Gosling - Its All a Bit Heath Robinson

Cover illustrations

Front: The Kamerad Counter. A New Machine for Counting the Number of German and Austrian Prisoners Taken by Our Allies in Galicia. (The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News)

Back: An Unrecorded Disaster to the Enemy An Unfortunate Mishap to a Zeppelin Through Want of Using Proper Caution When Descending. (The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News)

First published 2015

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published 2017

Text, Lucinda Gosling, 2015

Images, Mary Evans Picture Library, 2015

The right of Lucinda Gosling to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8588 8

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O n 20 April 1910, the first in a new series of cartoons was published in the weekly illustrated magazine The Sketch. Am Tag! Die Deutschen Kommen! sought to make light of what was a growing paranoia in the British press the possibility of a German invasion. In retrospect, the series appears remarkably prescient, and in 1910, though it would be more than four years before war was to erupt in Europe, the theme was both timely and topical. Four months earlier, in December 1909, Lord Northcliffe had commissioned the socialist journalist and editor of The Clarion, Robert Blatchford, to write a series of ten articles in the Daily Mail warning of the coming German menace. Northcliffe had already published a serial called The invasion of 1910, written by William Le Quex three years earlier, and several other papers under his control began to pump the British public full of stories that foresaw the potentially disastrous consequences resulting from emergent Prussian aggression. Certainly, Germanys military and naval expansion was a cause for concern, and in less than four years, Blatchfords views would eventually be justified, but in 1910 it all seemed a touch hysterical to a sophisticated magazine such as The Sketch and a state of affairs ripe for satire.

William Heath Robinson (18721944), the Gadget King.

William Heath Robinson, the man behind Am Tag, was one of The Sketchs most popular artists. His imagined Incidents of the Coming German Invasion of England depicted German spies in the most incongruous of locations, posing unnoticed as Graeco-Roman statues in the British Museum invisible to visitors despite their pickelhaube helmets or as British excursionists crossing the North Sea equipped with tell-tale boxes of Schnitzel, Schwartz Brod and Lager. The first in the series, German Spies in Epping Forest, showed the Teutonic intruders disguised as a ludicrous assortment of birds, trees and woodland animals following the movements of a single, small Boy Scout on an innocent ramble. It was a picture that embodied two elements intrinsic in Heath Robinsons art the elaborate and extraordinary lengths undergone to achieve what are ultimately underwhelming and simple objectives, and his own wry and gentle brand of mocking humour. Am Tag encouraged the British to laugh, not only at the ridiculous Germans in their woodland fancy dress, but also at themselves. Perhaps a German invasion was a possibility one day but Heath Robinsons visions diluted and dispelled hysteria and replaced it with a calmer perspective: a case of laughter triumphing over fear.

Mr. W. Heath Robinson at work. Will pictured in The Strand magazine in 1918. His photograph accompanied a series of drawings on the theme of War-Time Economies.

A most worthy disciple of the modern school of penmen. The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, illustrated by Heath Robinson in 1900. The influences of art nouveau and wood engraving are apparent in Wills early book-illustration work and the serious subjects the polar opposite to his later humorous drawings.

Cape Town from The Song of the English by Rudyard Kipling, 1909.

It appeared, however, that the British sense of humour was not shared by the Germans. Heath Robinson would later discover in 1915 that the cartoon had been taken literally when it was reprinted in the German press as an example of the alarm we were all supposed to be feeling at their frightfulness. The correspondent who had sent him the magazine from the front agreed, writing with amused disbelief, I dont think Jerry tries to convey to his readers the same meaning as your original idea conveyed I do believe he thinks that we have all got the wind up.

When war broke out in August 1914, less than five years after the publication of Am Tag, Heath Robinson was firmly established as one of the leading humorous artists of the day, and would find that his work of the next four years would be unavoidably influenced by what he called the all-consuming topic. The portly German soldiers, relics from the Franco-Prussian War, with their straining tunic buttons and ubiquitous pickelhaube helmets of 1910, became an amusing, if anachronistic, blueprint for the characters that would begin to populate his wartime cartoons, the majority of which were published in The Sketch, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, The Bystander and, less frequently, The Strand. Of editor Bruce Ingrams decision to publish him in The Sketch in 1906, Heath Robinson admitted it fairly launched me on my career as a humorous artist, even though around the same time his pictures had already begun to appear in rival publications The Tatler and The Bystander. Nonetheless, Heath Robinson would become associated with The Sketch more than any other publication, and by January 1911 he was profiled in a series of Photographic Interviews within the magazine. Writing glowingly of the famous Sketch artist, The Sketch declared, the work of Mr. Heath Robinson has always been an abiding joy since it first graced these pages with its delightful humour, its unforced yet vivid imagination, and the technical skill of its execution.