Imagination gone wild
Lucy Lethbridge
Pinner is a prosperous, halftimbered outer-london suburb, once a village and now absorbed into the sprawl of the city. And here it is that the first museum devoted to the works of the artist William Heath Robinson opened in October. This should be a cause of rejoicing. Heath Robinson is both completely familiar – his fantastical contraptions having made his name an adjective for any cunning device that looks as if it is held together by Sellotape and crossed-fingers – and completely forgotten. But in the first half of the 20th century, his cartoons and illustrations were instantly recognisable. He was a debunker of self-importance and human folly, a champion of ingenuity and resourcefulness, however futile, and, along the way, a sharp chronicler of domestic life in Britain between the wars.
Heath Robinson was born in north London in 1872, the son and grandson of engravers and illustrators. His father did the artwork for news stories in the Penny Illustrated Paper, his brothers Tom and Charles were also illustrators. As adults the three brothers met regularly for weekend rambles and pub crawls, calling themselves the ‘Frothfinders’. In 1908, Heath Robinson moved with his family a few stops up the Metropolitan line to settle in a villa in Hatch End, on the edge of Pinner Village. They stayed there for ten years. The Heath Robinson Museum now houses a permanent collection of 1,000 works bequeathed by Heath Robinson’s daughter Joan Brinsmead. With its exposed pipes and precarious-looking ceiling timbers, the building itself suggests the cranky precariousness that is the hallmark of a Heath Robinson machine. For its grand opening, the museum’s trustees commissioned the sixth-form members of the inventors’ club of St Helen’s School, Northwood, to devise a real-life contraption in corrugated cardboard, complete with levers, pulleys and rusty bits of scrap metal.
Heath Robinson began his working life in the 1890s as a book illustrator, creating sinuous fairy-tale figures and Brueghelish grotesques in the style of Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham. In 1902, his children’s book The Adventures of Uncle Lubin was a bestseller. He depicted his mishap-prone protagonist with an attention to detail of the kind that would later make his gadgetry so appealing. Fixed beneath the basket of Uncle Lubin’s rickety hot air balloon, for example, swings a useful carpet bag for the equipment or snacks that the reader knows he’s going to need for the journey.
When his publisher went bust, Heath Robinson found regular slots in the
illustrated magazines – and developed his talent for devising elaborately nutty inventions. At a period when the first portable domestic vacuum cleaners had only just appeared on the market, Heath Robinson’s cartoons were a commentary on machines that could meet every conceivable or inconceivable human need. They were so toppling and unwieldy that they seemed as human as the figures, mostly portly men with moustaches, who laboured like ants at pulling their enormous levers. By 1912, his contraptions were firmly established in the national imagination. As the reviewer of the London Illustrated News put it, he was ‘the fantastic limner of the dust-heap, the lumber room, the battered tin can, the strange bird and the stranger inhuman being, which contribute the material of his queer makeshift mechanical devices’.
During the First World War Heath Robinson did several series of cartoons, ripostes to German propaganda about its superior military technology and efficiency. In ‘German Breaches of the Hague Convention’ German officers stage a deadly serious advance on motorcycles towing canisters of laughing gas sprayed by soda siphons, or pull British buttons off with magnets, or, via underground tunnels, inject chilblain serum into soldiers’ feet. An early Heath Robinson drawing showed a boy scout walking through Highgate woods watched by German spies cunningly disguised as woodland animals. Heath Robinson later wrote that he was delighted to learn that it had been reprinted in a German magazine, quite seriously, as an indication that the British had ‘got the wind up’.
In the 1920s and 1930s, in his weekly columns in the Bystander and the Daily Sketch, Heath Robinson navigated the ingenuities required by modern living. These resulted in a series of ‘How To’ books: How to Live in a Flat, How to Be a perfect husband, How to Make a Garden Grow and How to Be a Motorist. How to preserve gentilities and bourgeois comforts in a strange new world of tubular steel and concrete in new-build bungalows and service flats is his theme. It was the age of new-fangled ideas such as the fitted kitchen and the dining room hatch, of keeping up appearances under straitened circs. How To Live in a Flat was dedicated to the new breed of estate agents who ‘see every house as a desirable res.; every flat as a unique opp.; every seaside villas as but a stone’s-throw from the beach’.
To the cast list of familiar portly men and garden-shed inventors, he adds spinster aunts, vicars, bridge-players, practitioners of callisthenics, winter sports enthusiasts, sunbathers, lotharios, motorists, golfers and, of course, nudists; he sometimes took a cameo role himself – moustached and with a neat bowler hat. Heath Robinson’s ever-resourceful modern-lifers make toast by attaching toasting forks to their heads and sticking them under a lightbulb. There is a wild and imaginative abandon to their inventiveness. As their creator rightly observed: ‘A settee is not necessarily less comfortable when suspended from the ceiling.’ He has great fun with tubular furniture, all the rage between the wars, suggesting that if heated like pipes a modernist chair in chrome could ward off influenza. Modern technology has not, yet, found a better way to dance in your flat without disturbing your neighbours than to tie sponges to your shoes. In 1934, the Ideal Home Exhibition created a special Heath Robinson house, ‘The Gadgets’, with an array of life-size labour-saving devices including a foot-operated custardmaking machine.
During the Second World War, the domestic contrivances of the Home Front were designed for a gentle Heath Robinson lampooning. In his sketches for How to Make the Best of Things, he had fun with camouflage, bomb shelters, rationing, make do and mend and reserved occupations (which included ‘drilling the holes in waistcoat buttons’). He died in 1944, in his artistic prime.
The new Pinner museum, currently showing alongside its permanent exhibition a temporary one on the theme of Heath Robinson at War, is a welcome tribute and well worth a trip up the Metropolitan line.
Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner Memorial Park, West End Lane, Pinner HA5 1AE. heathrobinsonmuseum.org. Heath Robinson at War is on until 8th January.