Rowland Emett

Frederick Rowland Emett OBE (22 October 1906 – 13 November 1990), known as Rowland Emett (with the forename sometimes spelled "Roland" [as his middle name appears on his birth certificate] and the surname frequently misspelled "Emmett"), was an English cartoonist and constructor of whimsical kinetic sculpture.

Emett was born in New Southgate, London, the son of a businessman and amateur inventor, and the grandson of 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.

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.

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