Automaton clock by Emett, Rowland, United Kingdom, 1984

Science Museum Group description

A Quiet Afternoon in the Cloud Cuckoo Valley was the last and largest of the automata created by Rowland Emett, one of Britain’s foremost artists in the field of kinetic sculpture. it was built in 1984 for a shopping centre in Basildon, but never installed. Born in London in 1906, Emmet studied at the Birmingham School of Arts & Crafts, before working as a commercial artist and then for the Air Ministry during the Second World War. He began producing cartoons for Punch in 1939, eventually becoming the magazine’s cartoon editor. His intricate drawings were inspired by the wonders of Victorian engineering and often featured unusual trains hauled by engines with elongated boilers and tall chimneys, carrying an eccentric range of passengers. In 1951 Emett designed a real-life version of his Far Twittering & Oyster Creek Railway for the Festival of Britain, at which it carried over 2 million passengers. He also designed the inventions of Caractacus Potts for the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and his working sculptures were exhibited at venues around the world. Emett died in 1990. A Quiet Afternoon in the Cloud Cuckoo Valley comprises eight separate automota, each representing a scene on a journey on Emett’s fictional Far Tottering & Oyster Creek Railway. The passenger train, pulled by a locomotive named Wild Goose, runs on a raised railway. At Cow Parsley meadow, cows nod their heads as a farmer plays to them on his harp, and at Far Tottering a water wheel revolves. A fisherman hauls a mermaid into his net at Shrimphaven, while at Wisteria Halt a clock is positioned at the top of a flowering tree. An ornithologist, disguised as a bush, cycles past Twittering Woods, with a bird nesting in his bicycle lamp. An elderly gentleman in a Victorian swimsuit dives from a bathing machine at Oyster Creek, and the journey ends with a Wishing Well. The clock at Wisteria Halt is designed to strike on the quarter hour, at which point all the automata come to life for a few minutes.