”He was fun,” says Dee Constable of her late father Bill, art director on the movie Dr. Who and the Daleks. “He was courteous, gracious and a good host. He also had this sense of humour. On Sunday mornings, I’d get into bed with my parents and he’d read to us from the papers. He’d be totally straight-faced but he’d make it all up - it would just get more farcical and bizarre until we were in fits of laughter! He might admit he’d exaggerated - but why let the truth get in the way of a good story? That was his philosophy.”
William Henry Archibald Constable was born in 1906 in Bendigo, Australia, the son of an Anglican rector. According to his biographer Olga O Sedneva, an art historian who wrote a 2014 thesis on Bill’s life and work, after leaving school he was apprenticed as an electrical engineer at the workshops of Victoria Railways, which he later credited for his practical grasp of mechanics. He studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, then, when the Depression hit in the early 1930s, thought he “might as well starve in England as Australia” and booked one-way tickets for himself, his wife and their baby boy. Bill took night classes at St Martin’s School of Art in London and had a number of odd jobs, including his first brush with experimental theatre.
Returning to Australia, Bill worked as a commercial artist but had his eye on set design. After some unpaid work for small theatrical productions, in 1933 Bill’s cubist designs for a production of Jonah and the Whale met with acclaim. He designed three plays for the English character actress Marie Ney before spending time with Whitehall Productions and Williamsons, followed by 15 years with the Borovansky Ballet. In 1954 he was production designer on the Australian film Long John Silver and the television series that sprang from it. More film work followed, and in 1957 Bill returned to London with his second wife and their baby daughter, Dee. He designed the Noël Coward ballet London Morning in 1959, and his subsequent work in TV and film included the post of art director on Just for Fun (1963) for the newly established Amicus Productions.