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    How to be a Perfect Husband
    How to be a Perfect Husband
    How to be a Perfect Husband
    Ebook168 pages59 minutes

    How to be a Perfect Husband

    By William Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne

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    About this ebook

    First published in 1937, 'How to be a Perfect Husband' is the second book in the 'How to…' series. From finding a wife to growing old together, Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne explore many aspects of married life with witty and insightful text and illustrations. Heath Robinson received much teasing from his family about this choice of subject. However, looking back over his cartoons one finds that romance and courtship had been among his most frequently chosen subjects, from early ‘Cupid’ cartoons to such pictures as ‘The Coquette’ and ‘Stolen Kisses’ which were reproduced in 'Absurdities' in 1934.

    'How to be a Perfect Husband' reflects the great changes that took place in the marital relationship between the wars. The authors’ gentle humour pokes fun at the challenges faced by men due to the depression, a lack of servants and the newly confident ‘modern’ woman. Of course, housework without servants also made life very difficult for women, until the invention of the washing machine and vacuum cleaner in the 1930s meant that things became a little easier. This too is reflected in the illustrations as Heath Robinson demonstrates his considerable talent for devising imaginative solutions to every-day problems in the home. For example, he offers us his take on a super-de-luxe coffee maker (that looks a lot like a complex twenty-first century expresso machine), a method of frittering a banana using electricity and various gadgets to help with childcare. Ultimately, the authors conclude that tolerance, compromise and being helpful are key characteristics of a perfect husband, if only to ensure that he can ‘earn a reputation for thoughtfulness that will stand him in good stead whenever he wishes to touch his mother-in-law for a fiver’!

    If, in addition to being a perfect spouse, you also love gardening (even though you live in a flat), you have a car and you play golf then you will find much to amuse and inform you in our other titles by Heath Robinson and K. R. G. Browne:
    • How to Live in Flat
    • How to Make a Garden Grow
    • How to be a Motorist
    • Humours of Golf

    All our Heath Robinson titles include a Foreword by Geoffrey Beare, Trustee of the William Heath Robinson Trust, who is working to build a Heath Robinson museum in North London.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRHE Media Limited
    Release dateNov 14, 2014
    ISBN9781910226230
    How to be a Perfect Husband

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      Book preview

      How to be a Perfect Husband - William Heath Robinson

      Contents

      DEDICATION

      FOREWORD BY GEOFFREY BEARE (TRUSTEE OF THE WILLIAM HEATH ROBINSON TRUST)

      AN INTRODUCTION TO THE VINTAGE WORDS OF WISDOM

      INTRODUCTION

      SELECTION OF A MATE

      COURTSHIP AND PROPOSAL

      THE WEDDING

      EARLY MARRIED LIFE

      THE YOUNG IDEA

      SPORTS AND HOBBIES

      DOMESTIC DIFFICULTIES

      MIDDLE AGE AND HOW TO MEET IT

      CONCLUSION

      DEDICATED

      (a) With Respectful Sympathy To: The Newly-Married, the About-To-Be-Married, the Long-Married, the Ex-Married, the Frequently-Married, and even – such is our combined love for our fellow-creatures – People Who Would Not Marry If They Were Paid To Do So.

      (b) With Sympathetic Respect To: The President, Vice-President, Chucker-Out, and Other Officials of the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division.

      W. HEATH ROBINSON

      K. R. G. BROWNE

      FOREWORD

      BY GEOFFREY BEARE (TRUSTEE OF THE WILLIAM HEATH ROBINSON TRUST)

      In the 1930s Heath Robinson was known as ‘The Gadget King’ and he is still most widely remembered for his wonderful humorous drawings. But humorous art was only his third choice of career, and one that he turned to almost by accident. On leaving the Royal Academy Schools in 1895 his ambition was to become a landscape painter. He soon realised that such painting would not pay the bills and so he followed his two older brothers into book illustration. He rapidly established himself as a talented and original practitioner in his chosen field, and in 1903 felt sufficiently secure to marry. However, the following year a publisher who had commissioned a large quantity of drawings was declared bankrupt. The young Heath Robinson, who had just become the father of a baby girl, had quickly to find a new source of income. He turned to the high class weekly magazines such as The Sketch and The Tatler who paid well for large, highly finished humorous drawings, and within a short time was being acclaimed as a unique talent in the field of humorous art.

      For a number of years, he combined his careers as illustrator and humorist with equal and growing success. One day he might be illustrating Kipling’s A Song of the English or a Shakespeare play and the next would find him at work explaining the gentle art of catching things. He said of this time ‘It was always a mental effort to adapt myself to these changes, but with the elasticity of my early days, it was not too difficult’. During the First World War the market for luxurious illustrated books diminished, but demand for his humorous work increased, his gentle satires of the enemy proving popular both with the public at home and especially with the forces in the various theatres of war. This situation persisted after the war with very few commissions for illustration, but regular demands for his humorous drawings from popular magazines and for advertising.

      In 1935 the Strand Magazine published an article titled ‘At Home with Heath Robinson’. This had a text by Kenneth R. G. Browne and ten pen and wash illustrations by Heath Robinson. The illustrations, which showed novel uses for unwanted items, were drawn under the working title ‘Rejuvenated Junk’. K. R. G. Browne, a fellow member of the Savage Club, was an ideal collaborator for Heath Robinson. He was the son of Gordon Browne who is still well known as an illustrator of books and magazines, and was the grandson of Hablot Knight Browne, who under his pen name of ‘Phiz’ gained lasting fame as the illustrator of many Victorian novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charles Lever and Harrison Ainsworth. The article in The Strand Magazine marked the start of a partnership that was only brought to an untimely end by the death of Browne in 1940. During 1932 and 1933 Heath Robinson had drawn a series of cartoons for The Sketch entitled ‘Flat Life’, which depicted various gadgets designed to make the most of the limited space available in the contemporary flat. It was this series of drawings that provided K. R. G. Browne and W. Heath Robinson with the inspiration for their first full-length book together. It was called How to Live in a Flat, and as well as greatly extending the original ideas showing many ingenious ways of overcoming the problems caused by lack of space in flats and bungalows, also provided much fun at the expense of the more extreme designs in thirties furniture and architecture. The book was published by Hutchinson for Christmas 1936 and was well received.

      Over the next three years K. R. G. Browne and Heath Robinson successfully repeated the formula in a further three titles. Heath Robinson received much teasing from his family about the choice of subject for the second book, How to be a Perfect Husband, but looking back over his cartoons one finds that romance and courtship had been among his most frequently chosen subjects, from early ‘Cupid’ cartoons to such pictures as ‘The Coquette’ and ‘Stolen Kisses’ which were reproduced in Absurdities in 1934. The next book in the series received a valuable preview when The

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