THE HENRY STORY

From the Army to Art: A unique glimps into the life of Desmond Paul Henry

Desmond Paul Henry (1921-2004)

Throughout his life, Henry felt compelled to respond to a fundamental creative urge to be original. His drawing machines represent the fruitful combination of his skills as both an artist and machine enthusiast. His inventive mind thrived on ingeniously ‘making the most’, artistically speaking, of his life experiences and the materials that happened, by chance, to come his way, so as to create something idiosyncratic and rare.

As a young boy growing up in Huddersfield in the 1920’s, Henry was clearly gifted with unusually high intellectual and creative abilities. His favourite reading materials were the volumes of Cassell’s Encyclopedia and his stated aim at the age of 9 was to be another Leonardo Da Vinci. He also shared his father’s passion for clocks and the technological advances of Victorian industrialisation.

In 1933 Henry’s Roman Catholic parents successfully pleaded for him to attend the local Grammar School, Huddersfield College. Despite being an academic success, Henry’s parents were not in a financial position to allow their son to further his education. At the age of 16 Henry was obliged to start working for Huddersfield Waterworks and also attended evening Art Classes at Huddersfield Technical College. In 1939, with the prospect of war, Henry volunteered for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, where he was employed for seven years as a Technical Clerk. Henry’s stay in the army encouraged him to develop experimental art making processes, including an unique finger-rubbing technique using duplicator ink, boot polish and even soot!

The army also further fuelled his passion for technology and enabled him to become acquainted with the predictor systems in anti-aircraft guns which were the ‘mirror-image’ of those he would later find in his beloved Bombsights.

After forming part of the second wave of the Normandy Landings in June 1944, Henry met and then married a Belgian girl living in Brussels, Louisa Bayen. On two occasions, his taking leave to see Louisa saved his life from a V1 and a V2 which left many of his comrades dead.

On return to the UK in 1946, Henry was able, as a former service-man, to receive a scholarship and attend Leeds University where he obtained a First Class Honours Degree in Philosophy in 1949. He was subsequently offered a teaching post in Philosophy at Manchester University where he remained until his early retirement in 1982. He is the acclaimed author of several books dedicated to Medieval Philosophy.

It was in the early 1950’s, at Shude Hill, Manchester, while browsing the second-hand book stalls, that he was re-united by chance with a piece of wartime technology- the Bombsight Computer. For nearly nine years he admired the graceful inner workings of this machine, before he was inspired to turn it into his first drawing machine of 1960s.

During the 1950s he had continued to experiment with unusual mark-making materials such as photo-chemicals and baby-bottom cream. It was these experimental pieces which won Henry the London Opportunity competition in 1961. It was L.S Lowry, one of the competition judges, who encouraged Henry to continue to experiment with his ‘new ventures in art’ and include his machine drawings in the prize of a solo London exhibition at the Reid Gallery in 1962. Here he first exhibited what became his critically acclaimed machine-generated drawings.

Subsequent one-man shows in and around Manchester and Salford culminated in the inclusion of his second drawing machine and its visual effects in the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition of 1968. This machine returned in 1972 from the American leg of the exhibition tour in a complete state of disrepair. During the 1970’s Henry turned his attention to experimenting with photo-chemical mark-making techniques, though the 1980’s did see a fourth drawing machine and 2002 a fifth; both based around a pendulum design.

Promoting Henry: post 1970s

Henry was not an artist by profession and worked in comparative artistic and scientific isolation outside of London. This necessarily had consequences for the extent to which he could promote himself during his life-time.

Post 1970s, it was Bip Banerji, the husband of Henry’s second eldest daughter Rita, who took a serious interest in his father-in-law’s machine-generated art, much of which still adorns the walls of their home. In the 1980s Bip gave a slide show and talk on Henry’s work at Liverpool University.

A family friend and admirer of Henry’s machine drawings from the 60s, Dr.David Mannings, (Professor Emeritus, former senior lecturer and Head of the Departmentof History of Artat King's College, University of Aberdeen, Scotland), accorded Henry pioneer status in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of 1990, under the entry ‘Computer Art’.

In 1998 Elaine, Henry’s youngest daughter, was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This illness obliged her to quit her teaching post as a High School teacher of French. As part of Elaine’s recovery her good friend Dr. Jagjit Chuhan, a professional artist and Professor of International Art at the Liverpool School of Art (John Moores University, Liverpool), suggested Elaine study for a Phd. at JMU on the subject of her father’s machine-generated art. Prior to this suggestion, it had never occurred to Elaine just how important her father’s contribution to machine-generated art was.

In 2000 Elaine’s proposal for a Contextual Studies thesis on her father was accepted with a commendation and so began five years of part-time study for a Phd. under her supervisor at John Moore’s University, Dr. Julie Sheldon. Half- way through the five years, the Phd. fees at John Moores were doubled which initially threatened to stop Elaine continuing her research. The Art School suggested Elaine continue her thesis paying just write-up fees with the proviso that the most she could get for her work would be a MPhil rather than a Phd. So it was that the thesis was completed in 2005, just at a time when interest in the pioneering days of Digital Art was coming to the fore. Unfortunately, Henry passed away in 2004 but not before he had provided a wealth of first-hand information and material for Elaine’s thesis.

Since then, web-development specialists, Redinko and Professor Paul Brown of the Computer Arts Society (CAS) have been key players in promoting Henry’s work. The Desmond Paul Henry website, professionally crafted by Redinko from (2007) has been crucial in Henry’s promotion so far and will continue to play a vital role.

Elaine discovered CAS during a random internet search and joined it in 2008. Its Chair, Professor Paul Brown then put Elaine in contact with curators Doug Dodds and Honor Beddard at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Dodds is a Senior Curator of Computer Art and Co-Investigator in The Computer Arts and Technocultures Project, a joint venture between Birkbeck College, London and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Both Doug Dodds and Honor Beddard (Computer Art Project Curator) have been especially encouraging and enthusiastic about Henry’s work and very kindly included Henry  as a late entry in the recent Digital Pioneers exhibition at the V & A (Dec. 2009- June 2010). This inclusion has confirmed Henry’s place in Art History as one of the few early British pioneers of Computer Art.

Following their introduction to Henry’s work at the V & A’s conference Decoding the Digital in February 2010, Anne and Michael Spalter have become key promoters in the States of Henry’s hitherto little-known pioneering work in the field of Digital Art. 

(Below) Desmond Paul Henry thesis by Elaine O'Hanrahan