Heath Robinson: Get a new look at the cartoonist's work

There were probably only two creative artists at work between the wars whose names have unaffectedly gone into the language. One gave us "Kafkaesque"; the other, "Heath Robinson". It's probably no coincidence that both terms arise out of worlds which make no sense; where absurdity has taken control of everyday existence.

In Kafka's story "In The Penal Colony", a huge machine writes the word of the law in living flesh; in a Heath Robinson drawing, visitors to the British Empire Exhibition take their seats on the Special Earthquake Machine. No explanation for these absurdities, in the one case terrifying, in the other hilarious, is possible, but the names of their inventors. Their names have gone not only into the dictionary, but into ordinary speech.

W Heath Robinson was, with HM Bateman, the most successful cartoonist-illustrator of his generation. His work has never declined in popularity, but is currently going through a revival of interest. The Cartoon Art Trust, which was originally established with donations of Heath Robinson illustrations by his biographer, Simon Heneage, is repaying the debt with an excellent show of his work at the Cartoon Museum in London.

The Cartoon Museum exhibition includes some of Heath Robinson's wonderful drawings of devices, and a couple of attempts to realise them in physical terms, but also hopes to draw attention to Heath Robinson's more human aspect. The focus is squarely on the machinery in a new volume to be brought out by Duckworth this week, Contraptions, by Heath Robinson. And the Chris Beetles gallery in London is holding a two-month selling exhibition of the great man's work.

In a throwaway age, where reliability has very little premium and ingenious skill almost none, there might be a hunger for the fantasist of make-do-and-mend. He is the poet of improvisational engineering, of the sorts of machines and engines held together with bits of string, always frayed and knotted – "my beloved knotted string", as Heath Robinson said – which once made this country great. Something "a bit Heath Robinson" will always, however improbably, work in the end.

Oliver Preston, of the Cartoon Art Trust, thinks Heath Robinson appeals as an exponent of "what the artist Fougasse called the good-natured pencil" – he may be satirical, but never unkind, and Preston calls him a descendant of Rowlandson rather than Gillray. His heroes are men with knotted brows and home-knitted Fairisle sweaters who have never heard of Asperger's Syndrome; his heroines stout lever-pulling dowagers. And not one of them has any suspicion that it might be funny to engage 21 separate people, a 40-foot arrangement of pulleys and a roast chicken in the testing of a single artificial tooth. Heath Robinson said, very acutely, that the key to the joke was, "The stone-blindness of the persons involved to the humour of the situation." No one ever laughs in a Heath Robinson; they are all far too busy.

Surprisingly, Heath Robinson himself had no idea whatsoever about anything mechanical. "He couldn't even mend a fuse," his widow fondly told Simon Heneage. Born in 1872, Heath Robinson came from a long line of illustrators. His father and grandfather worked in the business; two of his brothers were professional illustrators, and he married the daughter of the art editor of the Penny Illustrated Paper. His subject was the ramshackle and the shambolic, mysteriously transformed by some alchemy of nature into perfect efficiency. In real life, he was a consummate professional, and there is nothing ramshackle about his art.

At 30, a fantastical children's book written and illustrated by Heath Robinson, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin, gained him some attention. A sumptuous two-volume Works of Rabelais followed, but proved too sumptuous, bankrupting the publisher and requiring the unpaid Heath Robinson to find a profitable source of income quickly.

The very first "contraption" came as one of a series about absurd hunting methods, "Netting wild rabbits on the Berkshire downs", in 1906. Heneage says that Heath Robinson in person was "industrious, modest, reticent and extremely shy", and that the humour of machinery held a natural appeal to him. He liked his drawings, he said in his awkward way, "to make things out of homely materials originally intended for some wholly different purpose". His work quickly became popular – there was a book published about him as early as 1913, by AE Johnson, and numerous attempts were made over the years to recreate those imagined machines in reality, one on a grand scale at the 1934 Ideal Home Exhibition. But what really assured immortality for Heath Robinson was the outbreak of war. Oliver Preston thinks that one of the reasons for a revival of interest in Heath Robinson's work is that we find ourselves, once more, at war.

War always heightens interest in extraordinary technological inventions, and Heath Robinson is essentially a wartime artist. The peaks in his work coincide with the two world wars. "Deceiving the invader as to the state of the tide", or "heroic attempts to convey light refreshments" – an underwater procession of ice-cream carts, going slowly to Italy along the sea bed – may be ridiculous. But are they any more heroically absurd than barrage balloons, trench warfare, tanks or parachutists disguised as nuns?

Heath Robinson died in 1944, which may be just as well – it is to be doubted whether he could have found much enjoyment in the technological advancement that led to nuclear weapons. He had his followers and parallels – the American Rube Goldberg, the more dangerously unhinged Rowland Emmett and, nowadays, Nick Park's inventors, Wallace and Gromit.

What they don't have, or only intermittently, is Heath Robinson's shy, serious humanity, a world where, as well as mad machinery, German soldiers behave with extraordinary delicacy of feeling, neophyte nudists get used to the idea by removing one trouser leg before a walk in public. And, of course, before climbing a real mountain, you would want to rig up an apparatus in the back garden out of a piano, a grandfather clock, two ladders, six fraying guy-ropes, instead of snow a sack of salt, and, at the very top, a nice hot cup of tea.

A life illustrated

1872: Born in Islington, North London, the third son of Thomas Robinson, chief staff artist at the Penny Illustrated Paper.

1895: Attends Royal Academy of Arts.

1896: Decides to work full-time as an illustrator after abandoning the idea of making a living from landscape painting, his first love.

1897: Illustrates Hans Andersen fairy tales and Don Quixote.

1902: Prints own children's book, The Adventures of Uncle Rubin.

1903: Marries Josephine Lately.

1908: Produces Primitive Contraptions cartoons, showing his interest in machinery. Moves to Middlesex.

1912: "Heath Robinson" accepted into the Oxford Dictionary as a term for improvised machinery.

1915: Produces Some Frightful War Images and illustrates Charles Kingsley's Water Babies to acclaim.

1920: Elected President of London Sketch Club, which includes many of London's top artists.

1925: Makes radio broadcast instructing listeners how to draw in his style.

1929: Moves to Highgate, North London.

1936: How To Live in a Flat, the first of the How To books, published in collaboration with K R G Brown; it comments on the bland conformity of new housing blocks.

1940-43: How to Make the Best of Things is an optimistic imagining of post-war Britain.

1944: Dies at 72 after exploratory prostrate surgery in Highgate.

Heath Robinson: Contraptions, by Heath Robinson, edited by Geoffrey C Beare, and published by Gerald Duckworth, £18.99. To order a copy for the special price of £16.99 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897, or visit www. independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Heath Robinson's Helpful Solutions runs until 7 October at The Cartoon Museum, London WC1 (www.cartoonmuseum.org; 020-7580 8155)

The Chris Beetles Gallery exhibition runs from 11 July to 11 August (www.chrisbeetles.com; 020-7859 755)

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