His father died while on active service in the Second World War, when Marchant was 15; and he and his siblings were brought up by his devout Catholic mother, grandmother and aunts.
Epstein was encouraging and gave him a letter of recommendation to the British Council, which provided a grant to allow him to study for three months at the Saint Martin's School of Art.
[5] Forced by financial and political constraints to return to South Africa, they finally moved permanently to the UK three years later, in 1956; and in 1959 Marchant received a grant to study full time at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
“With his mezzotints, he touched greatness… Marchant was a master, his needle scratched in the darkness; a candle, a bowl, a cup and saucer gleamed forth.”[2] Liese Van Der Watt said that “Marchant is credited with the revival of this old craft in the (19)60s, especially in Britain.” and "the paintings show the same narrow repetition of a single class of subject, as if the artist's concern is more with technique and medium and with the objects that are portrayed.
In later years he travelled to other art schools including Royal, Slade, Chelsea, Morley and Winchester, to demonstrate the mezzotint process and illustrate this with his own work.