On 20 April 1910, the first in a new series of cartoons was published in the weekly illustrated magazine The Sketch. ‘Am Tag! Die Deutschen Kommen!’ sought to make light of what was a growing paranoia in the British press – the possibility of a German invasion. In retrospect, the series appears remarkably prescient, and in 1910, though it would be more than four years before war was to erupt in Europe, the theme was both timely and topical.

Four months earlier, in December 1909, Lord Northcliffe had commissioned the socialist journalist and editor of The Clarion, Robert Blatchford, to write a series of ten articles in the Daily Mail warning of the coming German menace. It all seemed a touch hysterical to a sophisticated magazine such as The Sketchand a state of affairs ripe for satire.

William Heath Robinson, the man behind ‘Am Tag’, was one of The Sketch’s most popular artists. His imagined ‘Incidents of the Coming German Invasion of England’ depicted German spies in the most incongruous of locations. The first in the series, ‘German Spies in Epping Forest’, showed the Teutonic intruders disguised as a ludicrous assortment of birds, trees and woodland animals following the movements of a single, small Boy Scout on an innocent ramble. It was a picture that embodied two elements intrinsic in Heath Robinson’s art – the elaborate and extraordinary lengths undergone to achieve what are ultimately underwhelming and simple objectives, and his own wry and gentle brand of mocking humour. ‘Am Tag’ encouraged the British to laugh, not only at the ridiculous Germans in their woodland fancy dress, but also at themselves.

When war broke out in August 1914, less than five years after the publication of ‘Am Tag’, Heath Robinson was firmly established as one of the leading humor ous artists of the day, and would find that his work of the next four years would be unavoidably influenced by what he called ‘the all-consuming topic’.

As with many Britons, the war had crept up almost unexpectedly on Will. Since 1908, he had lived with his family in Pinner, Middlesex, and loved nothing more than to spend his free time rambling around the surround ing countryside,

accompanied by friends, colleagues and his three brothers Tom, Charles and George. Most walks would usually conclude with a convivial stop at a local hostelry, and so the group revelled in the title of the Federation of Frothfinders, a moniker which might seem equally at home as a title for one of Will’s drawings. It was during one such outing in the Chiltern Hills on August Bank Holiday that the Frothfinder ramblers were passed by a military orderly in uniform riding one horse and leading another – “the first evidence of the war that was immediately to break out”.

For the next four years, magazine illustrators, whether consciously or not, were part of a national propaganda drive. As Will recalled in his autobiography My Line of Life, “I found that already a change was taking place. Publishers were beginning to restrict their enterprise within narrower channels, and these were all connected with the war”. Cartoonists drew inspiration from every conceivable aspect of the conflict but returned again and again to the infinite possibilities of caricaturing the enemy.

Transferring the obsessive complexity of the machine drawings he was famous for to mil itary training and warfare, Will’s German Army used a combination of underhand techniques to carry out their cunning schemes. “As the war developed,” recalled Will, “I at last found an opening for my humorous work. The much-advertised frightfulness and efficiency of the German army, and its many terrifying inventions, gave me one of the best opportunities I ever enjoyed.”

One of his first cartoons of the war, under the series heading of ‘Kultur’, was published in The Sketch in November 1914 and showed a small, scrawny gosling leading a synchronised goose-stepping column of German soldiers in training. Kultur was a word used with widespread derision in the British press. Intended to define the best of German culture and civilisation, the aggressive behaviour exhibited by the Germans in the early months of the war, together with such acts of cultural vandalism like the burning of the ancient library at Louvain, seemed instead, to the British, to be the antithesis of ‘culture’.

Will’s comic spin on German perfidy found full expression in 1915 with a series of drawings under the title ‘German Breaches of the Hague Convention’. In these, the ‘Hun’, having completed their comprehensive training schedule in ‘Kultur’, proceed to pitch themselves against the jovial British Tommies using means so utterly ludicrous, and yet often so prosaic and common place, they mine the very marrow of the British sense of humour. Tommies are hindered by magnets that attract away the steel buttons on their braces, or German soldiers suspend gramophones on sticks to emit an endless dirge of German patriotic songs and slogans so devastatingly dull they in fact bore a British sentry to death. Soon he was inundated with suggestions for more inventions. Many letters came embellished with explanatory diagrams and drawings which gave Will much pleasure:

With the coming of war again in 1939, The Sketch engaged him once more to provide full-page cartoons to satirise unfolding events and pitch mirth against fear. Will’s World War Two cartoons are even more convoluted and complex, and while most concentrate on the Home Front, there is also the introduction of real characters into his pictures. Two decades earlier, the only real personality to appear in his WW1 cartoons was the Kaiser – and then he was an unseen inhabitant of a car with a bath tub – but Will’s Second World War cartoons featured Goering and Churchill, and there were even rumours that William Heath Robinson was one of the names on the Gestapo Arrest List.