HEATH ROBINSON: Britain at Play

William Heath Robinson began his career illustrating works of poetry and children's stories. At magazines such as The Sketch, he developed his humorous illustrations for adults, culminating in the series of inventions for which he became known by his contemporaries as 'The Gadget King'. The frontispiece to this glorious collection of 1930s on Heath Robinson cartoons is entitled "A Heath Robinson Drawing of Heath Robinson Drawing a Heath Robinson Drawing", and the title encapsulates the labyrinthine absurdity of the great comic artist's take on life, portraying himself standing on a platform balanced on a huge stepladder making a close study of a piece of string. This collection of almost 200 cartoons focuses on Britain at leisure, starting with golf, winter sports, hunting, shooting and fishing, moving on to the citizen on holiday, followed by motoring, courting, and finally gardening. The hapless Heath Robinson golfer is constantly being submerged in sand and water, while a cartoon series advertising a golfing insurance scheme covers concussion, being permanently paralysed in a golfer's twist, and in the case of the golfer's female companion, having your elaborate headgear whisked into the air by a misdirected attempt at teeing off. Winter Sports show the skier suspended over a crevice, while an elderly skater prevents mishaps with a many-wheeled mobility frame. The Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lords has the diminutive contestants in top hats, while safety measures for adult cricketers include strapping a barrel to the body. A corpulent man training for a channel swim is winched into the air and sprinkled from a watering can by a stern-looking female assistant. A holiday walk on the beach shows a top hatted man warning his non-existent companion about quicksands, at which point we notice a second trail of footprints coming to an end some way behind. "Courting" features a couple getting together across the top decks of adjacent buses in a London traffic jam, while the complication of listening to the radio in its early days results in a number of typically phantasmagorical contraptions. 22 x 28.8cm, 192pp, cartoons on most pages including some in colour.
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