Rowland Emett

Another British artist today - the wonderfully eccentric Rowland Emett.

Emett was born in New Southgate, London, the son of a businessman and amateur inventor. His grandfather was Queen Victoria's engraver. He was educated at Waverley Grammar School in Birmingham, where he excelled in drawing, caricaturing his teachers and vehicles and machinery. When he was only 14 he took out a patent on a gramophone volume control. 

He studied at Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts and one of his landscapes, Cornish Harbour, was exhibited at the Royal Academy (it is now in the Tate collection). During World War II he worked as a draughtsman for the Air Ministry while perfecting his gift for drawing cartoons. From 1939 until the 1950s, and less frequently in the 1960s, he published regularly in Punch magazine. His cartoons were seldom political, except when he caricatured bureaucratic absurdities, and his early subjects typically found humour in the difficulties of life in Great Britain during the war. 

His drawings soon started to include railway scenes and he gradually developed a unique concept of strange, bumbling trains with excessively tall chimneys and silly names. Then, at the 1951 Festival of Britain, three of his steam locomotives, Nellie, Neptune and Wild Goose, were built as working trains. The Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Branch Railway quickly became one of the festival's most popular attractions.

He began to turn more and more towards designing and supervising the building of what he called his 'Things'. He had a particular genius for names such as The Featherstone-Kite Openwork Basketweave Mark Two Gentleman’s Flying Machine, two copies of which exist, one in a glass case in the Merrion Centre, Leeds, the other on permanent display at the Mid-America Science Museum in Hot Springs, Arkansas. 

In 1966 he was commissioned by Honeywell to create a mechanical computer, which he named The Forget-Me-Not Computer. This was displayed at trade shows and was an exhibition at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in London in 1968 and finally added to the Ontario Science Centre collection in Toronto. 

   

Then, in 1968, he achieved international fame when he was invited to design the elaborate inventions of Caractacus Potts (played by Dick Van Dyke) for the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

When asked how he came up with his strange designs, Emett remarked, 'It is a well known fact that all inventors get their first ideas on the back of an envelope. I take slight exception to this, I use the front so that I can incorporate the stamp and then the design is already half done.'

   

I have several books of Emett's work and they are a complete delight.

Oh, and a company called Smallbrook Studios (see here) now makes Emett-inspired shells that fit onto the chassis of standard model trains so you can build your own Oyster Creek style railway. One chap called Bob Downes has been doing this and has a Youtube channel for his Tippy Ashwood line (see here).

What fun. If I had the money, space and unlimited funds I'd do the same.