William Chappell (27 September 19071 January 1994) was a British dancer, ballet designer and director. He is noted for being a pioneering dancer within the companies that formed the basis of the modern British ballet, and was also a celebrated theatrical stage and costume designer for more than 40 ballets or revues, including many of the early works of Sir Frederick Ashton and Dame Ninette de Valois. He also developed a distinctive writing style displayed in voluminous correspondence and in books on ballet, theatre design and on the life of his long-time friend Edward Burra. He had a career in opera production, his works being described "milestones in the rediscovery of baroque opera".Crichton, Ronald. Obituary – William Chappell, British dancer, director and librettist. Opera, April 1994, Vol. 45 No.4, p. 426
The Oxford Dictionary of Dance described him as "an enormously versatile talent".
In a memorial tribute at the end of his life, the dance writer Peter Brinston described Chappell as the "...creative spirit which helped to found the national ballet we have today."
It has been written of Chappell that he showed "a precocious and bewildering ability to express himself at a high level in all his chosen activities throughout a long career ... Elegant and well read, he was involved in many successes in revue, musicals, ballet, straight plays and opera."
Early life Chappell was born in Wolverhampton, the son of theatrical manager Archibald Chappell and his wife Edith Eva Clara Black (née Edith Blair-Staples). Edith, the daughter of an army officer, was raised in Ceylon and India; in pursuing a career in repertory acting, she moved away from her upper-middle-class roots and married twice to fellow actors, by the first of whom she had a daughter, Hermina, the second time being to Archibald Chappell, by whom she had two daughters, Dorothea and Honor, followed by Billy. Chappell was acutely aware of his apparently "déclassé" origins; whereas his mother's brother had maintained a conventional upper-middle-class life, being a tea-planter in Ceylon and able to provide his son, Patrick (who was close to Billy and spent time with his aunt's family in school vacations) with a private school and Oxford University education, Chappell studied at Balham Grammar School.
After his father deserted the family when he was still a baby, Chappell and his mother moved to 35 Dornton Road, Balham, London, where she pursued a career as a fashion journalist. Edith's daughter by her first marriage, romantic novelist Hermina Black, Chappell's half-sister, was living nearby in Wandsworth. Chappell studied at the Chelsea School of Art (Chelsea Poly) where aged fourteen he met fellow students Edward Burra, Barbara Ker-Seymer and Clover Pritchard (later de Pertinez) forging life-long friendships.
Clover de Pertinez recalls how Chelsea Poly was under the influence of Augustus John but not for her or her friends Ed Burra, Barbara Ker-Seymer and William Chappell: "We aspired to the smooth chic and sophistication to be seen on the covers of Vogue by Erte and George Lepape, to be found in the novels of Ronald Firbank, Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Moraud, Jean Giradoux, and above all in Diaghilev's Russian Ballets."
Chappell did not take up dancing seriously until he was seventeen when he studied under Marie Rambert, whom he met through his friend Frederick Ashton.
This awareness of his background leads to a distinctive self-deprecating tone detectable throughout his writings. For example, in his book Studies in Ballet he finds he needs to justify his writing by listing "any pertinent reasons I might have for raising my voice or flourishing my pen." His list begins "I had been a dancer myself" and worked with English and Russian companies. He wrote he had 'suffered in ballet class under Rambert, de Valois, Nijinska and Sergueef'. Additionally he had created roles in ballet and performed in most of the classics. In doing so he had worked in the same corps de ballet with Lichine, Shabelevsky, Jasinsky, Verchinina, and Ashton. He partnered Karsavina, Lopokova, Markova, Fonteyn, Argyle, May and Brae. Thus he had acquired a "wide and practical knowledge of ballet design and costume" and "knew dancers as people as well as performers".
Even this list is not complete. In his contribution to Peter Brinson's collection of talks The Ballet in Britain, under the heading Problems of Ballet Design, he lists the various people with whom he worked, took class, rehearsed and performed, which reads like a "who's who" of the 1930s ballet world. For example, he said that he was taught his role in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune by Woizikovsky.
Career
Dance Chappell recalls in his discussion "Problems of Ballet Design" in the collection The Ballet in Britain, "I was one of those monstrous children given to prancing around whenever anyone played the piano. I had a sort of urge for dancing." A friend, the socialite Lucy Norton, took him to see her friend Marie Rambert who immediately saw Chappell had promise as a dancer. He said "there were so few male dancers in those days she was delighted to have anybody, even me, so I started having classes:""... after a while I decided I was not going to be a very good painter so I took my dancing more seriously and started going to her classes properly." Chappell notes that the only other male pupil Rambert had at the time was Frederick Ashton. Ashton and Chappell were life-long friends. Their early careers were closely connected and Chappell played an important role in providing friendship and support at critical moments in Ashton's career. In 1928, Ashton had moved to Paris to work with the Ida Rubinstein Company. Ashton was lonely, living in Montmartre in a flat belonging to the composer Lennox Berkeley. Chappell was passing through Paris at the time with Burra and they called on Ashton. Ashton was insistent that Chappell, now training with Rambert, should join the Rubenstein company under Nijinska's formidable leadership. He recalled:
'He nagged and nagged at me until finally I agreed... and the next thing I knew I was in...she was determined to have me for Fred's sake. She liked him so much that she was prepared to overlook my faults just to please him.'
Thus was formed a link between Ashton, Chappell, and Nijinska (and hence her brother Vaslav Nijinsky) who brought with her a complete philosophy of dance, ballet and movement. Ashton recalled for Julia Kavanagh the excitement and demands of the Nijinska class:
'Her classes were fascinating. They were never the same. She'd decide to do everything in waltz rhythm one day or everything in Spanish rhythm or syncopated rhythm. She brought the music to class, all worked out...and would one day do a whole class of Chopin with the most wonderful adages, another say a whole class of Bach, another day there'd be a whole class of nothing but tangos.'
For two years Chappell and Ashton toured Europe with Rubenstein's company under the direction of Massine and Nijinska. Chappell returned to London in 1929 to dance with Rambert's Ballet Club (later Ballet Rambert), the Camargo Society and Ninette de Valois's Vic-Wells Ballet becoming one of the founding dancers of British ballet. Throughout the 1930s he created more than forty roles for Rambert and Vic-Wells, including:
The Rake's friend in de Valois's The Rake's Progress The popular song in Ashton's Facade The title role in Ashton's The Lord of Burleigh The recreation of two Nijinsky roles, Le Spectre de la rose and the faun in L'Apres-midi d'un faune
Billy Chappell had an important role in Rio Grande – or a Day in a Southern Port - the first production to showcase Burra's designs on stage – choreographed by Ashton, performed for the Carmargo Society and premiered on 29 November 1931 at the Savoy Theatre, London, in which he partnered Alicia Markova. The ballet was reprised in 1934 with Chappell becoming the first dancer to partner Margot Fonteyn. Fonteyn in her autobiography recalls how she developed a crush on Billy Chappell: "... who was so much the kindest of the awe-inspiring adults around me...." This crush coincided with the rehearsals for her first principle part in Rio: "Billy Chappell was a sailor and I was the girl he picked up. Thus I was provided most opportunely with an excuse to regard him affectionately while acting my role."
The recreation of the two Nijinsky roles Spectre de la Rose and L'Apres-midi d'faune, were works which had profound effects on the future development of modern dance and Chappell was able to play a significant part in bringing these works to later audiences.
Faun
Faun was Nijinski's first ballet which he choreographed, developing it with his sister Nijinska in 1910/11. The ballet historian Lynn Garafola notes:"In front of the pier glass in the Nijinski family living room, where brother molded sister into the poses of Faun and Nymph, the ballet took shape."Faun has been written about at length. To draw on one aspect, to illustrate the pioneering nature of the work, Garafola argues how this work, among other things, did something new with the presentation of sex on stage. In the final few bars of the ballet the faun performs a movement of the hips suggesting masturbation over a scarf discarded by a faun. Garafola notes that, at the time, on the stage, the presentation of sex was highly conventionalised. However:"When transferred to the dance stage it amounted to a declaration of war against the received conventions of ballet. Indeed, into the eight minutes of Faune Nijinsky packed the essentials of ballet modernism, completing the revolution initiated by Fokine.'Further discussion by Garafola and others can be seen at 12.49: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OYJdEQYMMoIn discussing the importance of this particular work, the scholar Peter Stoneley in his book A Queer History of the Ballet observes that in a few short years Diaghilev's Ballet Russe had transformed the ballet "from a spectacle that focuses on the female body to one that focussed on the man":"Furthermore, the main figure, or the body in question, was not a limp form, but a muscular man with astonishing explosive energy [...] Even though he drew on fin de siècle resources, this was an escape from Wildean shame, and from physiological destiny, into a joyous process of free association." Faun was first performed by Nijinski with the Ballet Russes on 29 May 1912, at the Theatre du Chatelet Paris. It was first performed by a British company by the then named Marie Rambert Dancers with Billy Chappell in the title role in April 1931 as recorded in The Times Ballet Club notice which said of at the Rambert Dancers' first full programme at its new London home, the Mercury Theatre in Ladbroke Grove thatTimes review: "The Ballet Club." Times, 22 April 1931, p. 12. The Times Digital Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS202712214/TTDA?u=esusslib&sid=bookmark-TTDA&pg=12&xid=6e034a4d. Accessed 4 February 2026. the Marie Rambert Dancers were now "... smoother and more precise in ensemble...." with Chappell's pièce de résistance, being L'Après-midi d'un faune and "the chief addition to the repertory".
Forty-eight years later, in 1979, Billy Chappell, along with his Rambert co-dancer Elizabeth Schooling, revisited Faun again, this time to teach it to Rudolf Nuyerev, as part of that season's Nuyerev season.