The Peculiar Triumph Of Professor Branestawm

by Norman Hunter

He's madly sane and cleverly dotty. He's the craziest genius you'll ever meet and he's about to cause havoc in Pagwell with his wild inventions . . . The lovable Professor Branestawm, with his five pairs of spectacles and his pockets full of all manner of things, is back!Norman Hunter's irrepressible humour packs every page and the illustrations (by the well-known cartoonist, George Adamson) entirely capture the eccentricity of the Professor and the hilarity of his incredible adventures.

Genres: Childrens, Fiction, Fantasy

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Career
Hunter wrote popular books on writing for advertising, brain-teasers and conjuring among many others. His career started as an advertising copywriter and in the 1930s he was performing as a stage magician in Bournemouth.
It was at this time he started to write the Professor Branestawm series, originally intended for radio. The books were published in hardback, with the first illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. Other illustrators were to follow, including James Arnold, George Worsley Adamson, Gerald Rose, David Hughes, Jill McDonald and Derek Cousins. In the 1960s the books were reprinted in Puffin Books, the Penguin children's imprint.
Hunter returned to London during the Second World War, living on a boat on the Thames. Post-war, in 1949 he went to work in South Africa and the fiction writing ceased. On his retirement in 1970, he once again returned to London, where Thames Television had just produced the Professor Branestawm eight-part TV series. He continued writing in his retirement, with his last book published in 1983.
Works (Incomplete)
Simplified Conjuring for All: a collection of new tricks needing no special skill or apparatus for their performance with suitable patter, C. Arthur Pearson (1923)
Advertising Through the Press: a guide to press publicity, Sir I. Pitman & Sons (1925)
New and Easy Magic : a further series of novel magical experiments needing no special skill or apparatus for their performance with suitable patter, C. Arthur Pearson (1925)
The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, John Lane (1933)
New conjuring Without Skill, Bodley Head (1935)
Professor Branestawm's Treasure Hunt, John Lane (1937)
Larky Legends (1938), republished as The Dribblesome Teapots and Other Incredible Stories (1973)
Successful Conjuring for Amateurs, Pearson (c.1951)
The Puffin Book of Magic (1968), republished as Norman Hunter’s Book of Magic, Bodley Head (1974)
The Peculiar Triumph of Professor Branestawm, Bodley Head (1970)
The Dribblesome Teapots and Other Incredible Stories (1971)
Professor Branestawm Up the Pole, Bodley Head (1972)
Professor Branestawm's Dictionary, Bodley Head (1973)
The Frantic Phantom and Other Incredible Stories (1973)
Professor Branestawm's Great Revolution, Bodley Head (1974)
The Home-made Dragon and Other Incredible Stories (1974)
Dust up at the Royal Disco: and Other Stories (1975)
Professor Branestawm’s Do-It-Yourself Handbook, Bodley Head (1974)
Long Live Their Majesties (1975)
Professor Branestawm Round the Bend, Bodley Head (1977)
Professor Branestawm’s Compendium of Donundrums, Riddles, Puzzles, Brain Twiddlers and Dotty Descriptions, Bodley Head (1975)
Vanishing Ladies, and Other Magic, Bodley Head (1978)
Professor Branestawm's Perilous Pudding, Bodley Head (1979)
The Best of Branestawm, Bodley Head (1980)
Sneeze and Be Slain and Other Incredible Stories (1980)
Professor Branestawm and the Wild Letters, Bodley Head (1981)
Professor Branestawm's Pocket Motor Car, Bodley Head (1981)
Professor Branestawm's Mouse War, Bodley Head (1982)
Professor Branestawm's Building Bust-Up, Bodley Head (1982)
Count Bakwerdz on the Carpet and Other Incredible Stories (1982)
Professor Branestawm's Crunchy Crockery, Bodley Head (1983)
Professor Branestawm's Hair-Raising Idea, Bodley Head (1983)

Wikipedia

Reviews

[Josephine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The archetypal “absent-minded professor”, Professor Branestawm needs five pairs of glasses on his head at all times, four for all the varied visual tasks (including one for looking over at people sternly) and the fifth for searching for the other four when he loses them. His clothes are held together, up and on by safety pins, as he keeps forgetting to sew the buttons on. Colonel Deddshott, of the Catapult Cavaliers, is his best friend, though the Colonel usually hasn’t the least idea what Branestawm is talking about. The two, and Branestawm’s live-in housekeeper Mrs. Flittersnoop, live in Great Pagwell, itself surrounded by a seemingly endless number of satellite Pagwells–Lesser Pagwell, Little Pagwell, Pagwell Green and so on.

Branestawm is always at work in his “Inventory”, creating things that…well, they work, but not quite in the way he intended them to; he forgets a ‘little squiggly thing’ in the clock intended to never need winding, so it doesn’t start over when it strikes twelve, but instead continues to thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and so on. To compound the problem of misguided inventions, Mrs. Flittersnoop and Colonel Deddshott often start things going awry through their lack of understanding; in one story, Mrs. Flittersnoop tosses what appears to be an uncorked bottle of cough syrup into the wastepaper bin, only to find that it’s the Elixir of Life, left open to breathe, and she’s inadvertently brought all the papers to life! Dressing machines, cuckoo clocks, pancake flippers, high-speed transport that proves so fast it gets you somewhere before you left (i.e. a time travel device), inventions never seem to come out quite as planned, though everyone around admires a man so ferociously intellectual that his shirt cuffs are never clean of calculations.

Still other adventures are simply a result of Branestawm’s own absent-minded intellectual abstraction—he writes out an invitation to Dedshott for tea, but sends on the blotting-paper rather than the invitation itself, or sequentially checks out and misplaces fourteen copies of the identical book from fourteen neighboring libraries, requiring him to return the one copy he can locate to each library in turn in a ever-increasingly frantic circle. Each turns out well, however; the Colonel brings over to his friend what appears to be something written in a language so arcane that only Branestawm can translate it, fortuitously in time for tea, and the fourteen head librarians, similarly invited on the same day for tea—Branestawm having forgotten he’s invited them at all— and they discover their library’s books, filed in fourteen separate (but logical) places in Branestawm’s own library.

This was the first in a series of books about the eccentric inventor, Professor Branestawm; or rather (I think) they’re collections of short stories previously published in magazines in England in the thirties and forties. I have to admit this was my favorite, not least because Heath Robinson illustrated them. (Rube Goldberg is the closest American equivalent to Robinson’s rickety cobbled-together machines, though in Goldberg’s case, the equipment was a bit more deliberate in design.) Alas, Robinson died in 1944, and the later illustrators, though amusing in their own right, never quite recaptured that big-headed, vague and distracted nature of Professor Branestawm and the affectionate depiction of the pompous Deddshott, surely modeled on all the elderly before their time military officers back from India and other points of the Glorious Empire.

The books I have, published in the 1970s, are labeled as being for six to ten year olds; these days, I can see particularly precociously literate kids that age loving them but I have to wonder how many of the references would go swoosh over the kids’ heads? How many kids today know what blotting paper is, and why writing would appear peculiar on a piece of it? Not that going over kids’ heads is necessarily a problem, mind; challenging them to figure out what the book really means can’t hurt if the readers have got a bit of tenacity. Fun though.

[Meo · Rating 4 out of 5]

First enjoyed as a Time-Tot myself, over thirty years ago, and oft borrowed from the local library, this is a gem. Twelve short stories featuring Pagwell’s most famous scientist and the curious inventions he is responsible for. Over the course of the book, he visits the continent to test an automatic translating device, builds a mechanical Christmas Tree to distribute presents (and puts them in the wrong slots), tries to solve the problem created by too many children taking too many apples to too many teachers, and builds an ingenious car park which takes your vehicle in a grabber and slides it into a parking space.

Accompanied by the dependable Colonel Dedshott (of the Catapult Cavaliers) and cosseted by his faithful housekeeper Mrs Flittersnoop, the Professor dispenses wisdom, advice, loose spectacles and howls of laughter to all and sundry.

Probably out of print, it might be possible to find a copy online or in a second hand bookstore. Whatever age you are, there are plenty of laughs to be had when the Professor is about.

[Anthony Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor branestawm is great fun, in my view this is one of the funniest series of children's books of all time. The stories are not doing anything too clever but the writing is very charming and the gags all hit.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another dose of nostalgia. Terribly dated, but still amusing. Maybe even more so because it smacks of an era long departed.

[Adrian Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure how much my 9yo understands of the manic and playful language, but he enjoys the characterisation.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

P9 ...and found the Professor surrounded by unreasonable machinery and super-charged science.”

[AmbWitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Peculiar Triumph of Professor Branestawm is about an eccentric scientist whose inventions wreak havoc in a series of humorous adventures. This was the second time reading this book and although I enjoyed it more as a kid, I didn’t care for it as an adult. I do wonder whether I would have enjoyed it more if I was from an older generation. It was written for a generation of kids that I never belonged to, and although I enjoyed it as a child, I feel that had I been a child when it was written, I would have enjoyed it more, and perhaps had more nostalgic ties to it as an adult.

[bluetyson]

isbn,original