Emett of Punch

Americans often wonder what the British see in Punch. But one steady Punch contributor who easily hurdles all transatlantic barriers of humor is shy, blond, 35-year-old Rowland Emett. Emett is a daft satiric cartoonist in the English tradition of Max Beerbohm and Edward Lear. He is the producer of a fine series of affectionate burlesques of the British wartime scene. He is also, first & foremost, a comic master of an internationally favorite theme--the railway.

Rowland Emett's subtle railway fantasias are to Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley as the music of Mozart is to that of Meyerbeer. Emett's railwaymen become involved in the most decided peculiarities of right-of-way (see cut}. One of Emett's railway carriages is blue with the exhalations of an American Indian sucking his calumet, a Chinese inhaling opium, an East Indian at his hookah and other assorted pipe addicts (the caption, in the mouths of two elderly ladies, is "Bother--it's a smoker!"). An Emett dining car, where rabbit is being served, affords, by virtue of a sharp curve in the track, a view of the train's last car where the demoniac chef is in the act of snatching the bunnies alive from the very roadside. Emett's crazily antiquated rolling stock often shows the most charmingly ornamental cabinet work, and for anyone who has ever felt the obsessive fascination of pastoral narrow-gauge lines, with grass and weeds between the ties, Emett's studies of the subject are required looking.

When he leaves railways, he often discovers other strange features of the English landscape. A farmyard contains a tall tower leaning well to the right (". . . and my Italian prisoners put up the silo"). An enormous bomber roars low over a tiny cottage which, luckily, just fits between the bomber's mighty wheels ("I'm afraid we shall have to leave building the new wing until after the war"). Emett's capacity to embroider a theme with variations applies not only to railways but also to such other redoubtable English features as ear trumpets, bath chairs, lantern-slide lectures, and fair weather performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the vicarage lawn.

Emett, who lives in Birmingham with his wife, and works on the drafting boards of an airplane factory, tactfully comments on himself as follows: "Living, as he does, within a stone's throw of the center of England, Rowland Emett likes to imagine that he has his finger on the pulse of affairs--particularly those of the more curious sort.

"He . . . likes railways of the more infrequent kind. He is an authority on Waiting Room Tea, and prefers the Southern Railway's recipe to that of the Great Western. He has perfected a method of traveling which precludes all trains of more than one coach and involves a large number of single tickets.

"He designs obscure pieces for aircraft, and has exhibited landscapes at the Royal Academy and other London exhibitions.

"He firmly believes that the Horse will never supplant Steam."

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