William Heath Robinson - How to Live in a Flat

TO ANY HOUSE AND/OR ESTATE AGENT, AUCTIONEER, SURVEYOR AND VALUER

Dear sir:

But for you, this book might never have seen the light. Of what avail to prate of flats, if you are not at hand to negotiate the let? We want the best homes; you have them. It is your grim task to reconcile those two irreconcilables the landlord (to whom all tenants are destructive carpers) and the tenant (to whom all landlords are rapacious skinflints). That landlords are so seldom torn apart by maddened tenants, and tenants so seldom hamstrung by infuriated landlords, is largely due to the skill with which you contrive that hardly ever the twain shall meet.

Scarcely less admirable than your gift for diplomacy is your unquenchable optimism. Viewing the world through your rose-tinted glasses, you see every house as a desirable res., every flat as a unique opp., every seaside villa as but a stones-throw from the beach. This lends to your conversation a buoyancy and charm which though captious house-hunters have been known occasionally to differ from you is most refreshing in this gloom-ridden age.

Your versatility, too, commands our deep respect. Now agenting a house, now dittoing an estate, now auctioneering this, surveying that or valuing the other, you must be as fully occupied as a cat in an aviary. As Wordsworth might have said of you, if Longfellow had not more or less forestalled him:

Letting, surveying, valuing, onward through life he goes. Each morning sees some lease drawn up, each evening sees one close

It is in sincere admiration, therefore, of your many qualities, and in appreciation of the vital part you play in the daily or rather quarterly life of the nation, that this book is dedicated to you. No hard feelings, we hope?

In the 1930s Heath Robinson was known as The Gadget King and he is still most widely remembered for his wonderful humorous drawings. But humorous art was only his third choice of career, and one that he turned to almost by accident. On leaving the Royal Academy Schools in 1895 his ambition was to become a landscape painter. He soon realised that such painting would not pay the bills and so he followed his two older brothers into book illustration. He rapidly established himself as a talented and original practitioner in his chosen field, and in 1903 felt sufficiently secure to marry. However, the following year a publisher who had commissioned a large quantity of drawings was declared bankrupt. The young Heath Robinson, who had just become the father of a baby girl, had quickly to find a new source of income. He turned to the high class weekly magazines such as The Sketch and The Tatler who paid well for large, highly finished humorous drawings, and within a short time was being acclaimed as a unique talent in the field of humorous art.

For a number of years, he combined his careers as illustrator and humorist with equal and growing success. One day he might be illustrating Kiplings A Song of the English or a Shakespeare play and the next would find him at work explaining the gentle art of catching things. He said of this time It was always a mental effort to adapt myself to these changes, but with the elasticity of my early days, it was not too difficult. During the First World War the market for luxurious illustrated books diminished, but demand for his humorous work increased, his gentle satires of the enemy proving popular both with the public at home and especially with the forces in the various theatres of war. This situation persisted after the war with very few commissions for illustration, but regular demands for his humorous drawings from popular magazines and for advertising.

In 1935 the Strand Magazine published an article titled At Home with Heath Robinson. This had a text by Kenneth R. G. Browne and ten pen and wash illustrations by Heath Robinson. The illustrations, which showed novel uses for unwanted items, were drawn under the working title Rejuvenated Junk. K. R. G. Browne, a fellow member of the Savage Club, was an ideal collaborator for Heath Robinson. He was the son of Gordon Browne who is still well known as an illustrator of books and magazines, and was the grandson of Hablot Knight Browne, who under his pen name of Phiz gained lasting fame as the illustrator of many Victorian novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charles Lever and Harrison Ainsworth. The article in The Strand Magazine marked the start of a partnership that was only brought to an untimely end by the death of Browne in 1940. During 1932 and 1933 Heath Robinson had drawn a series of cartoons for The Sketch entitled Flat Life, which depicted various gadgets designed to make the most of the limited space available in the contemporary flat. It was this series of drawings that provided K. R. G. Browne and W. Heath Robinson with the inspiration for their first full-length book together. It was called How to Live in a Flat , and as well as greatly extending the original ideas showing many ingenious ways of overcoming the problems caused by lack of space in flats and bungalows, also provided much fun at the expense of the more extreme designs in thirties furniture and architecture. The book was published by Hutchinson for Christmas 1936 and was well received.

Over the next three years K. R. G. Browne and Heath Robinson successfully repeated the formula in a further three titles. Heath Robinson received much teasing from his family about the choice of subject for the second book, How to be a Perfect Husband , but looking back over his cartoons one finds that romance and courtship had been among his most frequently chosen subjects, from early Cupid cartoons to such pictures as The Coquette and Stolen Kisses which were reproduced in Absurdities in 1934. The next book in the series received a valuable preview when The Strand Magazine published an article called A Highly Complicated Science. The science referred to was that of gardening and the article by K. R. G. Browne was accompanied by nine of Heath Robinsons drawings all of which were subsequently used in How to Make a Garden Grow . Again, much of the subject matter for this book and the next, How to be a Motorist , was drawn from Heath Robinsons earlier cartoons. Among his earliest work for The Sketch was a series of drawings on the practicalities of gardening. This included a picture of root pruning showing the gardener tunnelling down to the roots of a plant to prune them. Although the earlier drawing is much more elaborate, the idea is the same as is presented on page 27 of How to Make a Garden Grow . Similarly the theme of motoring recurs frequently in his earlier cartoons.