Henry Remembered

The site welcomes any memories and anecdotes relating to Henry's personal life growing up in Huddersfield, or to his life in the Army or to his professional life as a former teacher of Philosophy at Manchester University or to his life as an Artist.

If you would like to have your story posted here on our site, then please use the form provided in order to send it to use.

So be the first and get writing .... !

Your stories ...

Henry in the 1990’s

(1) 'Papa' is from the French and is how Henry's grandchildren referred to him.

(2) 'Bobonne' is from the French and is how Henry’s grandchildren referred to Henry's wife, Louise who was Belgian-born.

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From Julia Clifton- daughter of Henry’s eldest daughter Anne-Marie who currently lives with her two daughters, Jessica and Julia, in Australia.

(Submitted May 2010)

School age means 10 hours less work later on

'One thing which sticks in my mind about your father is his recommendation (to you (Elaine) or your sisters or just to me?) that "each extra hour of work while you are of school age means 10 hours less work later on in your life". I admired this justification of laziness and simultaneous encouragement to revise for O/A-levels. I applied it to my own life. However, I have tried using the same formula on my own kids with absolutely no success!'

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From Julian Sternberg- a lifelong neighbour of the Henry family in Whalley Range, Manchester and son of Dr. Sternberg who also taught at Manchester University as did Henry, but in the Physics department. It was through this contact that Henry was able to acquire parts of V1s and V2s to use in his machines.

(Submitted may 2010)

Memories of Ideographs at The Reid Gallery (1962)

‘With regards to the first exhibition in 1962 I remember that I think Rita (1) and I went to that exhibition. I definitely did. It was somewhere in the centre of London and I remember thinking how posh the gallery was and could not believe my father had his pictures exhibited there. A lot of the titles referred to Tractatus?? and the gallery owner, or whoever had put on the exhibition, had a copy of the book so people could refer to it (2). They treated dad with a lot of respect. I felt quite grown up to be there. I was all of 14 years old.  There were not too many people in the exhibition when I was there and cannot remember if it was a success or not.  I do not believe it was that successful as the pictures were so way ahead of their time (3).  I think that dad won the competition with a non-machine drawing but put a lot in the exhibition.  I could be wrong (4).

(1) Henry’s second daughter born 1951

(2) Henry did indeed use references from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as titles for his pictures, but only because he was obliged to give his pictures titles for exhibition purposes. Henry admitted to me in 2001 that there was absolutely no connection between these titles and the pictures themselves. The references certainly confounded both the British and American press, which appealed to Henry’s mischievous sense of non-conformity. (Elaine O’Hanrahan)

(3) The exhibition caused a stir in the press, but not many pictures were sold which surprised the gallery’s director, Mr. Reid, as mentioned in one of his letters to Henry following the exhibition.

(4) Anne-Marie is absolutely right on this. Henry won the Salford art competition, organised by Salford Art Gallery’s director Mr. Frape and by L.S. Lowry, with a none-machine drawing. The prize for winning this Salford show was the solo exhibition at the Reid Gallery in London. Both Lowry and Mr. Reid encouraged Henry to include his machine-generated images in this one-man show. (Elaine O’Hanrahan)

From Anne-Marie Clifton, eldest daughter of Henry, born 1948.

Memories of Cybernetic Serendipity (1968)

With regards to Cybernetic Syrendipity I remember going to the exhibition and going into a very large hall which was really crowded.  There were so many spectacular exhibits and working models that I could not believe that our father could be part of this amazing spectacle with his machine made from what I thought of as spare parts. I had a catalogue and was trying to find where dad was when I came across him doing a demo of how he created a painting.  There was quite a large group around him, which quite surprised me, and they were very interested in the art. Dad, as usual, had one of his cigarettes (1) in his hand. It was probably long dead but it was his trademark at that time. It made me quite proud to be his daughter and it had never really occurred to me that anyone would really be interested in his art and the machine.'

(1) Henry, until the 1980s, smoked roll-ups. I remember my poor mother being driven almost to distraction by all the butt ends she used to find deposited in odd places around the house.(Elaine O’Hanrahan)

(Submitted May 2010)

Memories of Henry’s  1960’s drawing machines

‘I was five years old when I first stood transfixed, at eye level watching Henry’s first machine in action as it whirred gently away in the front bay window of his study. In the early sixties, I often enjoyed creeping into the study to gaze at the hypnotic motions of the machine’s arm holding a pen or pens going round and round then juddering and twitching every now and again. It was a source of constant fascination to see the pictures gradually emerging over the surface of the paper. Sometimes my father (Henry) would rise from his chair at his desk and join me at the machine to add a penny to the arm of the pen or attach a peg to the drawing paper itself, in order to modify the outcome of the design. Over the years I quite often felt more than a bit sorry for my father, as he seemed to be the only person who believed in his machines and I would often feign polite interest in them in order to just be kind to him.

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From Elaine O’Hanrahan- Henry’s youngest daughter, born 1957.

Memories of L.S. Lowry 1961

L.S. Lowry himself visited our house in Burford Drive, Whalley Range. I remember peeping out from behind my mother’s skirt as a tall, very stout gentleman in a heavy overcoat came through our front door. As he removed his hat before being ushered into my father’s study, I recall he had grey bushy eyebrows, small, piercing eyes and a short, grey, untidy mop of hair. Years later my father recalled how Lowry was offered a sherry –it was about 4.0pm- but all he wanted was a glass of orange juice. My father also explained how Lowry had come to make sure that as the winner of the Salford London Opportunity competition (1) Henry had a genuine artistic ‘oeuvre’ to his name and had not merely just produced a few drawings for the sake of the Salford competition. It was during this visit that Lowry first saw my father’s machine-generated work and encouraged him to include examples of this in the prospective London show.

(1) This was a competition Lowry had organised with Salford Art Gallery open to local artists from a 50 miles radius. The prize would be a ‘one-man show in London’. Lowry knew from his own experience as an artist how crucial a London show was in order to further any artistic career.

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From Elaine O’Hanrahan- Henry’s youngest daughter, born 1957.

Memories of the Reid Gallery’s Ideographs exhibition (1962)

I well remember being driven in a black cab round London at the age of five in the summer of 1962 on our way to the Reid Gallery where my father’s pictures were. Someone pointed out Buckingham Palace to me and explained it was where the Queen lived. We seemed to be in an almighty rush (1). Once at the gallery, my father lifted me high and carried me around looking at the pictures together. He explained how a red dot on a picture meant it had been sold which made him very pleased indeed. So I kept a sharp look out for red dots. It is his machine drawings that stick in my memory from this show, rather than the none-machine ones.’

(1) We had in fact just landed that morning in Dover from Ostend. We had been holidaying in Wenduine on the Belgian coast along with my Belgian Grandmother and friends of my mother’s. We got the train up to London where my father discovered it was forbidden to shave in a British Rail bathroom!?! He had to go to a friend’s flat in order to do the deed! So it was we all arrived late for the exhibition opening!

From Elaine O’Hanrahan- Henry’s youngest daughter, born 1957.

Memories of sea-side holidays in Nethertown, Cumbria 1959-72

The former fisherman’s cottage called Plessington no longer stands on the western seashore of Nethertown, Cumbria (formerly Cumberland). It was condemned in the early eighties after a change in ownership and pulled down. But the holidays my family and I spent there make up some of my best childhood memories. When I took my own children in the late nineties, it just wasn’t the same without the cottage. Some people were starting to build another cottage where Plessington had stood.

Nearly every summer, from when I was two and a half years old in 1959, my father would take our mother together with myself and two older sisters on a long train journey from Manchester to Nethertown. For many miles the train ran along a high embankment along the seashore. Then you knew the journey’s end was close at hand. Once we had arrived at the tiny station we would unload all our luggage which my father would take by taxi to the small Fisherman’s cottage called ‘Plessington’, while the rest of us walked over the fields. The cottage was named after Blessed John Plessington, one of the forty English martyrs who was coincidently also pictured in the stained glass of our parish church of the English Martyrs church located in Whalley Range Manchester. My father had found the cottage advertised in the Catholic Herald. It was owned by a Catholic lady doctor living in Egremont. A lady called Mrs. Pritt would come to clean while we stayed for two weeks. I remember she was very cheery but hard to understand because of her lack of teeth and also I think her accent.

Plessington was a single storey cottage, built from timber with a verandah at its front which did not face the sea as the other cottages along the shore did, but was perpendicular to the beach and so protected from the sea winds. Once at the cottage, we had no electricity, just one ceiling gas lamp which my father lit every evening by hand with a taper. There was no running water, only a pump out the back. We used old-fashioned matching porcelain jug and bowl sets for washing ourselves. The toilet was an oil drum plus seat situated down a little path at the end of the garden in a small, dark hut infested with spiders. Trains went by regularly along the embankment behind the cottage which made the whole hut rattle and shake alarmingly. It took a lot of courage to use this toilet. Once this receptacle was full, my father had the job of emptying it at high tide as it was turning.

Although the cottage was well-supplied with candles, my father would not let us use them for fear of causing a fire. So he had contrived small battery run torches for us to use instead. There was also a real fire on which my father would make toast using a toasting fork as it was often cold enough for a fire in those summer evenings. We would sit around the dining table and play cards together on a heavy green furze/baize tablecloth which I found very tickly to the touch. There I learnt how to play ‘Sevens’, my father’s favourite card game. The furniture was old-fashioned and I remember that one of the mattresses was stuffed with straw!

That first summer of 1959 when I was two years old, I was too timid to go down to the beach across the steep slope of what seemed to me huge pebbles! So, a white enamel bath was filled with sand and brought up to the garden for me to play in. I had been very ill with an unusual form of gastro-enteritis just before that summer and so my parents felt especially indulgent towards me. It was in the garden that I first saw bright orange marigolds and that my father taught me how to tickle the legs of grasshoppers with a piece of grass. At Plessington, my father’s customary jacket with breast pocket bulging with pens and screw-drivers was replaced by jumpers, which made having a cuddle far more comfortable from my point of view! Though to be fair, my father would often thoughtfully put his jacket around me so I didn’t get hurt by any hard objects!

During the summers which followed, my father would take me out on the rocks to catch crabs. We carried a white enamel sanitary bucket to put them in. I had to be very careful not to slip on the shiny black and feathery green seaweeds. I also carried a wooden handled spade with its bright red metal tip for lifting up rocks. My father helped me see all the wonders of the rock pools and the little creatures they contained. He would capture the crabs, keep them in the bucket and then set them free to have a race across the sands to the sea. I can still remember how their claws would scratch on the enamel of the bucket. I remember how my father made me feel very proud while assisting him in this important task of crab- catching.

There was nothing my father enjoyed so much as looking out to sea with his binoculars from the small wall with a palisade atop which edged the cottage garden. On a clear day you could see the Isle of Mann or even dolphins. We also saw the Pirate Radio ship- Radio Caroline. Having spent seven years in the army during WW2, he also enjoyed it when the firing range at Seascale was being used for target practice out to sea by tanks. You could hear the guns in the distance and see small puffs of smoke.

When the tide was out you could see a semi-circular low wall which I learnt had been used to trap fish. The rocks on the beaches were forever moving and changing from one year to the next. One year, there was even the prow of an old wreck sticking out of the sand and we spotted a conger eel swimming in the pool surrounding it. There was nothing my father enjoyed more than a good storm and there was usually at least one during our stay. He would take us all out to walk along the sea edge searching for kegs of whisky washed ashore on the raging waves. We never found one but he never gave up hope. More than once a fierce sea came right up to the garden wall of the cottage.

It was in Nethertown that my father was at his most relaxed and communicative since he had no study to retreat to and no drawing machines to play with! It was the beach at Nethertown with its amazing pebbles which gave me a love of pebbles and rocks and taught me to be on the look out for things other folk miss. I think my father found some of his own childhood again at Nethertown. My mother had never been on holiday as a child and so it was my father who taught us how to make sandcastles and dig dams, learnt during his own sea-side holidays at Bridlington. But he wouldn’t go in the cold sea. I did learn to steel myself against the biting cold but I didn’t like it if there were jelly fish.

We used to walk up the winding concrete road from the ramp which had been used as a firing range, up to the village. We got our milk and eggs from Mossops farm and groceries and pear drops from the newsagent’s. How my mother managed I don’t know. There must have been a cooker but I think the clothes washing was done by hand. She used to throw potatoe peelings to the seagulls and I would watch them swoop excitedly and carry them off.

Then on Sunday we had to get to Egremont for mass. I think we went by taxi. One time we walked back to Nethertown and I remember my mother keeping us going by singing French songs of her youth from the one holiday she had had with her school at the age of 14 in her native Belgium.

In 1965 we got our first motor vehicle- a Volkswagon Camper Van. My father insisted he would only consider owning a vehicle in which he could make the all-important cup of tea (after all, stopping for a cup of tea had saved him from a V1 which dropped on his convoy during WW2). The camper van meant we could now drive around the area and visit the Lakes, take the train at Ravenglass and visit St. Bees Head.

My holidays got even better once my cousins’ parents ( The Melias) rented a modern bungalow up in the village. I think my mother envied its modern conveniences but for us children nothing could ever beat the special quirkiness of Plessington.

In the seventies and eighties, the high radiation levels on the beach caused by discharged water from the nuclear plant at Windscale (now called Sellafield) made it a less appealing place to visit. But I will never forget the comforting feeling of being lulled to sleep by the low roar of the sea after spending a day in the invigorating fresh air and almost constant bracing wind. It was all most exciting and magical.

Once my father purchased the stone-built cottage- Lower Brigg Hey Farm (Cragg Vale)- in 1970, visits to Nethertown became much less frequent and the last was in the mid seventies. Renovating the cottage took up the weekends and holidays and became a much-loved retreat for my parents, until my mother’s death in 1992.

From Elaine O’Hanrahan- Henry’s youngest daughter, born 1957.

(Above) Henry outside Plessington in 1963.

(Above) c. 1964 Mrs. Louise Henry and youngest daughter Elaine.

c.1963 Left to right Elaine, AnneMarie, Rita Henry outside Plessington.

Memories from an ex-student of Desmond Henry

I came across this (Henry’s web-site) by chance. I was a student of his at Manchester in the early - mid 70's. I hadn't realised that he was such a polymath. A very popular and well liked man. I wish I'd had the chance to meet him again after I graduated.

From former student of Henry’s:  Des Browning.

Parties, Hand Grenades and Philosophy

I remember you pouring me a drink at one of those parties ! (Henry threw regular parties for his students at his home in 4Burford Drive)

Your father also came and gave a talk on philosphy at a youth club that I
was involved in at that time. Do you have the inert hand grenade that
he used to keep on his desk at the university? I'm sorry to hear that he took early retirement under those circumstances. Still, he was clearly not a man to sit back and do nothing after that. I'll keep an eye on the site in the future.

In an email to Elaine O’hanrahan – Henry’s youngest daughter

The power of the search engine

I got up at 6.20am yesterday morning, and for some reason (maybe to with the fact that I had a 9.am lecture on Medieval Arguments for the Existence of God) thought about Desmond Paul Henry. He was the lecturer at Manchester University whose fine teaching, and 'cool' image finalized my decision to transfer from doing a Politics and Modern History degree, to doing Philosophy.

I assumed that he must be dead by now, and went online to see if there was an obituary, or anything.

What I found, astonished me. I\'d no idea he was so involved in computer art. The astonishment was compounded by the fact that I specialize in the philosophy of visual art, and in my last book, had a chapter on digital art. If I\'d known about his work, I would have included him in the chapter!

Desmond used to wear a leather jacket, had longish grey hair, often had a cigarette in his mouth, and spoke in the most wonderfully mellifluous tones.

Towards the end of my first term at Manchester in autumn 1971, I went to to his office to discuss the transfer. He said he was glad that they'd 'corrupted' me into choosing philosophy. But it turned out there was a problem about a logic course that majors in Philosophy had to do, so I ended up going back to my home city - Leeds to do a Philosophy and History of Art degree.

I subsequently did various higher degrees, and taught History of Art at the Universities of St. Andrews and Oxford, before eventually attaining my ambition to become a Professor of Philosophy. (I now hold the Chair at the National University of Ireland, Galway.)

It's clear to me, that Desmond was a pioneer of computer art at the world level, and not just the British one. The reason why he hasn't been more widely recognized is because his work was on a home made computer, rather than a commercially available model - which would have engaged a wider international audience.

But having now seen the quality of his work, I'll certainly be looking to write something about him in the next appropriate book I do.

From former student: Paul Crowther- Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland