Machine head …
The illustrator William Heath Robinson’s name became a byword for cobbled-together, overwrought contraptions. He made it into the dictionary in 1912.
The hole truth …
This is one of his best-loved drawings, in which making cheese go a bit further – by drilling holes in it and recycling the leftovers – becomes a hopelessly complicated, machine-driven faff. Created in 1940, it’s a bittersweet comment on rationing and the war effort.
Human racing …
What is striking now is Robinson’s wider vision of 20th-century life. This is a different kind of machine to the merciless giant cogs that chew up Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. With its patched-up wheel and wonky piping it seems scattershot, inefficient and fallible; in other words, all too human.
Stuck in the middle …
The balding and bespectacled workers are another enduring type that Robinson both sent up and celebrated. They are middle management, stuck in the system, although the precariousness of the artist’s inventions hints at unruly forces within.
Heath Robinson: Dreams and Machines, Mottisfont Abbey, nr Romsey, to 15 April
