In August 2014 we learned that the largest private collection of Heath Robinson’s original artwork still in private hands was about to be sold. The collection had been the property of Simon Heneage, a publisher and a founder of the Cartoon Museum, who died in 2011. It comprises 410 drawings and paintings and includes many of his most well-known First and Second World War cartoons. At the heart of the collection are 67 published full-page humorous drawings for magazines. Of these, about half relate to the two World Wars and many contain his popular “contraptions”. There is also an almost complete set of drawings made for How to build a new World, a book published in 1941 which reflects the hopes and aspirations of Britain in the second year of the Second World War. The Heneage collection also includes a large number of rough sketches that Heath Robinson made to show editors new ideas for humorous subjects. Those that were approved would have been worked up into finished drawings. They offer an insight into his working practice and into the way that he developed his ideas. A number of them match up with pictures already owned by the Trust. The works are almost all humorous, and as such are a perfect compliment to the Trust’s original collection, the greatest strength of which lies in its original drawings for illustration.

We approached the agents who were handling the sale and having seen the works and realised how well they would complement the Trust’s existing collection, we reached an agreement that the Trust should buy the collection by private treaty. The asking price for the collection was £300,000 which was not negotiable. We appointed independent experts to value the collection and to provide a condition report. Our immediate problem was that most of the limited funds of the Trust had been sunk into the Museum project. We needed to find the full asking price for the collection and we had to raise the money in ways than would not conflict with funding for the new Museum. We initially sought advice from our friends at HLF, and quickly realised that the very strong content of material relating to the two World Wars meant that we had a good chance of getting a grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). We also contacted the ArtFund. Both organisations provide money for the acquisition of works of art of National importance, but not capital funding for new building projects. In the event the NHMF gave us a grant of £250,000 and the ArtFund supplied the balance of £50,000. The purchase was completed and the pictures added to the Trust’s collection at the end of March 2015.

With the support of a small grant from the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), we have started necessary conservation. Meanwhile a small selection of works from the collection can be seen at West House, Pinner. In the long term the acquisition of the Heneage collection will greatly enhance the Trust’s ability to present a rich and varied range of exhibitions in the new museum and will reduce the costs of putting on those exhibitions. For example, the first exhibition in the new Heath Robinson Museum, planned to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the battle of the Somme, will be “Heath Robinson at War” for which the current Trust collection would have had to be supplemented with a large number of printed items and loans; even then there would have been a bias towards WW2 material. Our acquisition of the Heneage collection will make this exhibition well balanced and it can be mounted almost entirely from the augmented Trust collection.

Three of our newly acquired pictures are shown here:
1. ‘A Christmas deed of kindness’, 1925.
2. ‘Deceiving the invader as to the state of the tide’, 1941.
3. Unpublished watercolour, ca. 1920.