page_title: Rowland Emett
section_title: Later work
hierarchical_section_title: Rowland Emett / Later work
caption_attribution_description: English: Symbolic map of Hemel Hempstead and its neighbours by the artist Rowland Emett. Entitled 'Tile Mosaic Map' it was erected in 1960 on the side of what is claimed to be the first multi story car park in the UK.
context_page_description: Frederick Rowland Emett OBE, known as Rowland Emett, was an English cartoonist and constructor of whimsical kinetic sculpture.
context_section_description: 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. She 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 Tuppence 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 a 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 returned to West Cornwall before settling for the rest of his life at Ditchling, in Sussex.
  In 1953 Malcolm Muggeridge became editor of Punch 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 was 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, until 2010. In 2015 it was reinstalled, refurbished and in full working order, to a new location on the upper mall. When commissioned, it played Rameau's Gigue en rondeau II from the E-minor suite of his Pièces de Clavecin when striking the hour and half hour. Later modification enabled it to perform every fifteen minutes (the playback system was changed from tape to compact disc).
  A 30-foot-square mosaic by Emett, installed around 1960, can be seen on the side of the NCP car park in The Marlowes, Hemel Hempstead.
  The Cats Cradle Pussiewillow III clock was commissioned by Basildon New Town and inaugurated by Michael Bentine on 7 August 1981.  It 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, D.C.. The Ontario Science Centre in Toronto has a collection of about ten 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.
  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 excepti
caption: Whimsical map of Hemel Hempstead and its neighbours,  erected in 1960 on the side of what is claimed to be the first multi-storey car park in the UK
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