Francis Coudrill was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 artist and ventriloquist, most notable for being the creator of Hank the Cowboy. He was also an artist and illustrator.

Coudrill appeared on Lime Grove Studios

Lime Grove Studios

Lime Grove Studios was a film studio complex built by the Gaumont Film Company in 1915 situated in a street named Lime Grove, inShepherd's Bush, west London, north of Hammersmith and described by Gaumont as "the finest studio in Great Britain and the first building ever put up in this country...

' 1950s BBC children's television show Whirligig with Peter Hawkins

Peter Hawkins

Peter John Hawkins was an English actor and voice artist.- Career :Born in London and a native of Brixton, Hawkins' long association with British children's television began in 1952 when he voiced both Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men. In 1955–1956, He voiced Big Ears & Mr. Plod from The...

, Peter Butterworth

Peter Butterworth

Peter William Shorrocks Butterworth was an English comedy actor and comedian, best known for his appearances in the Carry On series of films. He was also a regular on children's television and radio and appeared in seven early episodes of Doctor Who in 1965 as the 'The Meddling Monk'...

 and writer Peter Ling

Peter Ling

Peter Ling was a British writer in many media, but best known for his work in television, where he was the co-creator of the soap opera Crossroads....

 (all of whom were later involved in Doctor Who

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...

).

His son is the artist Jonathon Coudrille

Jonathon Coudrille

Jonathon Xavier Coudrille is an English artist, musician and writer. He was born in November 1945 on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, an area with which he is still closely associated. His father was the artist and ventriloquist Francis Coudrill...

.

Professor Sir Christopher Frayling

Christopher Frayling

Sir Christopher John Frayling is a British educationalist and writer, known for his study of popular culture.-Biography:Frayling read history at Churchill College, Cambridge and gained a PhD in the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

, Rector and Vice Provost of the Royal College of Art

Royal College of Art

The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...

and Chairman of the Arts Council said about him:

Francis Coudrill introduced the first generation of post-war baby-boomers – the lucky ones who watched television at home in the early 1950s – to TV animation and to the European Western, both at the same time. Hank Rides Again involved puppetry (for the studio introductions to each episode), drawings, cut-out animations, several distinct voices (including that of the horse Silver King, who was something like Disney’s Goofy) and sound effects – all supplied by Francis Coudrill, who made a personal appearance in a check shirt each week with Hank as his ventriloquist’s dummy. The end of each episode, a back view of Hank riding off into the sunset and descending below the horizon line, is still etched in my memory. My interest in European Westerns was first kindled by Hank Rides Again. So was my interest in artisanal kitchen-table animation – an aesthetic challenge to the cartoons produced by the big American studios. Okay, some of the characters were 1950s stereotypes – Mexican Pete the bad bandit, Dirty Face the Indian Chief – but they were harmless and good-hearted ones. They certainly didn’t do me any lasting damage. Francis Coudrill lives on, for all those of us who are about to be eligible for our bus passes and who remember sitting in cramped front rooms dreaming of wide open spaces and listening to tall stories which grew taller in the telling.

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