Lost 1950s cowboy show Hank Rides Again rediscovered after 64 years

The first episode was simply billed as The Adventures of Hank, but in the following edition his slot was titled Hank Rides Again – and so it remained.

Each episode would open with cowboy-attired Coudrill talking to the camera with a puppet version of Hank and his horse Silver King to introduce the story. The popularity of cowboy films had already familiarised the television audience with Wild West speak, so Coudrill developed a dialect based on this.

By May 1952, his cowboy characters had drawn the attention of Radio Times, which reported: "Many viewers, by no means all children, have written to ask who provides the diverse voices of 'Hank Rides Again', that cheerful Western item in 'Whirligig'.

"The answer is simple: Francis Coudrill is a ventriloquist and provides all the voices himself. He also does pretty well everything else connected with the rootin', tootin' old-timer.

"We met this amiable 36-year-old man the other day and he told us how the programme comes into being. 'First I think up the story and at the same time devise the animations so that the movements express the idea in the simplest way. (I made my first animated cut-outs at school and have since used animations in various ways, including animated pictures for nursery walls.)

"'When the various movements are worked out, I cut out and paint the actual animations which are seen on the television screen. Some of the animations I completely assemble – the rest I leave for Alfred Wurmser and his assistants, who also operate them. Their cues are taken from the dialogue, which I write.'

"Coudrill has a keen critic in his six-year-old son Jonathon. 'The entire Hank canon grew directly out of telling him bedside stories.'"

We contacted Jonathon, an artist, musician and writer living in Cornwall, to see what he remembered.

"What that write-up didn’t explain, because it wasn’t remarkable at the time, is that the animations were all performed live. Hardly anybody today, outside of the brave reporters that cover the news, can understand the thrill and tension of live television; to operate the characters and produce the voices for them all requires an exceptional mind, and my papa sure had that!

"He claimed to have drawn Mexican Pete's sombrero 300 times, as opposed to Hank's hat, which he only designed 50 times! I appreciated his unusual gifts when I grew older, but when he started in variety theatre, going out at night and coming home with his suitcase full of money (all the 'turns' were paid cash in hand in the 1940s), I thought he was a burglar!"

"As for Alfred Wurmser, he was the obvious person to help in the studio as he was the main supplier of captions for BBC television. Unfortunately, the two men had very similar skills and seemed to be in competition with each other.

"Both were physically fit and full of testosterone; while my father appreciated verbal and visual humour but despised practical jokes, Austrian-born Wurmser didn't get British verbal humour but loved playing practical jokes. One of these ended badly when my father found an open jar of cold cream in his coat pocket. The stain never came out and he knew who to blame.

"The next time my father saw Wurmser, his reproach quickly descended into a wrestling match on the studio floor; fortunately, the struggle was in total silence as Annette Mills and Muffin the Mule were performing live not 20 feet away. Thankfully, Studio Manager Bob Tronson was able to restore order just in time for my papa, already in his cowboy costume, to perform in his slot."

Hank trotted away from Whirligig in 1954 but remained in the junior public’s consciousness through a regular strip in TV Comic. Meanwhile, Coudrill, who had worked as a science teacher, applied his practical skills to setting up a studio at his new home in Beaconsfield. From here, he made a series of ten-minute Hank adventures on film.

Jonathon recalls: "Gregories Manor provided studio space for painting upstairs and the cardboard figures would then be filmed downstairs. In the former parlour, my father constructed the tracking and panning rostrum for the Bolex camera; alongside it, a Bell and Howell projector in a sound booth was operated by ingenious foot-pedals and levers which enabled both film shooting and sound dubbing on separate synchronised film stock.

"The lights and the hot machinery made for a memorable aroma of roasting celluloid. The music was improvised around my father's cowboy songs by Gy Baskin and 17-year-old Lawrence Sheaff. When they went travelling, my father asked me to take over the music and sound effects. I was already multi-instrumental and much into composition; it was huge fun and, at 14 years of age, my first professional job."

The new series of filmed episodes were first screened within Let's Get Together, an Associated Rediffusion series presented by Jon Pertwee. Then in 1960, the old timer returned to the BBC, not within another programme but with his own billing and time slot. The significance was not lost on RT, which ran this profile on Francis Coudrill.

The series of six episodes was followed by another seven in 1961. So far as we know, this was Hank’s last appearance on British television, but devotees may have been comforted by RT's words of reassurance: "We know that however wide and dry the desert, however sheer the cliff drop, however near the oncoming express train, however cunning the plans of Mexican Pete or Big Chief Dirty Face, Hank will live to ride again."

Sixty-four years on, RT’s prophecy is to come true. Hank is about to return to our screens, but how can this be when none of the episodes were preserved in the BBC or ITV archives? Step forward the Radio Times Treasure Hunt. This appeal for programmes missing from the official archives has now produced over 250 responses, and one of them was from Lee Clark, a friend of Jonathon Coudrille, who has added an E to the family name.

Clark had been looking after a box of films for his friend which had been spared after Francis Coudrill's studio closed and most of the contents sold. When he saw our appeal, he thought this might be the right time to see if the films could go to a suitable long-term home. On examination, we found over 20 episodes of Hank Rides Again, including those billed in RT in 1960-61.

The films were in good condition but the surprise was that they were all made in colour, at least seven years before the launch of colour TV in Britain. "It was a bit of foresight on my father’s part," explained Jonathon. "Later, when Gerry Anderson claimed that Stingray was the first children’s series to be made in colour, my father formally complained to the broadcaster ATV, pointing out that he got there first!"

Before the advent of channels devoted to the TV of yesteryear, a revival of Hank would have been unthinkable. But now channels such at Talking Pictures and Rewind TV are making airtime for programmes which, if they lack the technical sophistication of today’s output, make up for it with their nostalgia value.

For some, however, there is also a cultural significance in these fragments of a 1950s childhood. One of these is the man who now owns Hank and the other puppets created by Francis Coudrill, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling. We spoke to the former Chairman of the Arts Council, who is also an authority on the Spaghetti Western.

"I was one the first generation of children lucky enough to have grown up with a TV in his home," he explained. "It was Hank ‘s adventures which first kindled my interest in European Westerns. Every fortnight, on Whirligig, we could see an English artist in a check shirt reinterpreting American Westerns – especially 'B' Westerns with their whiskery sidekicks – for the enjoyment of British children.

"I also loved Francis Coudrill's artisanal kitchen-table style of animation; it was an aesthetic challenge to the cartoons produced by the big American studios. Some of the characters were 1950s stereotypes – Mexican Pete the Bad Bandit and Big Chief Dirty Face – but they were harmless and good-hearted ones, more to do with movies than real life.

"In fact, I liked them so much that when the puppets came up for sale in Penzance, I bought them to ensure they had a good home, and so for the past 20 years or so they have lived with me. It is still a bit unnerving to see these characters from the television screen of long ago become real three-dimensional, physical presences."

"The end of each episode – a back view of Hank riding off into the sunset and descending below the horizon – is still etched in my memory. For all those of us now eligible for 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, Francis Coudrill and his masterpiece Hank live on..."

Rewind TV will be screening Hank Rides Again on Sundays at 3:45pm starting 19th October.

The Radio Times Treasure Hunt goes on! Do please continue to contact us with news of anything you unearth. Email treasurehunt@radiotimes.com or write (but don’t send any tapes at this stage, please) to: Treasure Hunt, Radio Times, 44 Brook Green, London W6 7BT.

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