Introduction

Clifford Ellis was born in 1907 at Bognor Regis, West Sussex; during the years 1914-17 he lived with his grandparents in Arundel; his grandfather was an artist, naturalist and taxidermist, while an uncle, Ralph Ellis, had trained at the Slade and worked as a designer and painter of public house signs. Ellis attended Owen’s School, lslington (1918-1923), where the sensitive headmaster, R.F. Cholmeley, encouraged in him a liking and feeling for history. During his schooldays Ellis started to visit London Zoo and to make drawings of animals.

Ellis spent a year at St Martin’s School of Art before studying Illustration at the Regent Street Polytechnic (1924-7) and then taking a year’s postgraduate teacher’s training course at the London Day Training College Centre (the precursor of the Institute of Education, London University). In 1928 he was awarded the Board of Education’s Art Teacher’s Diploma. One of his tutors, Marion Richardson, a pioneer in teaching art to children, was to be very influential on Ellis’s ideas; she introduced him, and fellow students, to Roger Fry who showed the original works of Cezanne and Klee, and contemporary art from Paris and Europe as well as African sculpture. In 1929 Ellis was awarded the Diploma in Art History, London University. From 1928-36 he was on the staff of the Regent Street Polytechnic Art School, teaching perspective to all students and in charge of first year students.

In 1931 Ellis married a girl who had also studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic. She was Rosemary Collinson, born 1910 in Totteridge. North London. Her father worked in the firm of furniture designers Collinson and Locke, founded by her grandfather, and one of her uncles was E.C. Bentley. inventor of the Clerihew, a leader writer on the Daily Telegraph and author of the prototype of the modern detective novel, Trent’s Last Case. At the Polytechnic from 1927 or 1928-1931 she studied first a general art course and then sculpture and art history. Among the fruits of their marriage were two daughters. Penelope, who studied at the Slade and Charlotte, an architect.