Later Work
An otherwise undistinguished career was interrupted by World War II, when 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 and for many years when his work was published elsewhere it was credited to "Emett of Punch". 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 second World 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.
On 12 April 1941 he married Elsie May Evans (who was always known as Mary ), the daughter of a Birmingham silversmith. It was Mary who managed his business interests. They had one daughter, Claire.
In 1947 his cartoons came to life on the stage of the Globe Theatre, London, in "Between the Lines", a scene for Laurier Lister's revue Twopence Coloured, with Max Adrian as an eccentric signalman at Friars Fidgeting Signal Box. In 1951, at the Festival of Britain, his most famous steam locomotive, Nellie, was made into a copper and mahogany kinetic sculpture and with two other locomotives Neptune and Wild Goose, was one of the festival’s most popular attractions, operating the Far Tottering and Oyster Creek Branch Railway. There was an unfortunate fatality when two trains collided. At this time he was living in Cornwall and working in a studio in a boat-loft at Polperro; later he would return to West Cornwall before eventually settling for the rest of his life at Ditchling, in Sussex.
IN 1953 Malcolm Muggeridge became editor of Punch magazine and began systematic changes, but Emett continued to publish his work there, albeit less frequently. After a spread in Life magazine on 5 July 1954, his work was much in demand in the United States.
He turned more and more to designing and supervising the building of what he called his "things" – always with silly names such as The Featherstone-Kite Openwork Basketweave Mark Two Gentleman’s Flying Machine, two copies of which exist, one of which used to be displayed 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 the mid-1960s he was commissioned by Honeywell to create a mechanical computer, which he named The Forget-Me-Not Computer. In 1968 he designed the elaborate inventions of Caractacus Potts (played by Dick Van Dyke for the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In 1973 his water-powered musical clock, The Aqua Horological Tintinnabulator, was installed on the lower floor of the Victoria Centre, Nottingham, and can still be seen at work there. When originally commissioned, this clock played Rameau's Gigue en rondeau II from the E-minor suite of his Pièces de Clavecin when striking the hour.
The Cats Cradle Pussiewillow III clock was commissioned by Basildon New Town and inaugurated by Michael Bentine on 7th August 1981. The clock is on display at Eastgate Shopping Centre in Basildon.
His larger works, such as Emettland, went on extended tours, ending up in prestigious venues such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The Ontario Science Centre in Toronto has a collection of about ten Rowland Emett creations and every December displays the restored working pieces, usually under the title "Dream Machines".
The Mid-America Science Museum has had four of his inventions on permanent display for most of the museum's existence.
A 30-foot-square mosaic by Rowland Emett, installed around 1960, can be seen on the side of the NCP car park in The Marlowes, Hemel Hempstead.
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."
In 1978 he was awarded an OBE
Rowland Emett died on 13 November 1990 in a Sussex nursing home.
Read more about this topic: Frederick Rowland Emett
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“There never has been a time in our history when work was so abundant or when wages were as high, whether measured by the currency in which they are paid or by their power to supply the necessaries and comforts of life.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)