As a young teenager Frank worked briefly for Homfray & Company in the cotton mills in Halifax and the Midlands for a family relative, before returning to London.
Cordell entered a citywide London music contest and won a Melody Maker poll at the age of 17 for the most promising jazz pianist of 1935.
While in RAF Middle East he was later assigned as bandleader with his own group of musicians and a small convoy of lorries to entertain the British troops in the Western Desert Campaign.
It is in Palestine while music entertaining that he met his first wife Magda, who was a Hungarian refugee working for the British in translating intercepted wireless signals.
Magda later became a "Brutalist" artist, and along with Cordell was a participant in the This Is Tomorrow Exhibit, and both were founder members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
[1] Cordell was commended in 1951 for his radio score of the historical drama The Gay Galliard, starring Valerie Hobson as Mary, Queen of Scots.
He worked with most of the performers and musicians of the day including Noël Coward, Charlie Chaplin, vocalists such as Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton, and the jazz trumpet player Humphrey Lyttelton.
Frank Cordell composed over twenty music scores including The Voice of Merrill (1952), First on the Road (1959), The Rebel (1961) starring Tony Hancock, The Bargee (1964), Never Put It in Writing (1964), Khartoum (1966), Mosquito Squadron (1969), Ring of Bright Water (1969), Hell Boats (1970), Cromwell (1970), Trial by Combat (1976), and God Told Me To (US: Demon, 1976).
He wrote choral music for the Choir of King's College, Cambridge; and an arrangement for strings of the English air "Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be", available on Guild GED5104.
Cordell retired with his wife and son to their sheep farm in the English countryside, where they kept open house to many of Britain's leading artists and musicians including The Beatles.