For over a century, W. Heath Robinson, whom the novelist, Philip Pullman called ‘the immortal contraptioneer’, has been famous for drawing rickety, bizarrely complicated devices that carry out the simplest of tasks like potato peeling, wart removal or pancake making. He became so famous for them that in 1933, he was the obvious person to illustrate Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm books and, in 1943, Bletchley Park named one of their code-breaking machines after him.

Much later still, some of the contraptions in Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers are based on a scale model of a gadget filled house that he made for the Ideal Home Show in 1934. But there was more to him than this: he was also a fine painter, an outstanding literary illustrator and a brilliant satirist, who poked gentle fun at modern life in cartoons that are still laugh out loud funny.