Adam Hart-Davis
Heath Robinson was a walker as well as a wonderful illustrator
WILLIAM HEATH ROBINSON was a brilliant comic artist who loved to poke fun at life. His extraordinary contraptions and machines have put his name into the language, describing delightful devices that might possibly work, like the automatic shampoo chair, or the folding back garden. He also drew many pictures without machines or gadgets, which merely suggested some absurdity of life. One of my favourites is of spring cleaning in Highgate Woods, where men and women are cleaning the barks of trees, dusting birds’ nests, sponging the ducks, using a vacuum cleaner on the grass, and even polishing the fish in the pond.
Heath Robinson was an enthusiastic walker even as a lad. On Saturday mornings he and his older brothers loved to go walking. They took packs of sandwiches, and aimed to get to High Barnet, some six and a half miles away. In due course they reached Shepherd’s Cot, roughly where Highgate Cricket and Lawn Tennis Club is now. He writes in his autobiography My Line of Life “Here the real country began, and we walked a little way along the lane in the hope of seeing the shepherd and his sheep, or at least his cot. Evidently the shepherd had moved, for we saw no sign of them… Returning once more to our road, we looked across the railway cutting to Highgate Woods, filling the valley and rising to hills on either hand. Beyond the woods, you could see for miles and miles, a wide expanse of country with village church towers here and there, and hills far away in the sun.”
Today London is built up all the way to Barnet, and that wide expanse of country is no more. Not that they often got that far: “The two or three milestones which we passed were of especial interest, but strangely enough they did not seem to succeed one another as rapidly as we had anticipated.” They began to tire, and by noon they had finished their sandwiches. At Finchley cemetery they usually decided High Barnet would have to wait, and turned for home.
At art school he dreamed of being a landscape painter, “to live the open air and in lonely communion with nature. To be hardened to all weathers... To be equally at home in raging storms and under the dazzling sun of the desert... Sometimes, perhaps, in the Swiss Alps or the Himalayan Mountains and Tibet. At other times my wanderings might take me to Greece, to Rome, or to Egypt, and back again to the Norfolk Broads.” When he showed his paintings to an art dealer, however, he was advised to try another profession. Heath Robinson and his friends later formed the Froth finders Federation walking club. They would head out from Pinner, and invariably end “at some hostelry, usually the Crown at Stanmore”. History does not reveal how they got home. He remained a lifelong walker, though as a married man with a family he set his sights closer to home than in his youth. In the many pages he devotes to these walks, Heath Robinson never mentions carrying anything other than sandwiches. Whether he ever wore or even owned any tourist outfits seems doubtful, but in this drawing from my book Very Heath Robinson, he suggested dreams of taking to the road for weeks at a time, prepared for rain, shine, hunger and thirst, and equipped with mattress (or at least pillows), lamp, pyjamas, towels, mirror, hairbrush, wine (and a glass), camera, telescope, toasting fork, pipe, book, umbrella and everything else one could possibly need.