bookshop in Litchfield Street in London’s West End. With the increasing volume of work coming in, they hired Bob Smithers and Rick Goodale, with Harry overseeing the quality.

Alan Aldridge top and Harry Willock below at Ink Studios in the early 1970s.

One of the first notable projects for Ink Studios was The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969), with Alan commissioning an array of talent to each visually illustrate a Beatles song. Alan’s own contributions to the book would, as usual, be worked up as detailed outline tracings. These would be given to Harry, and he would set about the task of perfecting the drawing, transferring it onto art board, followed by the painstaking task of masking out the many layers for airbrushing. At the end of the process, a fully fledged Alan Aldridge imagining was realised into an immaculate piece of artwork via Harry’s supreme craftsmanship. The Beatles Apple Corp would become a major client at this time.

John Lennon, There's A Place from The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics.

Harry's 1969 D&AD Silver Award winning album cover.

Work from Ink studios was popping up everywhere, the combination of Alan and Harry was becoming formidable. In Ink's first year, Harry picked up a D&AD Silver Award for the Small Faces album, Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake, a die cut cover as a replica ornate Victorian tobacco tin.

Victor Lownes, head of the UK end of The Playboy Club, had opened a restaurant in Mayfair and commissioned Ink Studios to produce menu designs. By this time, Alan and Harry had bedded into a seamless relationship akin to that of an architect and an engineer.

The Great American Disaster poster (1971)

Peter Morton commissioned them to produce the identity for the hamburger restaurant The Great American Disaster (1971), located on Kings Road. It was a big hit, and while Alan was away, Morton phoned Harry with a very urgent letterhead job that he needed. “Nothing too fancy, just simple,” requested Morton. Harry produced something overnight and Morton was delighted. Within a week, the enterprise was up and running. It was the logo for The Hard Rock Cafe and 35 years on, it is still in use.

Produced overnight by Harry and still in use worldwide 35 years on.

Work continued to flow from every which way and Harry found himself designing covers for Penguin in his own right, but these had to be done in his own time, as the fee of only 30 guineas (around £500 today) and was felt to be laughable by Ink's finance director.

Harry designed this door notice for sale at the Apple Boutique located on Baker Street. It was devised and written by John Lennon in 1968.

Album cover for The Who 1966.

Logo for the Rolling Stones tour in 1968. 

An early 60's Harry Willock logo for DJ Pete Murray.

One of Harry's many night time activities for Penguin Books via David Pelham.

Created for a Heineken 'Refreshes the parts' 48 sheet poster

By the early 1970s, although still frantically busy, Ink Studios wasn’t making enough money for its wider financial backers, so the company was wound up. Alan had bought himself a palatial vicarage in Norfolk and had relocated there with his young family. He and Harry formed Alan Aldridge Associates. Now with Harry living in Bromley and Alan in Norfolk, they would meet every fortnight at the Museum Tavern in the shadows of the British Museum in London. Harry would arrive with his pristine artwork in a portfolio. Alan would always be tucked away smoking in a corner, where he could view Harry’s latest execution well away from prying eyes; this was always a concern for the secretive Aldridge. By this time, their work had developed into complete books, the first being the highly successful The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1973), later turned into an animated film.

First edition of The Butterfly Ball

A later edition of The Butterfly Ball

Music album for the animated version of The Butterfly Ball.

The book received major coverage in the press including a feature in The Sunday Times Magazine.

It caught the eye of Elton John, who had Alan design the album cover for Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975).

The Elton John album cover would eventually lead Alan Aldridge to America to work on an animated version of Captain Fantastic. 

Album cover for The Peacock Party music

 Then it was straight onto another book, The Ship’s Cat (1977), followed by The Peacock Party (1979) and, finally, what Harry considered their best collaboration, The Lion’s Cavalcade (1980). Over a ten-year period, Alan and Harry would continue their clandestine Museum Tavern meetings. Each one-page illustration would take Harry two solid weeks of work to complete.

The Lion's Cavalcade considered by Harry as his finest collaboration with Alan.

Alan had got rather immersed with Elton John and Bernie Taupin on an animated version of their Captain Fantastic creation and he moved to Los Angeles, where he rented a house from the film star Sally Ann Howes. Alan and Harry’s collaboration ebbed away, leaving Harry to look for work elsewhere. There was never a legal contract between Alan and Harry, nor with Ink Studios and Alan Aldridge Associates, and the question of ownership of the original artworks was, and still is, a rather a grey area for Harry, especially when he discovered that Alan was planning on auctioning some of the original artworks at Sotheby’s, but this was eventually stopped.

Harry began to pick up work in his own right ironically, it came from his old employer The Sunday Times via the talented Art Director Gilvrie Misstear who had been with The Sunday Times Magazine for many years, alongside Michael Rand and David King. Harry produced a flow of wonderful header illustrations for a whole series of topics for her, from health to diet and DIY to electronics.

The above 5 images were all for The Sunday Times Magazine with Harry's working solo. They show not only his supreme skill as an airbrush artist but also his with and inventiveness.

At the suggestion of a friend Harry was persuaded to take on a one-day-a-week teaching post at Kingston Art School: something he was unsure of but would continue for 15 years until computers were introduced – which Harry did not want to embrace. Over those years many of his ex-students would surface in many influential design companies and he would often be commissioned by his old young charges now fully fledged in own their right. He found this particularly touching.

Alan Aldridge would pop up from time to time and at one point offered Harry the opportunity to work in LA on an animated film. He was to be responsible for the background artworks. He flew off to LA to team up with Alan again, but the film didn’t go ahead and, anyway, Harry found the endless heat of LA far too much for him – he couldn’t wait to get back to the gentler climes of Bromley.

Harry received a D&AD Silver award for the above in 1984.

Solo again, a wonderful opportunity arose for Harry from ex-Penguin Art Director David Pelham. He asked Harry to collaborate with him on the book The Human Body (1983): an ambitious, sophisticated adult pop-up book written by Jonathan Miller. Harry’s usual masterful work shone, and the result picked up a D&AD Silver Award in 1984.

This led to a second collaboration with Pelham: The Facts of Life, which was another highly successful pop-up extravaganza. In 1987, Harry was approached by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass to design the poster for their film adaptation of

. The result was indistinguishable from the earlier Aldridge/Willock collaborations. 

The Wind in the Willows film poster.

 In the early 1990s, there was one last collaboration between Harry and Alan on the book The Gnole, but it was only the cover and some small internal graphics; the remainder of the illustrations used an entirely different technique. But Harry was soon to discover that all the years and many thousands of hours working in this demanding area of illustration was to come back to haunt him.

In 1994, Harry was playing his regular game of squash at the local sports club when he suffered a heart attack. Luckily, he survived but was advised to change his lifestyle and cut out stress. He had never thought of himself as being under stress, but it soon became clear to him that the years of deadlines and the exacting nature of his technique, sitting tensely for hour upon hour, must have taken its toll, so he put away the airbrush and art board and stopped altogether. He did visit Alan’s 2008 retrospective show, The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, at the Design Museum and he was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work on display and so much of it had been produced by him in his little garden conservatory studio attached to at his home in Bromley. He was disappointed that there was little mention of him at that exhibition after all those years of collaboration, but he has very fond memories of his time with Alan and those heady days in the 60's and 70's.

In February this year came the sad news that Alan Aldridge had died, following a struggle with a rare form of Alzheimer’s. Left behind an amazing body of work by this unlikely creative duo. Apparently, all of the original artworks have been meticulously filed away by Alan. What will become of them is another story.

Harry Willock is one of a few remaining handcrafted exponents from the 1950s known affectionately as ‘commercial artists’: a breed that could turn their hand to almost anything. Much of what they did has been absorbed into the clinical, scalpel-free, digital world, and it is a sad loss.

It was a pleasure to meet Harry and hear, first hand, his own story about this special time in British design history.

Part one of HarryWillock's story here.

 

Harry Willock: The man behind the curtain / Part one

Earlier this year, the light of one of the most flamboyant graphic stars of the 1960s was extinguished with the death of Alan Aldridge. But he left behind an astonishing array of mind-blowing work, born out of that special, psychedelic, drug-induced era of the 1960s.

But perhaps few know that many of Alan Aldridge’s wild imaginings were in a large part brought to life by Harry Willock: a man ten years Aldridge’s senior who spent three decades behind the scenes quietly beavering away. 

Born in West Bromwich in 1934, Harry Willock was a rather shy, lonely boy who spent most of his time drawing at home and at infant school. His ability was later recognised by a teacher when at secondary school, who suggested that he apply for art school. This led him to Ryland School, where he studied commercial art for two years. 

At Ryland’s end-of-year art exhibition, a local businessman spotted some of Harry’s work and offered him an apprenticeship at his printing firm Kendrick and Jefferson. It specialised in bespoke stationery. At age 17, Harry joined the company and systematically worked his way through the different craft disciplines under the eagle eye of his boss, who was a stickler for perfection. A quick learner, Harry mastered line drawing, hand lettering, scraperboard illustration and airbrushing. 

Above two examples of Harry Willock's scraperboard mastery.

1952, Harry in army uniform at the drawing board.

A year later, he had to break off for compulsory National Service. He was first attached to the Royal Engineers and, after some cajoling, he managed to get transferred to the mapmaking section of the Worcester Military Survey, where he would often find himself in mobile darkrooms learning the tricky art of reversed writing, directly onto film negatives.

Harry seated centre, with staff members at The Sunday Times Marketing Division around 1960. 

After completing his two-year army stint, he returned to Civvy Street and slotted back into his original job at Kendrick and Jefferson. But he soon became rather frustrated and, in 1959, through a fluke, he managed to get a job in London with The Sunday Times’ Marketing Division. He was disappointed at first, due to the lack of much to do, but that was to all change when Lord Thompson took over the publication and shook things up. This gave Harry a greater opportunity to show his array of craft-based talents. At one point, he was asked if he would like to be considered for the post of studio manager, but telling people what to do wasn’t in Harry’s nature and he much preferred to be on the ‘drawing board’ doing what he knew and loved. 

In 1964, a gangly young man sporting dyed-blond hair joined The Sunday Times’ Promotions Department. His name was Alan Aldridge, and little did Harry know that he would become inextricably linked with this eccentric-looking character for almost three decades.

Alan had a seemingly never-ending stream of fresh and varied wild ideas but often with the inability to craft them into life. But having seen some of Harry’s amazingly exacting work, he quickly realised that together they could make the perfect partnership to realise his imaginings. Another staffer in the Promotion Department was John Gorham (later to develop as a supreme talent himself). Harry recalls that John and Alan would often go to the pub after work and enthusiastically talk about all aspects of design. They would zero in on one of the Promotion Department’s projects that needed cracking. After the bell for last orders was rung, they would go their separate ways. The next day, Gorham would arrive still feeling a little jaded but would be astonished by Alan firing on all cylinders, bristling with a plethora of ideas he would have dreamt up overnight.

Two examples of Alan Aldridge Penguin covers prior his collaboration with Harry Willock. Top shows Aldridge working within the confines of Penguin's cover grid styling.

In 1965, Alan left The Sunday Times, having secured himself a new job via Germano Facetti at Penguin Books, at the time located in a house on John Street, Bloomsbury. At first, Chief Editor Tony Godwin, a Penguin long-termer with wide-ranging experience and knowledge of selling who was always on the lookout, employed him as an in-house designer for new ways of presenting covers. Alan’s early Penguin covers had to slot within the carefully controlled house grid styling created by Romek Marber in 1962 for the then overall Art Director Facetti. Alan found this very restrictive and at odds with his view of design. Tony Godwin had been promoted to perk up Penguin’s sales due to increasing pressure from other paperback imprints like Pan, Corgi and Fontana. As part of his new strategy, Godwin got Alan to produce some experimental fiction covers, freeing him from the carefully controlled cover house style. The story goes that at a Penguin sales meeting at which some of the new experiments were floated, and received well, Alan fielded the idea (with Godwin’s backing) that he should take over the art directorship of all fiction covers, much to the displeasure of Germano Facetti. But it was agreed and, apparently, Facetti never spoke to Alan again.

Now with a lot on his plate, Alan persuaded Harry, still at The Sunday Times, to join him at Penguin, where they began their partnership in earnest. In addition to commissioning covers from external artists, designers and photographers, Alan would design a lot of covers himself. An example of an Aldridge/Willock collaboration can be seen in Penguin’s science fiction series. Alan would come up with the idea, create a basic skeletal drawing and then hand it over to Harry to unleash his airbrush. As can be seen, Alan’s own drawing style had an almost childlike naivety at the time: something that would evolve as his and Harry’s partnership matured. 

Three examples of Aldridge's covers with the addition of Harry Willock's magic airbrush. All from 1967.

Soon, Penguin fiction covers were making waves, and approaches of work from outside for Alan were coming thick and fast. So began a lot of moonlighting for both Alan and Harry while at Penguin. This didn’t fit comfortably with Harry, as he was of that earlier generation where modesty and loyalty were the norms. As a long-term print trade union man, doing an honest day’s work for your employer was in his blood. Conversely, Alan was very much a child of the swinging sixties, where success and fame went hand in hand.

An example of an Aldridge and Willock moonlighting project for rival paperback house Panther 1967.

And the Who's A Quick One album cover 1966

Harry undertook the design of the Allen Lane hardback books solo.

Meanwhile, there were boardroom rumblings. Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, was very unhappy with the change of direction in cover presentation masterminded by Tony Godwin in league with Aldridge. Lane said, in a pointed remark at the time, “A book is not a tin of beans”.

The situation became exacerbated when Alan turned up for work with prison bars painted on the lenses of his round Lennon-style specs. Lane took this as a personal affront and set about planning to have Alan transferred to Penguin’s offices at Harmondsworth, out of harm’s way. Godwin saw the writing on the wall and resigned in 1967. This was shortly followed by Alan’s own departure, who by this time had external commissions from many quarters, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who, making it possible for both him and Harry to embark on a new enterprise, shortly following Goodwin’s departure. 

For Part Two click HERE

More on Alan Aldridge HERE        More on John Gorham HERE

Things I like...

40 years before Stella McCartney adopted the theatrical mirror light bulb logo (above) for her fashion brand, the graphic designer Denise York had already thought of it for the Penguin Plays series in 1964,

Front cover

Back cover

transforming this earlier styling... 

by John Banks (later of Banks and Miles) to the simple modernist horizontal banded structure. Still rather pleasing.

Things I like...

This poster still raises a few eyebrows with its confrontational stance. It was designed by Robert Brownjohn for the Rober Fraser Gallery back in 1964.