oz.Typewriter

This is an image of the envious and socially ambitious New Jersey housewife Mrs Anna Johnson Dunn Pollard, a mother of two young daughters and herself a "Daughter of the American Revolution", who in October 1914 pleaded "non vult" ("no contest") in the infamous "lady with the serpent typewriter" case in Elizabeth City, Union County. She was fined $100 on each of two indictments. The Richmond Times-Dispatch surely understated matters when in January 1915 it described the fines as a "gentle sentence".

Mrs Pollard was said in court to have used as her "serpent typewriter" to write "poisoned letters" a "somewhat battered Remington No 2 typewriter" - although Mrs Pollard claimed she had only bought her one typewriter in 1913. This statement, it seems, had been a vain attempt to throw investigators off the scent of a trail of defamatory letters which had been typed on the same Remington No 2 since at least 1909.

The engraving above - from a photograph taken on one of the few occasions Mrs Pollard had lifted some her layers of white veils in court - appeared on the front page of the Evening Independent in St Petersburg, Florida, on October 28, 1914, just after Mrs Pollard had ended the long-running "poison typewriter mystery" with a full confession.

Mrs Pollard, the wife of Nebraska-born Public Service Corporation assistant electrical engineer Nelson Levi Pollard (1868-1933), was born in Hillsboro, Ohio, on December 5, 1870. She died on June 7, 1947, aged 76.

The more contentious typewritten letters began to appear in the summer of 1911. And when Canadian-born dentist's wife Florence Jones, a neighbour of the Pollards, received one in November 1912, she immediately suspected Mrs Pollard. Mrs Jones and her husband, Charles Frederick Jones, employed a private detective, Thomas L.Carey, to gather evidence against Mrs Pollard. Carey, however, found that the social and professional positions of the upper middle class Pollards made his task very difficult.

A very mild example of the anonymous letters sent to Florence Jones by Anna Pollard. This image appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on January 24, 1915. The allegation about Edith Jones appears to relate to a Bennett or Junior typewriter.

Florence Jones was the target of most of the typewritten venom. It took more than two years to entrap Mrs Pollard and to get her to confess.

According to The New York Times, the case "stirred Elizabeth more than any other event of recent years, for its various threads included nearly a score of persons prominent in the city and was said by many to have originated from social ambitions and social jealousies". The Times reported that Prosecutor Stein had told a jury at the first hearing against Mrs Pollard, "the case was of greater importance to the State of New Jersey than to any human individual. It has been necessary for the State to pass laws against writers of letters that are unsigned. It has been shown that the receipt of these letters undermines the health of the receivers. It is proved that these letters destroy the happiness of the home and often separate members of the family."

Mrs Jones was accused in the letters of having "no social standing" and of only owning three dresses when she got married.

The "poison typewriter" letters contained many other "cat-like, scurrilous, improper and downright indecent" expressions and allegations. One told Dr Jones his two sisters-in-law were "thick as Jersey 'skeeters'" (whatever that means).

Mrs Pollard was first arrested on May 31, 1913, on a charge of typewriting "improper" letters. When the court case opened before Judge Owen Patrick Mahon on June 9, New Jersey police were expecting the largest crowd ever to jam into the Elizabeth City Hall courtroom. US Postal inspectors were among those attending, with a view to pressing further charges, of misuse of mail, against Mrs Pollard. As well, the Masonic Order was represented, fearing one of the letters revealed the first three secret decrees of Masonry.

In her defence, Mrs Pollard said she herself had received a poison typewriter letter in August 1909 and that Dr Jones' sister-in-law, Edith Jones, had often visited her and used her typewriter. Former Pollard servants, Anna Soper and Minnie Schier, gave evidence supporting this claim, but Edith's husband Tom countered that his wife did not know how to use a typewriter.

On August 8, 1913, Mrs Pollard was rearrested on a Federal warrant by US Marshal Beekman and US Postal inspector Frank A. Butler, after investigations by Butler, county detective John Gallatine and the Joneses' detective Carey. Mrs Pollard appeared before US Commissioner Stockton, charged with mailing "objectionable matters". This time the complaint had come from a Dr Charles H. Schlichter. Apparently these letters contained particularly nasty claims concerning the Schlichter's seven-year-old son Gerard, who suddenly died a year later following the funeral of his grandmother.

A forensic typewritten document expert, Frank J. Hayes, testified on August 12, 1913, saying that on April 29 that year he had managed to obtain a specimen of the work of Mrs Pollard's Remington No 2 typewriter by going to her house and passing himself off as a typewriter salesman.

After several adjournments, the case resumed in the Union county court on March 10, 1914, when the great typewriter forensic expert William J. Kinsley (1866-1916) was called and gave evidence for 10 hours. He said, based on imperfections in the "h", "e", "i', "o' and "u" letters, all the poison typewriter letters, as well as one sent by Mrs Pollard to the Elizabeth postmaster in 1909, were written on the same machine.

On March 12, Judge James C. Connolly, calling for order during a heated courtroom argument between Prosecutor Stein and Mrs Pollard's counsel Samuel Schleimer, slammed his gavel so vigorously it broke, the flying head of it just missing Stein's head.

The next day Mrs Pollard was acquitted by the jury, after five hours of deliberation. But soon the poison typewriter letters began arriving again at the Joneses' house.

Frank Butler had arranged for two "decoy" letters, addressed to the Joneses, to be delivered to the Pollards. Mrs Pollard had opened them, written more allegations in the letters with her typewriter, then re-sealed the letters and re-posted them.

Finally, completely entrapped, Mrs Pollard confessed on the night of October 24, 1914.

It is always a delight to discover the provenance of a typewriter. That enchantment, it seems, is all the more heightened when the discovery is made by sheer chance, many years after having been given the typewriter. And it's impossible to beat when the "chronology of ownership" is heavily laden with Australian history.
Take the case of my little three-bank folding Bijou. Well, actually, don't take its case - which is a gorgeous, round-topped dark brown leather case, looking a little like what we in Australia might identify as a bowling bag (that is, for lawn bowls).
Two weeks ago, after making some hard decisions about which typewriters I wanted to keep, I was prepared to gift the Bijou to a very dear friend in the US, an extremely generous friend who had expressed an interest in it. However, as he was paying for two other typewriters and high shipping costs, and already had a folding Erika three-bank, he decided not to take up the offer. Any slight disappointment I might have felt was soon dissipated.
One week ago, after being asked by the National Museum of Australia about typewriters used in World War I by our war correspondents, I did a bit more research into the matter and found that Remington was selling Bijous in Australia, in competition with Corona 3s, in 1914.
This came as a bit of a surprise, and led me to revisit my Bijou, viewing it from a slightly changed perspective. As I was aware this Bijou had been owned by an Australian, I guess I should have known better, but it had never occurred to me that a German portable would have been on sale in this country during the war years. I just assumed it had been brought to Australia by its original owner.
Yesterday, as I continued to research typewriters being sold in Australia in 1914, I came across a rather startling little item from the Sydney Sunday Times of March 12, 1914, while trawling through the National Library of Australia's Trove digital archives. Here it is:

I readily confess I'd not previously heard of the Reverend Robert Brodribb Stewart Hammond, and that ignorance represents what had been a significant gap in my knowledge of Australian history. The Reverend Hammond, I soon found, deserves to be regarded as an Australian saint - and I'm sure that if his calling had been as a Roman Catholic, he'd already be high on the list of candidates to be canonised. It wasn't difficult to find out about him. There is a long entry on the Reverend Hammond in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

The Reverend Robert Hammond

I'll come back to that. My first reaction on reading the newspaper item was to wonder whether the portable typewriter given to Hammond by the reformed drunkards in 1914 was a Bijou. Well, it had to be either a Bijou or a Corona 3, as strictly speaking no other true portable typewriters were available for sale in this country at that time. A Bijou cost £15, which presumably was within the collective reach of the former "down and outs".
Behind my first thought was a recollection that, when I was told by its donor that he was giving me his grandfather's Bijou, back in 2009, Rob Glasson mentioned the original owner had been a man of the cloth. But the details were sketchy. The donation itself came in unusual circumstances. I was in a hotel room in Oriental Bay in Wellington, New Zealand, when I was awoken by a cell phone call from Rob at 4.30 one morning. To cut a long story short, I arranged with Rob for him to deliver the Bijou to my work place in Canberra after I'd returned to Australia.
To say I was thrilled when I eventually received it is an understatement. Yet little did I know then - or until yesterday - what a story it could tell.
Rob's name was on my list of donors, and I had a vague memory he lived somewhere around Kiama in New South Wales. The only Rob Glasson I could find in the White Pages was a retired pilot, now a budding author, who lives in Coonamble, a long way from the coast. This Rob Glasson, however, was very helpful when I explained my quest. He put me in touch with distant relatives in Kiama, and through them I was able to contact the Rob Glasson I was after.
Rob told me what he knew of the Bijou's provenance, and armed with that information I was able to establish that it was indeed the portable typewriter gifted to the Reverend Hammond in Sydney in 1914. Rob's maternal grandfather was the Reverend Samuel Raymond Robbins, a Methodist minister who was born in Thirroul, New South Wales, north of Kiama, in 1890. He died at Parramatta in August 1953. (Thirroul is where D.H.Lawrence wrote Kangaroo in 1922.) The Reverend Robbins was an avid collector of antiques and he and the Reverend Hammond were good friends who lived close to one another during their various postings, first in the Sydney area in the 1930s and later in Northern New South Wales in the early 1940s. On at least one occasion in the mid-1930s they even preached together, though Hammond was an Anglican and Robbins a Methodist.
In March 1935, the Reverend Hammond's Bijou was stolen. Upon its return to him, perhaps feeling it was either past its "use by" date, or was "soiled goods", he decided to give it to the Reverend Robbins, knowing of Robbins' interest in collectibles and presumably thinking the Bijou already was one. After all, as a three-bank folding typewriter, it was well and truly outmoded technology at that point.

So there it is, an amazingly colourful if chequered chronological history of my Bijou! So pleased was I to uncover these details, I immediately sat down and typed on the Bijou. Given all it has been through these past 100 years, it typed remarkably well:

Now, for the story of the Reverend Hammond:

Robert Brodribb Stewart Hammond, Anglican clergyman, evangelist and social reformer, was born on June 12, 1870, at Brighton, Melbourne. He was educated at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, where he was school captain in 1888, and exhibited the sporting prowess which later took him into the Essendon Australian football team that won the Victorian Football League premiership in 1897.

Hammond was made a deacon by the bishop of Melbourne on May 20, 1894, and ordained priest in 1896. He moved to Sydney in 1899 and was organising missioner for the Mission Zone Fund of the Church Society in 1904-11, working within the congested areas of Waterloo, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills, Redfern and Darlington. His vigorous programme of pastoral care and evangelism made him familiar with the social problems of Sydney's slums. In 1918 he became the rector of St Barnabas, Broadway, where he remained until 1943. Hammond restored St Barnabas from decline to vigorous life. The Wednesday night men's meetings proved popular, while the noticeboard fronting Broadway became famous for the weekly 'sermon-in-a-sentence': 'Drink promises you heaven, but gives you hell!'

One of the best-known Australian churchmen of his day, Hammond regarded himself primarily as an evangelist, and his zeal, commanding presence, compelling oratory and gift of repartee led many to Christian commitment. His concern for the 'whole man' and his knowledge of life in the slums convinced him that spiritual welfare was intimately related to general well-being. Appalled by problems associated with alcohol, he became an advocate of total prohibition and a leader of the temperance movement, revelling in the nickname of 'the Wowser'.

Another striking personal initiative took Hammond daily for years to the 'drunks' yard' at Central Police Court, where, from 1912, he was permitted to talk to those awaiting appearance in court. Before handing over to a special missioner he had personally interviewed over 100,000 people, of whom 20,000 had signed the pledge. As a temperance leader, Hammond was well known beyond Australia and attended international conferences on alcoholism in North America. His experiences led to the publication of With One Voice: A Study in Prohibition in the USA.

Also known as 'Mender of Broken Men', Hammond in 1908 established, in an old warehouse at Newtown, his first Hammond Hotel to rehabilitate some of Sydney's destitute. By 1933 there were eight (and a family 'hotel' at Glebe). Deploring cold charity, he aimed at restoring hope and self-esteem to his 'guests' as well as providing temporary assistance. The diverse forms of relief organised at St Barnabas in the Depression were placed under its registered charity, Hammond's Social Services, which by the time of his retirement administered relief, Police Court work, and a Children's Court and Family Welfare Bureau.

His greatest single achievement in social reform was Hammondville. Suspicious of radical ideology, Hammond saw in the 'back to the land' movement a partial solution to the steep rise in homelessness, a means of encouraging independence and self-esteem through home ownership, and a bulwark against communism. In 1933 a company, Hammond's Pioneer Homes Ltd, was set up and by 1937, on land purchased near Liverpool, 100 homes had been built to house families with at least three children and a father unemployed at time of settlement. Settlers were helped to find employment, could buy their homes by easy instalments, and supplement wages by home-grown food. Hammondville won recognition as an important model for small-scale land settlement.

Hammond died of cardiac failure on May 12, 1946, aged 75.

He was tolerant of other persuasions and was a man of enormous energy, intensity and complexity of character. Deeply compassionate and capable of great patience, he could also erupt in bursts of anger, but he had pre-eminently the gift of appealing to a diversity of people, from the destitute and struggling to civic and business leaders who supported his projects with money and expertise.

A collection of colour typewriter images from around the world. I gathered them for no other reason than they appealed to me, and gave me my own ideas:

The former British Olivetti Typewriter Company factory in Glasgow, built at a time, immediately after Word War II, when the British Government actively fostered foreign investment and economic growth in Scotland. The Government will now have to start talking turkey to the Scots again, starting with a tax upheaval.

Those days are passed now

And in the past they must remain

But we can still rise now

And be the nation again

- Flower of Scotland, the unofficial Scottish national anthem

The Scottish Commonwealth Games team uniform

After a brief highland fling with Scottish nationalism while Glasgow hosted the Commonwealth Games (once known as the British Empire Games) from July 23-August 3, Scotland yesterday came back down to earth and voted 55.3 per cent-44.7 per cent to not break free from the United Kingdom. The sighs of relief could be heard from Whitehall to the Royal Mile. For the time being, at least, the Union Jack retains its dash of blue and Britain's stockpile of nuclear weapons stays put, north of the Borders.

Meanwhile, in Scottish-influenced New Zealand, it seems voters will also opt for the status quo, and return conservative party Prime Minister John Key to power in the national election tomorrow. The good news is that if Key is retained, he has promised to hold a referendum on the national flag and the Union Jack may disappear completely from its top left corner.

I do hope that Key, if he holds on to the prime ministership, will prove to be as good as his word. The latest poll on the flag question, in July last year, showed 61 per cent of New Zealanders wanted a change, to something more akin to the Canadian flag - which means, of course, sans the Union Jack.

An independent Scotland would have been happy to hold on to St Andrew's Cross. Which is just as well, since the thistle is no maple leaf and a tartan flag might be a wee bit too much. (I do quite like the rampant red lion on a yellow background, however.)

For New Zealand, I'd love to see the national symbol, the silver fern, feature prominently if a new national flag is to be introduced. It could still corporate the four stars representing the Southern Cross.

The silver fern was embraced as the official emblem of the New Zealand rugby union team, the All Blacks, in 1892, and was soon adopted by other sporting teams and as a national symbol in all spheres. It was the idea of a great rugby player, Thomas Rangiwahia Ellison (1866-1904), who captained the All Blacks in 1893 and devised the lethal 2-3-2 scrum. In 1891 he became one of the first Maori solicitors.

But back to Scotland. At least 90 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote in yesterday's independence referendum. Like Tom Ellison 91 years earlier, I was on a rugby trip to Edinburgh in March 1979 when the first Scottish devolution vote was held, and while 51.6 per cent supported the proposal, the turnout was a mere 64 per cent, meaning the "Yes" vote was only worth 32.9 per cent of the registered electorate, short of the required 40 per cent. I felt disappointed in the outcome back then, but progress has been made.

As for Australia, no new flag, nor a republican, appears to be on the horizon. If a new flag is introduced in New Zealand before 2017, it would be acutely embarrassing for this country.

Regardless of what happens in the coming years, Scotland already has one advantage over Australia and New Zealand: it was the home of at least two typewriter factories, both in Glasgow - one owned by Remington and the other by Olivetti:

From A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind, by Roy Sorensen, professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College.

In Van Quine's obituary, written by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times said, "Although a 'Quine' is defined in the New Hackers Dictionary as 'a program that generates a copy of its own source text as its complete output', Van Quine never wrote on a computer, always preferring the 1927 Remington typewriter that he first used for his doctoral thesis."

Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908-December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of logic and set theory, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. A poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries.

New Zealand's telegraphic typewriter inventor Donald Murray:

New Zealand Free Lance (Auckland), March 14, 1914

New Zealand's cypher typewriter inventor Morgan Cyprian McMahon O'Brien:

"Britain's 'Enigma'" - Intelligence and Strategy: Selected Essays (2005)

Slanderer: Wenger

*Patterson, Louisana-born Rear Admiral Joseph Numa Wenger (1901-1970), who seems to have had such a low opinion of New Zealanders and Irishmen, played a leading role in the development of both the US Naval Security Group Command and the US National Security Agency. He was one of the seminal figures in American cryptologic history and, more than anyone else, was responsible for establishing a cryptologic organisation Navy-wide.

Tony Olmo, of Bronx Typewriters, got me started on all this when he pointed me in the direction of a video about an L.C. Smith 8-10 typewriter in a collection at Macoy Publishing in Richmond, Virginia. This typewriter types in lower case Roman characters and, in what appears to be easily decipherable "cypher" text, in upper case "Coptic English" (that is, according to the narrator Martin Faulks. I could find no other reference to "Coptic English" as a "cypher" font.).

Wim Van Rompuy Collection

The Macoy Publishing & Masonic Supply Company was established by Robert Macoy (1815-1895), born in Armagh, Ulster, Northern Ireland, a prominent freemason. He is described by Faulks as an "avid code breaker", but of course Macoy was long dead before this particular model of the L.C. Smith was made. Faulks, an Englishman, is known as "the Norwich Ninja", an author, martial artist and "esotericist", whose interests include freemasonry. His video concerns a 2007 book called Committed to the Flames: The History and Rituals of a Secret Masonic Rite, by Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris.
Anyway, getting on to more serious (typewriter) matters, Tony's email led me to a search of cypher typewriters (not sure that I would call the videoed L.C. Smith one, as it strikes me as a bit too simplistic to be called a cypher machine).
Before embarking on this hunt, I had been giving a lot of thought to Donald Murray, the former Auckland and Sydney newspaper journalist who invented a telegraphic typewriter.

The Northern Miner (Charters Towers), May 21, 1914

The reason for my renewed interest in Murray is that is a 100 years this year since Murray's far-sighted invention was launched in the United States and Britain.

And on Friday, smack bang in the middle of my cypher typewriter quest and thoughts of Murray, a researcher from Auckland University rang to say his university was planning an exhibition to celebrate the fact Murray had attended that seat of learning. Not sure how the university had stumbled across Murray - maybe my thoughts had been transmitted across the Tasman, through some sort of magical Murray process. The researcher was unaware this was a Murray "centenary year", but was nonetheless already well versed on Murray's life and times. One thing he is keen to know is whether any of Murray's machines have survived - in Switzerland, perhaps? Murray, battling a brain tumour, had moved to Switzerland in the early 1940s and he died, aged 79, at Territet, a suburb of the town of Montreux, on July 14, 1945. His childless widow Patricia remained in nearby Veytaux.

My chance discovery of Murray came about rather fortuitously, in March 2012, when I found and translated a Japanese entry from Koichi Yasuoka. I was stunned to realise Murray and his inventions were so little known. In the English language, at least, Murray had been completely forgotten about to that time. There was a lot of interest in my Murray blog post, and subsequently he found his way on to Wikipedia (I didn't write that sketchy entry, I hasten to add). However, Murray has yet to be recognised by either the Australian or New Zealand dictionaries of biography.

The New Zealand Herald (Auckland), January 13, 1930

Tony Olmo's email last week and my search for cypher typewriters immediately put me on to yet another completely forgotten yet ingenious New Zealand inventor, Morgan Cyprian McMahon O'Brien. Like Murray, O'Brien has no entry in Te Ara's New Zealand Dictionary of Biography, and there is incredibly little known about him. There are some scan references to him online, mostly just to his patents.

O'Brien was born in Auckland on September 25, 1886. His father, Charles, came from Youghal in the south of Ireland, once the home of Sir Walter Raleigh. Although O'Brien finished high in the New Zealand civil service examinations in 1904, when was 17, by 1911 he had became a miner. And not just in any mine, but at the infamous Waihi mine in the Hauraki district. Indeed, he was working there during the tragic miners' strike of 1912. O'Brien continued to work in gold mines in the Thames Valley district until 1914, when he enlisted as a field artillery gunner in the main body of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force headed for Egypt and Gallipoli. He survived the war, returned to New Zealand, then left for Sydney in the early 1920s, travelling on to Vancouver and through Montreal for London, apparently with a wife and father-in-law.

What happened to him beyond that time I cannot say, but these extracts from a chapter called 'Britain's "Enigma"' in the 2005 book Intelligence and Strategy: Selected Essays , by John Robert Ferris, tell something of O'Brien's later career:

In one of the added scenes, Willard is kept in a metal shipping container called a "Conex", while Kurtz, surrounded by children, sits outside the doors and reads several Time Magazine articles detailing America's success in the war.

- Speaking With Conrad

Coppola at an Olivetti DL

PS: One theory has it that the character of the manic American photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper, was in part based on Sean Flynn, son of Australian-born actor Errol Flynn. Flynn disappeared on April 6, 1970, aged 28. He was a freelance photojournalist best known for his coverage of the Vietnam War.

Boston Globe correspondent Eugenia Williamson paid a visit to writer Ben Mezrich in his office earlier this month. The Globe's Essdras M. Suarez took this photo of "some details of Mezrich's working space". Lovely Royal typewriter, Ben. Resin? Modern Chinese, perhaps? (Ben's wife, by the way, is not called Bugsy, that's his dog. The wife's name is Tonya M. Chen.)

The image appeared in the Globe under the headline, "Writes At The Top Of The Pru", referring to the second-from-top floor of the Prudential Centre. It begins, "Ben Mezrich’s office was once his bachelor pad. It has been given a new Mad Men-like look thanks to his wife.""I still call it my man cave," says Ben. "It used to have air hockey and fish tanks and leather couches ..." Now it's got a resin typewriter!

In reference to branching out into declared fiction, Ben mentions reviews of his work written by Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Ms Maslin has been relentlessly scathing, calling Mr Mezrich a "baloney artist". Wait till she finds out about his typewriter!

"[Ray Parkin's Prisoner of War] writings have a Homeric quality, not in the sense of celebrating battlefield virtuosity, but in their poetic largeness of spirit, in their refusal to peddle shibboleths or to buckle to self-pity, and in a pervasive if discriminating generosity that recognises the maimed humanity of the Japanese captor, men like the prisoners themselves entrapped by the all-in viciousness of war."

"For a maritime nation such as Australia, truly girt by sea, the dearth of knowledge of our naval history and its contribution to nation-building, in particular in the human quotient, is disappointing. Some call it 'sea-blindness' and it is something we must all work to correct."

- Reviews of Pattie Wright's 2012 book,Ray Parkin's Odyssey

This drawing of what the prisoners termed "Changi University", by Australian official war artist Vaughan Murray Griffin, was made in the infamous Changi Prisoner of War camp in Singapore in 1943.

An example of the watercolour artwork of Ray Parkin, of a will-o'-the-wisp beetle given to him in 1944 by fellow prisoner of war (later Sir) Weary Dunlop.

Author Ray Parkin at his Olivetti Studio typewriter at his home in Ivanhoe, Melbourne, in 1956, when he started writing his trilogy based on his prisoner of war diaries.

Raymond Edward Parkin was an Australian sailor, writer, artist and historian, noted for his memoirs of World War II and a major work on James Cook's Endeavour voyage. He was born in Collingwood, Melbourne, on November 6, 1910. After leaving school at 14, Parkin worked for an engraver and then joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1928 . By 1939 he was chief petty officer on board the Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth. The Perth saw duty in both the Mediterranean and South-East Asia theatres of war. Before that her sole peaceful mission was a trip to New York to represent Australia at the 1939 World's Fair.

Parkin survived the sinking of Perth in the Sunda Straits off Java in March 1942 and spent 11 hours in the water. Washed ashore on a small island, he and nine others tried to make it back to Australia in a lifeboat called Anzac. However, after 16 days at sea they became prisoners of war at Tjilatjap. Parkin was imprisoned in Bandoeng camp and worked on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway. In March 1944 he was shipped to Japan and became a labourer in an underground coalmine near Ohama.

A video interview with Parkin about working on the Thai-Burma railway and Hellfire Pass can be seen here.

During his imprisonment Parkin became a close friend of fellow prisoners (later Sir) Ernest Edward "Weary" Dunlop, the Australian surgeon renowned for his leadership of prisoners, and (later Sir) Laurens Jan van der Post, an Afrikaner author, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist. When Parkin was shipped to Japan, Dunlop kept Parkin's collection of drawings and diary notes in a false bottom of his operating table.

Parkin at his Olivetti Studio typewriter

Van der Post encouraged Parkin to write and introduced him to Hogarth Press, established by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Hogarth published Parkin's war trilogy, Out of the Smoke (1960), Into the Smother (1963) and The Sword and the Blossom (1968).

In 1997 Parkin published in two volumes a book about Cook’s 1770 voyage : H.M. Bark Endeavour: Her Place in Australian History. Parkin started researching the voyage in December 1967 after coming across an inaccurate picture of the ship while looking for a representation upon which to base a Christmas card. The research took 13 years, and it then took another 17 years to find a publisher. But finally Parkin's work restored the reputation of Sydney Parkinson, a draftsman on the voyage. Received wisdom had been that Parkinson had taken artistic license, since his drawings seemed inexact and differed from Admiralty plans.

Parkin died in Melbourne on June 19, 2005, aged 94. A book about his life, Ray Parkin's Odyssey, by Pattie Wright, was published in 2012. See here.

Was a national day of mourning declared in Mexico on Thursday, December 11, 1958, the day its former "king", William Archer Parker, died in Waco, Texas, at the ripe old age of 88?

Well no, actually. When one goes looking for Mexican royalty, there isn't a lot to be found. Just a couple of 19th century emperors, and that's about it. Oh, and I rate Miguel Ángel Chávez Silva pretty highly, too. A while back Mr Bojangles did ask about Mexican royalty and "high" society on Yahoo!, and got the answer, "Cheech and Chong".

So what about Smokin' Bill Parker?

It turns out the "long, lank Kentucky youth" was no mere figment of the fertile imagination of the advertising department of the Oliver Typewriter Company in Chicago, Illinois. He really did exist. And to prove it, here's his passport photograph from 1919, with his wife Bertie Ellen Blanchard Parker:

In 1911, Oliver's ad men would have had us believe that Bill Parker became a king in Mexico. Well, a Typewriter King, anyway. Same thing, no?

"You, too, can be a king ... just promote Oliver typewriters" - which surely must make Marty Rice the King of Jonnstown, Pennsylvania.

William Archer Parker was born on October 25, 1870, in Parkersville, Kentucky, and grew up on a farm at Bishops Mill. For a monarch, he came from fairly humble stock - his father, Joe, was a commoner who worked the land.

He may not have exactly become a real king in Mexico, but Bill did well enough there. In 1926, the United States Government took its Mexican counterpart to the General Claims Commission chasing $39,000 and five cents it reckoned Bill's company, Compaňia Parker SA, was owed. See here for details:

Bill took up residence in Mexico City in 1897 - he was hardly a "youth" at age 27. After taking on the Oliver typewriter agency, he formed his own office supplies company on December 8, 1911, and returned to Waco three years later.

Thereafter he ran the Mexican concern from Texas:

It was still trading under its original name in 1922. But in 1919 Bill had set up another Oliver distribution company, in San Antonio:

One of the Olivers which presumably was sold in Mexico by Bill Parker is this truly magnificent 1912 beast in Richard Polt's collection:

Richard also has one of the Mexican L-12s from 1923. The name William A.Parker can be seen on the front plate:

Note how the typeslugs have been cut in such a way so the larger notes can fit snugly together in the typebasket.

On the evening of my typewriter Pecha Kucha presentation during the Zine Festival back in March, I got chatting to two ladies representing the National Library of Australia at the event. They seemed genuinely interested in typewriters, so I told them about the Olympia Musicwriter the library held. I knew it was there, because I had been offered a brief glimpse of it on a visit to the library in 2006.

The younger lady, Kristen Gidney, from the library legal deposit and acquisitions department in the Australian contemporary publications section, took a particular interest in this and decided to take it upon herself to lure the machine out from the bowels of the library.

At about the same time that I viewed the Musicwriter in the National Library, in early June, I found online that the same model had been passed in on US eBay for under $35 (bear in mind these things weight more than 20kg, or 44lbs). But the one for sale in the US was made in the US. So was the one that the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has (which the Powerhouse dates to 1980). Until I saw this Musicwriter, I was unaware Olympia had had a plant in Mexico.

The wheels of bureaucracy apparently turn quite slowly at the library and it took Kristen fully two months to track down the Musicwriter in the manuscripts and pictures section, and to get permission for her and I to have a close look at it. That viewing took another week to organise.

I get the impression these machines were made individually, on a one-off basis, on order to Cecil Effinger's Music Print Corporation in Boulder, Colorado. Seemingly, once ordered, the Musicwriter was then made on commission for Effinger. Effinger died in Boulder on December 22, 1990, so he was still around when these were made. Note, below, that the Musicwriter is "custom modified" by Effinger's Music Print Corporation. Does this mean it was modified in Boulder, Colorado? Seems possible. This model was sold by Admiral Office Machines of Frenchs Forest, Sydney.

The serial number didn't offer me any clues as to its year of manufacture - M8-5571415. It's a wide carriage SG-3, and presumably "M" stands for Musicwriter. On the Typewriter Database, Javier Vazquez del Olmo's SG-3 has the serial number 7-2600617, so perhaps '8' signifies a later version?

Cecil Stanley Effinger (1914-1990).

See my post on music-writing typewriters here.

In the meantime, Kristen had mentioned that the Musicwriter was being dragged out for inspection in some sort of internal communiqué. I must say it was such a pleasant surprise to turn up on the day and find so much interest in a typewriter. There must have been more than 20 staff members in the room, most of them in the 20s-30s range, all craning their necks, eager to take a good look at this example of obsolete technology. Kristen compared the scene with a "pack of puppies at feeding time". To be able to get up close to something so completely different in typewriters even tickled my own jaded appetite. I found the various modifications, and their purpose, quite fascinating.

Unlike the earlier R.C.Allen version of this machine, the Olympia Musicwriter is set up to only use carbon ribbon. The carbon ribbon, of course, can only be used once, therefore this piece of wire ensures the direction of the ribbon movement is not reversed.

The R.C.Allen version was set up to use carbon and conventional ribbon

When I used this typewriter in June, the imprint was remarkably clear and crisp - I can well understand why donor Michael Wade would describe it as "engraving". To the naked eye, it was if the sheet music had been printed on a press.

The high-reaching ribbon vibrator and open printing point are obviously set up in such a way as to allow for the larger music notes:

Even after the viewing, however, I still had to get permission to publish online photos I had taken of the Musicwriter. Such a rigmarole! Anyway, Kristen herself posted on the machine, on the library's "Behind the Scenes" blog. Her story can be seen here. Yesterday she was also interviewed on ABC radio about it. See here to read about this and listen to the interview.

The line spacing mechanism has been disabled and the carriage lever removed. These embossed lines on the platen knob appear to give the user the only indication of the required spacing when writing sheet music. The platen must be very carefully turned to maintain correct alignment. Creating the horizontal and vertical lines must have been extremely time consuming and required considerable skill, let alone the positioning of the notes. Effinger updated his patents for "free platen typewriters" in 1968 (R.C.Allen) and 1976 (IBM). Was an IBM Musicwriter ever made? In 1968, Effinger also adapted his musicwriter patent for a "diagram typewriter".

Below, R.C.Allen version

While all this has been going on, I have been trying in vain to track down and talk to the donor, Australian musician and composer Michael Wade, who gave the machine to the library in 2003. This is as much as I can tell you:

Wade was born in Sydney on April 17, 1947. In 1960 he co-founded the pop band The Ramblers, starting a career as a professional musician that spanned almost 40 years. In 1963, the Ramblers became The Midnighters and signed their first recording contract. RCA released the band's first single, surfie song Goofy Foot, written by Wade, that year. Between 1965-68, the band's basic line-up performed as Climax. Wade performed for the US Army in Vietnam in 1968-69. In 1972, Wade's exceptional technical abilities as a guitarist resulted in his appointment to the Australian production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Michael Wade, third from left, with some of the the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar in Holyoake, Massachusetts, in 1971. Wade, who played Peter in this production, is behind singer Yvonne Elliman.

In 1974, the rhythm section of the band Wade led for JCS formed itself into the band Baxter Funt, which regularly backed Marcia Hines at the start of her career and provided musical backing for Reg Livermore's stage shows, such as Betty Blockbuster Follies. Wade was also musical director, arranger and conductor for the stage show Hair in 1977-78. During the 1980s he operated his own studio in Bondi and worked as a sheet music arranger-engraver. His use of computer music in the rock opera Rasputin made him an Australian pioneer in the field. In the 1990s, he worked as arranger, composer and musical director for various corporate events and in 2001 began writing semi-autobiographical fiction.

My take on these Musicwriters is that they were specifically made to individual orders. Someone who wanted one approached Cecil Effinger's company, which would then commission one to be made. There wouldn't have been too many customers – given the design and the Effinger modifications, these typewriters had but one function and one function only, to write sheet music. That being the case, to want one, and to get Effinger to commission one to be built, meant the cost would have been quite considerable. And who is going to buy one now? Quite apart from the very limited use one could put such a machine to (and the skill required to operate it efficiently), the considerable weight means shipping them around the world would be massive on its own.

'I think that I know thoroughly every phase of life in Australia I write of; that I absorb the life of our people and country with love and an intense and intimate sympathy; I strive to express myself from those sources … My defect as a writer is probably that I am too much of the soil. But I'd rather be that and fall from universal standards than be less the medium for expression of this place and people.'

- Katharine Susannah Prichard

I feel deeply honoured to be the custodian, for sadly all too brief a time, of the Remington Model 1 portable typewriter upon which the great author Katharine Susannah Prichard wrote her classic Australian novels Working Bullocks and Coonardoo. In less than two weeks' time, when the Remington will be back in its permanent home in Tom Collins House, Swanbourne, Western Australia, the 45th anniversary of Prichard's death will be marked.

Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969),

one of this country's greatest writers.

The author of 13 novels, five collections of short stories, 10 plays, two films, two volumes of verse, and with translations into 13 foreign languages and prizes for a novel, a short story and a play, Katie Prichard once confessed that she had been born "with ink in her veins". She would be delighted to know that, exactly 90 years after buying her Remington portable from Chartres in Perth, there is still some of that ink left in her typewriter's ribbon.

For Miles Franklin, Prichard's Working Bullocks represented "the breaking of a drought" in Australian novel writing. Now, for at least a few days, Franklin's Corona 3 portable typewriter sits just feet away from Prichard's Remington portable. What poetic justice!

Prichard's Remington portable has been entrusted to me by the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Western Australia), of which Prichard was a founder and life member.

So delighted was the fellowship with the work I did in tidying up Joseph Furphy's New Franklin typewriter exactly one year ago, it has sent me Prichard's Remington. Furphy wrote his great Australian novel Such Is Life on the Franklin in 1903. The Franklin is now back in Western Australia, encased in a Perspex box and on display at Tom Collins House (see image below).

Back to my latest house guest, which, after an aborted attempt to get it to Canberra four months ago, arrived here this morning. It is in serious need of some TLC after more than 40 years of neglect. Prichard's Remington portable had been given the fellowship in 1973, just four years after her death, by her friend Annette Cameron. It was on open display, with its right side exposed to a window, hence the evident damage.

Working Bullocks, which dramatised the physical and emotional traumas of timber workers in the karri country of Australia's south-west, was published in 1926. Coonardoo, a candid, sensitive and often poetic novel about a sexual relationship between a black woman and a white man, was notorious in 1928, even before it was published. Prichard submitted the manuscript under a male pseudonym ("Jim Ashburton") to the Bulletin’s £500 annual literary competition. It won equal first prize over the opposition of one of the judges, who protested that a white man could never feel any "higher emotion" than pity for an Aboriginal woman. When the Bulletin serialised the novel, in 15 weekly instalments from September 5, 1928, the magazine was inundated with so many letters of outrage that its editor refused to publish any further writing on the subject. Prichard’s hopes of publishing the book in Australia also came to nothing. George Robertson, the crusty head of Angus & Robertson, was quoted as saying that his firm had already done its "fair share of presenting to the world pictures of hardships and 'sordidity'". He knocked the novel back, although he suspected it would sell 10,000 copies, a very large number for the time. In the end, Coonardoo was published by Jonathan Cape in London and sold even more strongly than Robertson had predicted. Angus & Robertson finally bought the rights from Cape and published the book in 1954. The novel beautifully depicts the landscape as it was in the mid to late 1920s, when white settlers tried to control more of the bare plains of north-west Australia.

Katharine Susannah Prichard was born to the then Australian editor of the Fiji Times during a hurricane in Levuka on December 4, 1883. She spent her childhood in Launceston, Tasmania, and won a scholarship to South Melbourne College, Victoria, where her father, Tom Henry Prichard, was editor of the Melbourne Sun newspaper. Katharine worked as a governess in South Gippsland and in the far west of New South Wales, and later as a journalist for the Melbourne Herald. The New Idea had initiated her career as a journalist, publishing her prize-winning love story, "Bush Fires", on December 5, 1903, and a six-part romanticised version of her governessing experiences in May-October 1906. "You must make every word count" her editors told her. Her father suicided in 1907, but Katie, bearing a letter of introduction from family friend and former prime minister Alfred Deakin, took the editors' advice on board on an assignment to London and Paris in 1908. There she saw first-hand the misery of starving men and women, the homeless, and the desperation of the hunger marchers. This spurred her search for the way to a fairer world. "I wouldn't have the poor of London on my conscience", she wrote.

Her first novel, The Pioneers (1915), won the £250 Hodder & Stoughton All Empire Literature Prize, enabling Prichard to become Australia's first internationally recognised author.

After Katharine's return to Australia, the romance Windlestraws and her first novel of a mining community, Black Opal, set among the opal miners of Lightning Ridge, were published. In 1920 Prichard moved with her husband Jim Throssell from Melbourne to Greenmount, on the Darling Ranges escarpment outside Perth, Western Australia, and lived at 11 Old York Road for much of the rest of her life.

With fellow Australian author Eleanor Dark at Greenmount in 1948

She used her 1924 Remington portable typewriter to write most of her novels and stories in a self-contained weatherboard workroom near the house. The home has now become the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre, a foundation promoting humanitarianism, the study of Prichard and encouraging writing in Western Australia.

Prichard married war hero and Victoria Cross winner Hugo Vivian Hope 'Jim' Throssell (1884-1933) on January 28, 1919. They had met in London during World War I, when Jim was in a convalescent hospital for Australian soldiers. Their only son, Richard Prichard 'Ric' Throssell (1922-1999) was an Australian diplomat and author whose writings included novels, plays, film and television scripts and memoirs. His career was dogged by unproven allegations that he either leaked classified information to his mother or was a spy for the Soviet Union.

Prichard's husband, VC winner Jim Throssell

An Australian spy agency letter declaring a VC winner suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as "not strong-minded" and Prichard as "dangerous".

Katie Prichard was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia at the end of 1920 and remained a member for the rest of her life. She worked to organise unemployed workers and founded left-wing women's groups, and during the 1930s she campaigned in support of the Spanish Republic and other left-wing causes. While Katie was visiting the Soviet Union during the Depression in 1933, Jim Throssell, unable to find work, obsessed by overwhelming debt and a sense of failure, shot himself (their son also later suicided).

As a pamphleteer and public speaker, Prichard fearlessly and emotionally promoted the cause of peace and social justice. She was awarded the World Peace Council medal in 1959. In 1964 she wrote her autobiography, The Child of the Hurricane (having been born at the height of one in Fiji). It reflected on a lifetime of conflict, triumph, tragedy and unremitting struggle for the things she believed in, including nuclear disarmament.

A stroke that left her unable to move her hand interrupted her last novel, Subtle Flame, dedicated to the peace movement. Prichard died at her home in Greenmount on October 2, 1969, aged 85. Her ashes were scattered on the surrounding hills.

The 1996 Australian film Shine depicts the close correspondence between Prichard and Australian pianist David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush). Prichard helped raise money for Helfgott, to enable him to go to London to study music.

The lady who gave Prichard's Remington portable typewriter to the writers' fellowship was Annette Elizabeth Cameron, née Moore and formerly Aarons (1920-2008), a feminist and political activist. Her political interests were awakened by the Spanish Civil War, which led her to join the Anti-Fascist League and, in 1941, the Communist Party of Australia. Moving to Sydney, she worked for the party, was briefly jailed for her role in a protest supporting Indonesian independence, and developed a friendship with Prichard. Having met prominent communist Sam Aarons in Sydney, she married him and returned to Perth; they had one son, Gerald, in 1949. In the late 1950s Annette and Gerald were flown to China by the Maoist government to visit Sam, who had suffered a heart attack; The West Australian alleged that Mao Zedong was so impressed by her that he "made it clear that a place was waiting for her as his consort". Annette's interests lay in the Australian communist movement, however, and she stood as a candidate for the Senate in 1955 and 1958 and for the House of Representatives in 1966. During the 1960s she was prominent in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Sam Aarons died in 1971 and Annette married Duncan Cameron, who was also an active communist; they were leading organisers of the Vietnam War moratoriums and campaigned for Aboriginal rights.

Bennett's tree-kangaroos are very small by comparison with terrestrial kangaroos. A large red kangaroo can stand as tall as Richard Polt (6ft 7in) and weigh 200lbs. Male Bennett's tree-kangaroos weigh no more than 30lbs. But they are very agile, able to leap 30ft down to another branch, and have been known to drop as far as 59ft to the ground without injury.
The Bennett's tree-kangaroo (Dendrolagus bennettianus) was first described in 1887 by Charles Walter de Vis (1829-1915), clergyman and zoologist who in January 1882 was appointed curator of the Queensland Museum. De Vis named the kangaroo in honour of George Bennett of the Australian Museum in Sydney.

Charles de Vis

George Bennett

George Bennett (1804-1893) was an English-born Australian physician and naturalist. Lured Down Under by the structure and relations of the mammary glands of the Ornithorhynchus anatinus (platypus), Bennett settled in Australia in 1836 and acted as honorary secretary of the Australian Museum, which had just been established. Bennett is commemorated by the scientific names of the dwarf cassowary (Casuarius bennettii) and Bennett's tree-kangaroo.

This very elusive (or "cryptic") tree-kangaroo is found in both mountain and lowland tropical rainforests south of Cooktown in Queensland to just north of the Daintree River. It is also occasionally found in sclerophyll woodlands. It lives almost completely on the leaves of a wide range of rainforest trees, notably the Umbrella tree, vines, ferns and various wild fruits. Now that it is rarely hunted by Aborigines, its main predators are pythons and the dingo and most of its range is now protected under World Heritage legislation. It is thought to be the closest tree-kangaroo to the ancestral form.

I'm feeling a bit like an ancestral tree-kangaroo right now as I try to fathom out the true history of the Bennett typewriter. Can anyone explain to me why, in almost every US advertisement for the Bennett, the words "Bennett Typewriter Company" are preceded by a different set of letters? So far I've found BF, BE, BZ, HI, HH, HG, DG, WK, QC, QD, PM, QH, MC, JM and even CSK, and I feel I'm only just scratching the surface. Is it advertising code, perhaps? Has anyone else ever noticed this? I'm utterly confused.

What I can say is that the inventor, machinist Charles Almon Bennett (born Illinois, August 1847) claimed a Civil War pension (he'd served under the alias of John R. Smith) in 1912 and was well dead by 1918. He had also long since handed over the rights to his design, even before its predecessor, the Junior, was produced in 1907.

Bennett maker: Max Howell Behr, left

The Bennett was manufactured by Elliott-Fisher in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The man most responsible for its production and worldwide sales was Max Howell Behr (1884-1955), the famous golfer, Southern California golf course designer and editor of Golf Magazine. Behr, born in Brooklyn, was the son of industrial magnate Herman Behr, an abrasives manufacturer and president of the Herman Behr Company. At the time the Junior typewriter was invented, Max Behr was a near neighbour of Charles Bennett, living with his family in Morris, New Jersey. After graduating from Yale in 1905, in early October 1910 Behr went to work as a director of Elliott-Fisher, and was given charge of the Bennett.

A quarter of a century after De Vis first described the Bennett's tree-kangaroo, in 1912, Bennett typewriters were introduced to the Australian mainland. They had first appeared in this country two years earlier - in, of all places, Emu Bay, not the one on Kangaroo Island, but the one that is now Burnie in Tasmania.

Emu Bay Times, 1910

Bennett typewriters are very small by any typewriter standards. They were described in this country as a "hip pocket typewriter".

The "0" and the "1" are transposed here

On the mainland, the Bennett was first offered across the country through Anthony Hordern & Sons, the largest department store in Sydney (also once the largest department store in the world). The business was originally established by a free immigrant from Staffordshire, England, Anthony Hordern (1788-1869), in 1823, as a drapery shop. Hordern went on to operate one of the largest mail order businesses in Australia, offering, among many other things, the Bennett typewriter.

The business remained in family hands for a century, and a huge six-storey building was opened by them in 1905, called The Palace Emporium, the main entrance being completely fitted out in imported Italian marble. The massive store was located on the corner of George, Pitt and Goulburn streets in downtown Sydney. One of their advertising slogans was that they sold "anything from a needle to an anchor".

In 1912, the year it introduced the Bennett typewriter to mainland Australia, the business was sold to a private limited liability company with Samuel Hordern Jr as governing director. In April 1926 the mostly family-owned business was sold to a public company set up for the purpose for £2.9 million, the highest sum paid for an Australian business to that date.

(In 1952 Hordern also introduced the Torpedo portable typewriter to Australia, as the Blue Bird).

Between 1912-13, 103 Hordern display advertisements appeared for the Bennett typewriter in newspapers around Australia. Then the advertising abruptly stopped.
One of the more interesting aspects of the advertising is that it was targeted at people living in far-flung, isolated areas of the country - places where one would have been far more likely to see a Bennett's tree-kangaroo. Bennett typewriter adverts mainly appeared in publications such as the Stock and Station Journal and the Wool and Stock Journal.
Across "the ditch" in New Zealand, Bennett typewriters were also seen as a "rural device":

The Bennett typewriter was certainly prized in Australia, especially by people called Bennet:

Helen Garner with her beloved Corona.

This article appeared in the Melbourne Age Spectrum liftout this morning:

Clack of typewriters captivates authors

"When we were young the keys struck the paper with such authority and power that on the other side of the sheet you could feel the indentations with your fingertips," Helen Garner says. "Now that was writing."

By Justine Hyde*

For most of us, the mechanical staccato of the typewriter has faded into memory. The push of the heavy carriage, the slap of the keys striking paper, the fingers ink-stained from replacing ribbons – all sweet nostalgia for an obsolete technology. The digital world marches on.

Not so for a dedicated band of typewriter enthusiasts, collectors and artists who are leading a revival driven by their deep affection for these machines. In fact, some writers never stopped using them. Today, you are more likely to find a vintage typewriter restored for sale in a high-end vintage shop, rather than out on the nature strip for the hard rubbish collection.

Underwood. Hermes. Remington. Olivetti. Brother. Ask any typewriter devotee to name their favourite machine and they will reel off a list of beloved brands.

It was a sleek 1915 black Corona portable that first seduced author Helen Garner. "I was crazy about its romantic brand name," she says. "The smell of oil when I opened the lid of its box made me feel like fainting with happiness." Ernest Hemingway was similarly intoxicated, dedicating a poem to his Corona and stating that it was the only psychiatrist to which he had ever submitted.

Garner's handsome folding typewriter belonged to her grandmother, Alfreda Gadsden, who she describes as "a chic and perfumed person, generous but rather tough". Garner can't remember how old she was when she took possession of the Corona from her grandmother, or whether it was a birthday or Christmas gift. "It just manifested in my life. I mooned around her for a long time, dropping hints about the typewriter. She must have cracked eventually and handed it over," she says.

Garner's fondness for typewriters grew from there. While she flirted with other makes and models, she never parted with her Corona. "I kept it in a cupboard for years, lugging it from house to house whenever I moved, which was often." To add to its charm, Garner discovered that Danish writer Isak Dinesen had owned the same model. "Suddenly my heavy old machine, already hopelessly superseded, seemed even more of a treasure," she says.

Karen Blixen's Corona 3

Garner's devotion is shared by Robert Messenger, owner of the Australian Typewriter Museum in Canberra. Messenger, who revels in the "sheer beauty of the machine with so many variations", says his passion for typewriters was ignited during his days as a print journalist. In the early 1960s, journalists could choose a typewriter and then have their pay docked a few shillings each week to pay for it. "I had eyed a typewriter in the store for months, and when I had the chance, knocked over several little old ladies to get to it," he recalls.

Messenger started seriously collecting when he spotted a shiny black Imperial portable typewriter in a shop on the New South Wales south coast. The real turning point was discovering eBay. At the peak of his collecting, Messenger amassed 903 typewriters. He has since pared this back to 390, displaying 250 of these in his museum. Visitors can try out an impressive array of vintages, from an 1878 Remington through to a 2013 Royal, which is still manufactured in China and sold through Amazon.

The collection springs from Messenger's "great fascination in typewriters as an outmoded technology". For him, their true wonder is the fact that he can take his 1893 Blickensderfer typewriter anywhere, "to the desert, a mountain top, Antarctica – and I can write. I just need paper. The ink is still working after 120 years." No electricity or batteries required.

The functional simplicity and singular purpose of typewriters explains why some writers still prefer to bang out sentences on their keys, shunning computers and their myriad distractions of email and social media. "Once you get onto a typewriter you can forge on with your creative urge," Messenger says.

David Malouf, author of Typewriter Music

Paul Auster, Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy are among the literary heavyweights who favour the cranking carriage and inky ribbon. Closer to home, David Malouf and Les Murray write their poems on typewriters. Messenger reasons that this is because typewriters do not dictate your writing style, for example, by capitalising the beginning of lines of poetry, like Word does.

Throwing off the shackles of digital technology also appeals to Luke Sinclair, a zine-maker and coordinator of Melbourne zine store Sticky Institute. Sinclair uses only typewriters and photocopiers to make his zines. "I don't use computers at all," Sinclair says. "One of the integral parts about a zine is their honesty. With a typewriter you can't get rid of mistakes. Mistakes become an integral part of the finished artwork. I think that's beautiful."

Luke Sinclair

Collectively, typewriter fans form the "typosphere", a community of devotees, collectors, artists and makers. Their analog fetish is on show in blogs, and they gather at "type-ins", events held in bars, bookshops and even on New York City trains and Melbourne trams.

The typewriter revival does not end there. In September, actor Tom Hanks released Hanx Writer, an iPad app that recreates the sound and pace of a manual typewriter.

In 2009, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy's beaten-up Lettera 32 Olivetti was auctioned for more than $US250,000. McCarthy bought the machine in 1963 for $50 and wrote all of his novels over 50 years on the Olivetti. Explaining why a typewriter would fetch such a price, Des Cowley, of the State Library of Victoria, says: "All the value is laden on by the spirit, ambience and the mystique of the object ... not by any integral value". Cowley says visitors to the State Library are fascinated to see the tools that helped authors create their favourite books.

To this end, Helen Garner has loaned her cherished Corona to the library, to be exhibited alongside her manuscript for Monkey Grip. "It's a wonderful narrative and story for people," Cowley says. "It will give a sense of a writer at work."

When Garner agreed to lend her typewriter to the library, the carriage was jammed. Cowley searched the internet and found "Tom the typewriter guy" in Carlton.

Tom Koska

Tom Koska has been fixing and selling typewriters since the 1960s in his Elgin Street store. "He's one of the few ... left in Melbourne who can go under the bonnet of a typewriter and fix it," Cowley says. "I went to visit him and he remembered Helen [Garner] coming in, in the 1970s. She bought some of her early typewriters from him. He was really chuffed to be working on her typewriter again."

It was the curious hands of Garner's granddaughter that temporarily disabled her Corona. "It's the first typewriter my grandchildren have ever seen close up, or touched," she says. "They stand around it in awe. All that oil and steel and moving parts ... and the tremendous clatter it makes – how primitive it must seem to them." Garner remembers buying quarto paper in reams when "the shop assistant counted out the sheets with a special flick of the wrist and wrapped them in paper with string".

"When we were young the keys struck the paper with such authority and power that on the other side of the sheet you could feel the indentations with your fingertips," Garner says. "Now that was writing."

A younger Helen Garner

Helen Garner's Corona typewriter will be on display in the State Library of Victoria's Mirror of the World exhibition from October.

*Justine Hyde is a director of the State Library of Victoria.

Justine Hyde

Canberra barrister Jack Pappas and typewriter collector Jack Pappas was made famous in Helen Garner's book Joe Cinque's Consolation, after he defended student Anu Singh on a charge of killing her boyfriend in 1997 by lacing his coffee with Rohypnol then injecting him with heroin.

Yes, you spotted it. It's a Nakajima identical twin sister for Nick Beland's Olympia B12 - with, I suspect, all the same drawbacks, including the serious plastic mask discolouring. The original colour was pure white, as can be clearly seen where I have stripped off the trader's sticker on the front of the Hermes 305. See Nick's blog post in his B12here. His observations about the B12 and comments from other Typospherians on his post matched my experience in typing with the Hermes 305. Not great.

I'd go so far as to say the Hermes 305 marks the spot where Nakajima started to go off the rails as a manual portable typewriter manufacturer. The little tin machines are a pleasure to work with compared to this. It rattles but it doesn't hum.

These Hermes-Olympia siblings came about because of a 1978 "co-operation" between the two companies to have Nakajima make manual portables and an electric typewriter, the 505-505C (see brochure cover below). It was all part of a doomed bid to ward off Olympia's impending collapse.

You want 10 typewriters? That should save a few jobs!

On February 2, 1979, German national weekly Die ZeitreportedAEG (Olympia) chief executive officer Walter Cipa as saying the "Swiss Hermes Precisa International SA presents ... as potential partners in order to facilitate the increasingly urgent rehabilitation of Olympia". Technical glitches in electronic typewriter development had cost AEG money and reputation. AEG's entry into "a market dominated by IBM golfball typewriters [had] succeeded only after a collaboration with the Swiss Hermes Precisa".

Japanese-made Olympia Electronic Compact

Olympia ES200

Cipa had "long been seeking a buyer for the sliding of Olympia works" but had been unsuccessful. A deal with Litton (Triumph-Adler) had failed because of the opposition of the German Federal Cartel Office. Siemens had baulked because it was "not interested in the typewriter market and the few electronic devices from Wilhelmshaven did not fit into its program" (plus it didn't want the responsibility of 15,000 jobs at risk). But there was speculation about a deal between AEG, CII Honeywell Bull and Hermes Precisa, with "at least 51 per cent" of Olympia capital and "at least 25 per cent" to a Swiss bank group representing the interests of Hermes Precisa.

As things turned out, AEG was taken over by Daimler-Benz in 1985. Olympia typewriter production ceased at the end of 1992, but on July 1, 1994, Computer Business Reviewreported Daimler had sold Olympia to Yong Ling Liu's Elite Group in Hong Kong, including a factory in Mexico and the one in Wilhelmshaven. Elite already had factories in China, Malaysia, Indonesia and India.

This shows the 305's original colour. See manual at the bottom of this post.

The Hermes 305 is also the big sister of the Hermes Baby S and the Japy Baby, which use an earlier Nakajima carriage design inside a plastic nask very similar to the 305's:

This badge, on the back of a Hermes Baby S, is identical to the one on the back of the Hermes 305. Below, the back of an Olympia B12:

The Hermes 305 and the Olympia B12 are the same mechanically and in the carriage area as the Nakajima ALL 800, which uses a far superior and much simpler, more conventional mask and is an infinitely better typer than the 305 (can't speak for the B12). The mask on the 305 is three-piece (front, spools cover and base), overly complicated and, like that on the Valentine, simply doesn't suit the mechanical design.

Nakajima redesigned its small, standard portable's mechanics in 1973, although the new repeat spacer device remained strongly influenced by the Brother innovation. In order to accommodate the new mechanical design, while retaining a reasonably flat-profile machine, Nakajima came up with completely new, tight-fitting mask designs. The automatic repeat spacing mechanism was designed for Nakajima ALL by Takemi Ikeda, Toshikatsu Terashima and Tokushige Hasegawa:

Underneath the Hermes 305

Above is the earlier Nakajima mechanical design, without a repeat spacer. Quite apart from the spacer, you can see how different it is from the Hermes 305. Among many other things, this model retains the tiered aluminium dowelling block to guide and hold in place the type rods in automated assembly. The Hermes 305 has done away with this and has an arrangement that is much more akin to a Brother or an Olivetti, a flat or slightly sloped metal section.

Above, the Hermes 305. Below, the earlier Nakajima design.

Compare this with a Brother, below:

Interestingly, above is a slightly different arrangement again, the Olympia Traveller C, now the Scrittore II. I have used both Scrittore models (the II at WordPlay in Cincinnati) and found the II an improvement on the I, but not by much!

Above, a Wilhelmshaven Olympia and, below, a Nakajima Olympia. The major difference is the comb - one was designed for automated mass production, the other was not. There was far more of the human touch and quality control at Wilhelmshaven.

See below the underneath of a Chinese (Royal Scrittore I) machine, which is clearly based on the Brother design.

Below is a Brother without repeat spacer.

Jean Salisbury and the Hermes 305

A then 90-year-old Jean, right, showed she still had her typing skills, while trying out an Olivetti Lettera 32 at the opening of the CMAG typewriter exhibition in 2012.

A dear friend, Jean Salisbury OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia), passed away on September 15. Jean, who had turned 92 on January 5, was still living on her own and driving a car up until a few months ago. She was an amazingly alert, active, interesting and interested old lady. She attended all of my typewriter presentations at the Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2012, as well as a few others, and always found time to ask intelligent questions and offer stories about typewriters.

Jean, second from right, attends one of the typewriter presentations at CMAG. Beside her is her daughter, Barbara Coe, who has often contributed valuable research for this blog.

Jean left me her three typewriters, which included the Hermes 305 portable and a Facit 9401 (sold by Remington Australia as a Remstar) which had belonged to her late husband, Alan.

Jean and Alan met when Alan was working in the War Cabinet Secretariat - Jean was the daughter of Ray Nicholson, a member of the Air Board. After working in the typing pool, Jean became the personal stenographer of Sir Frederick Shedden, secretary of Australia's Department of Defence from 1937 to 1956. But, under the prevailing Public Service regulations, Jean had to leave the Defence Department upon marrying Alan in May 1945. After settling in Canberra in 1959, Jean was for many years keeper of the records at the famous St John the Baptist Anglican Church in Reid:

My eyes popped when Jean's son-in-law, Bruce Coe, opened the case of the Hermes 305. When I first saw the case in the boot of Bruce's car, I recognised it as Japanese in origin, and was intrigued, since Bruce had said there was a Hermes inside. I had had no idea Nakajima made a Hermes, and was totally unaware of the Hermes 305 model.
Fortunately, Jean and Alan Salisbury were meticulous people, and kept every bit of paperwork associated with their typewriters. Jean bought the Hermes 305 on July 8, 1981, from Kevin McQueen, manager of the Canberra branch of Dataprint Pty Ltd, on Maryborough Street, Fyshwick. Dataprint was headquartered in Prahran, Melbourne. Jean traded in her Remington Eleven portable (serial number HRE 127840) for the Hermes, and in exchange for the Remington was given $35 off the huge price of $225 for the Hermes.
I cannot say how happy she was with the deal, but within three months of buying the Hermes, Jean had to have a line space lever broken link repaired. And three months after that, more repairs, this time on the carriage lever! What I can tell you is that the Hermes line spacer and carriage lever remain a problem to this day. The fault, I believe, is in this 1975 Toshikatsu Terashima design:

You need to be very careful when assembling this knob, with just the right amount of tension, otherwise it won't work, it jams up the platen. Believe me, I took the Hermes 305 completely apart and put it back together again. It's not something I would recommend. The mask itself is near impossible to get off and back on again. All in all, it's a poor design.
I feel sad that Jean was sold such an expensive lemon (which was white and turned lemon). It would seem she soon gave up on the Hermes 305 and bought a Panasonic R305 electronic typewriter instead. Can't say I blame her.

Manual for Hermes 305 and Olympia B12:

Across the Tasman in good ol' conservative New Zealand, a technology magazine is in hot water today for promoting its wares with bikini-clad lasses at an expo in Auckland. God forbid that any of our 'technology' magazines, ETCetera, The Typewriter Exchange and Historische Bürowelt, should ever be so shallow and insensitive! But is such a sales push no more than just good, clean fun?

I guess we should have put that question to Bert Lance before he fell off the perch last year. Lance was the American businessman who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under US President Jimmy Carter in 1977, and is credited with coining the phrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Lance was quoted saying it in the May 1977 issue of the magazine Nation's Business.
The expression "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" came to mind on Friday when I received the latest edition of ETCetera magazine, now edited by Ed Neuert.

Ed Neuert and, behind him long-time ETCetera contributor Peter Weil, at the Milwaukee convention last month.
Photo by Richard Polt.

In the past year or so, there has been a lot of healthy and welcome discussion among subscribers about future directions ETCetera might take, starting with questions asked by Jos Legrand about a possible "generation gap" between some of today's typewriter collectors, and ETCetera's non-appeal to current non-subscribers. That exchange involved such things as online developments, notably the emergence of the Typosphere.
Call me a blinkered anti-activist, a fence-sitter or a Humpty Dumpty if you will, but my first reaction upon reading the latest ETCetera was Bert Lance's phrase. To be blunt, I can't for the life of me see that there's anything "broke" about ETCetera.

I love ETCetera. I always have. I love the way it looks and what it contains, and, frankly, I wouldn't change its basic format for quids. But then, maybe I'm a voice in the wilderness on this. Should ETCetera be actively seeking an upsurge in subscriptions? From what I can gather, it's doing pretty well as it stands, and at this time there appears to be no immediate threat to its future. On the other hand, I'm no Time Lord or soothsayer, so I guess it is possible I'm being overly optimistic, or unduly confident.

ETCetera is coming up for its 27th anniversary next month and it has evolved greatly since Darryl Rehr brought out the first issue in October 1987. As someone who has a full collection of all 105 editions, I fell qualified to offer the opinion that it changed most positively under the editorship of Richard Polt, which covered 30 issues from 2006-12. New standards in the editing, layout, content and quality of production were set during that time.
Every effort to maintain those standards has been made since Richard stepped down. Yes, there have been some problems with the regularity of the magazine - most of them caused by things beyond anyone's control. But an acting board of directors has shown every determination to sort this out, and to ensure four editions continue to appear each year.
The latest edition of ETCetera offers an opportunity for subscribers to have their say on the make-up of this board, and presumably through this process to promote ideas on where ETCetera should be headed. I do hope they avail of the opening.

For the time being, at least, I am on this board, along with Bert Kerschbaumer and Reinmar Wochinz in Germany and Richard Polt and Peter Weil in the US (editor Ed Neuert and treasurer Herman Price are ex-officio). So, yes, I do have a vested interest here; but believe me, this post is not a plea for support. Whatever the outcome of the vote, ETCetera will remain in very safe hands.
Nonetheless, regardless on whether I retain my place on the acting board, I'm hoping ETCetera continues down the path it has taken as it has evolved over the past 27 years. This latest edition is, I think, an excellent example of what ETCetera continues to offer - in ongoing abundance. The articles by Ed (on the Milwaukee convention), Martin Howard (on the early Crandall), Flavio Mantelli (on the Taurus) and the marketing of typewriters during wartime, by Peter Weil, are all thoroughly researched, well written, very readable and beautifully illustrated.

Maybe ETCetera isn't yet as ideal as it could be. If you feel differently than I do about the journal, as it is now, this is the time to express those contrary views, by accepting the invitation to submit nominations for the board. I hasten to add that my thoughts on the state of ETCetera are not in any way meant to represent the views of the entire acting board. But I think it's safe to say we're all pretty much typewriting brothers-in-arms.

Not every edition of ETCetera is going to be filled to the gills with content that totally engrosses every single reader. Show me a publication which can claim to do that. My experience tells me that certain sections and articles appeal greatly to some readers, not so much to others. The thing is, for a publication of its size, ETCetera does meet a very wide range of typewriter interests. Given the low cost of an annual subscription to ETCetera ($35), I doubt anyone has ever suggested they weren't getting their money's worth. In the English language, there simply isn't another publication quite like ETCetera. It's good that The Typewriter Exchange has been able to fill a slightly different gap, and my observations about ETCetera are in no way intended to be a reflection on the excellent job Typex does.
Long may ETCetera live, in print, and pretty much the way it is now - full of really great stuff, and no bikinis!

I'd only just mentioned Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a blog post last week - in relation to golf champion and course designer Max Howell Behr overseeing the manufacture of the Bennett typewriter by Elliott-Fisher there in 1910 - when to my utter astonishment I found a letter postmarked Harrisburg in my mail box. The return address was typewritten and the envelope sealed with lipstick red wax. How intriguing!
Inside was a charming typewritten letter from Harrisburg author and journalist Monica Schroeder, thanking me for a blog post in May about fixing the ribbon vibrator on a Facit T2 standard. Little did I think at the time of posting that I would be solving a problem for someone in Pennsylvania.
I did say that I was no saint, but that my cries to heaven upon getting my T2 working could be heard in far-off Cincinnati. Richard Polt commented, "I thought I heard some joyful shouting from the Antipodes!" Well, now we know it reached Pennsylvania, too. Monica's letter opened:

Monica's T2, Brigeet, has joined her growing collection, which includes an LC Smith 3 (she could do with some help on getting the carriage to advance), a 1938 Underwood Universal called Lucille, a Smith-Corona Coronet, a Remington 1 portable, a Sears Celebrity with script font, and an Olivetti Studio 44, all within a few months. When Monica wrote she was waiting the arrival of a Corona 3, a Royalite, a Skyriter and a Robotron. I'd say she's well and truly hooked.
Thanks you, Monica, for the lovely letter.

***

I guess it had to happen, but it looks like the Monpti is becoming the new Valentine. David Lawrence in Auckland, New Zealand, alerted me last night to this listing on eBay (#321535204924) - 'buy it now' price $US489. The seller, with whom I had have pleasant dealings in the past (I bought an African mahogany Rheinmetall from him), includes a two-minute video with his listing to prove this Monpti does work. Which means it's not just a rarity, but a rarity among rarities! Neither of my two Monptis performed anything like this.

David also drew my attention to a beautiful Postal for sale at $1795.95. I see there are also two Odells, at $299.99 and $685, a Varityper for $99.99 and this Geniatus at $62, after 10 bids:

***

From The New York Timeson August 12, 1913. One hundred and one years further on, the demand for typewriters is a barometer of these rather different conditions:

1. Mental and physical well-being.

2. A high level of common sense.

3. Greater appreciation of the higher things in life.

4. Happiness, contentment and creative achievement.

5. Absence of RSI.

6. Reduction of bad language (called Twainism).

Please fell free to add to this list.

***

Egon Erwin Kisch as a reporter

While last week researching the story of Katharine Susannah Prichard, whose Remington 1 portable I am temporarily caring for, I came across reference to her helping the cause of Egon Erwin Kisch. This was timely, as just two weeks ago the Australian Government announced plans to relax “unnecessarily restrictive” elements of the skilled foreign worker visa scheme, including rigid English language proficiency rules.

Kisch (1885-1948) was a Czechoslovak writer and journalist, who wrote in German. Nicknamed the "Raging Reporter from Prague", Kisch was noted for his development of literary reportage and his opposition to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. In World War I, Kisch was a corporal in the Austrian army and fought on the front line in Serbia and the Carpathians. He deserted in October 1918 and played a leading role in the abortive left-wing revolution in Vienna in November that year. In 1919 Kisch became a member of the Austrian Communist Party and remained a Communist for the rest of his life.

On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag Fire, Kisch was one of many prominent opponents of Nazism to be arrested. He was briefly imprisoned in Spandau, but as a Czechoslovak citizen was expelled from Germany.

In late 1934 Kisch came to Australia, initially planning to be a delegate to an anti-fascist conference. The Australian Government refused him entry from the ship Strathaird at Fremantle (where Prichard was in the welcoming committee) and Melbourne. Kisch then took matters into his own hands. He jumped 16 and a half feet from the deck of his ship on to the quayside at Melbourne, breaking his leg in the process. He was bundled back on board but this dramatic action mobilised the Australian left in support of Kisch, including Prichard. When the Strathaird docked in Sydney, proceedings were taken against the captain on the grounds that he was illegally detaining Kisch. Justice Bert Evatt (later Leader of the Australian Opposition and a key figure in establishing the UN) ordered that Kisch be released. Under the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, visitors could be refused entry if they failed a dictation test in any European language. This law was used to enforce the White Australia Policy by ensuring that potential Asian immigrants were given an impossibly hard test.

As soon as Kisch was released, he was re-arrested and was one of the very few Europeans to be given the test; he passed the test in various languages but finally failed when he was tested in Scottish Gaelic. The officer who tested him had grown up in northern Scotland, and did not have a particularly good grasp of Scottish Gaelic himself. The High Court found that Scottish Gaelic was not within the fair meaning of the Act, and overturned Kisch's convictions for being an illegal immigrant. In February 1935, Kisch addressed a crowd in the Sydney Domain warning of the dangers of Hitler's Nazi regime, of another war and of

concentration camps.

Kisch in Spain

In 1937 and 1938, Kisch was in Spain, where left-wingers from across the world had been drawn by the Spanish Civil War. He travelled across the country, speaking in the Republican cause, and his reports from the front line were widely published.

In late 1939, Kisch and his wife Gisela sailed for New York where, once again, he was initially denied entry. He eventually landed at Ellis Island on December 28, but as he only had a transit visa moved on to Mexico in October 1940. He remained in Mexico for the next five years, one of a circle of European communist refugees. Kisch died two years after his return to Prague, shortly after the Communist party seized complete power.

Kisch's work as a writer and communist journalist inspired Australian left wing intellectuals and writers such as Prichard. This group formed the nucleus of what later became the Writers League, drawing on the example of Kisch’s own journalistic dedication to reportage.

***

Janet Holmes à Court

There was another odd twist with the Prichard typewriter. Back in May I heard a revealing ABC radio interview in which Janet Holmes à Court, widow of Australia's first billion dollar businessman, Robert Holmes à Court, told Richard Fidler she had been raised by closet Communist parents. When visitors arrived, her family had had to hide Communist literature in the house.

Mrs Holmes à Court then went on to describe the influence Katharine Susannah Prichard had had on her. "She [Prichard] left me two precious things," said Mrs Holmes à Court. I held my breath as Fidler probed, hoping she was going to say one of them was a typewriter. She didn't.

But a few days later I got a call from the Fellowship of Writers Western Australia to tell me it was sending me Prichard's Remington. In the circumstances, I could hardly believe my ears.

***

Anyone ever heard of an Avanti electric typewriter? I wonder what its bloodlines are. It looks like it could be another Nakajima product. This ad is from November 1985:

***

Miss Typewriter

This later model Remington Junior, serial number JP60237 (made January 1916) was donated to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney by Chartres in 1939.

It's a long story. A Remington Junior typewriter, sold under somewhat mysterious circumstances in Adelaide, South Australia, in late November 1914, found its way to Moúdros on the Greek island of Lemnos in the north Aegean in early 1915. Moúdros was used as an Allied base in World War I and in October 1918 was the site of the signing of the Armistice of Mudros, which ended hostilities between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies.
In November 1915 the Remington Junior was returned from Moúdros to Australia by the Melbourne doctor who had taken it there - Lieutenant-Colonel William Henry Bryant of Collingwood (whose father, publican James Mark Bryant, had helped establish the Australian football code in 1858-59).

Lieutenant-Colonel Bryant, right, at a camp on the Aegean island of Lemnos in April 1915.

While war correspondents clearly favoured a true portable, the Corona 3, at Gallipoli, the Remington Junior had been donated by South Australian businessman Charles Francis Muller (1871-1954) to the 1st Australian Stationary Hospital, Australian Army Medical Corps, Australian Imperial Force, for use at Maadi in Egypt and on both Lemnos and Moúdros in the Aegean.

Dr Bryant was commander of the 1st Australian Stationary Hospital and the typewriter was sent from Adelaide to Melbourne to be in his care. His unit left Melbourne on the Kyarra on December 5, 1914.
Twice Mentioned in Despatches for his work at Moúdros, the extremely trying conditions there destroyed the 54-year-old Bryant's health, forcing his return to Melbourne. He never regained full health, was sent to Caulfield Military Hospital and later to the Anzac Hostel in Brighton, where he died on May 6, 1920, aged 60.

Staff Sergeant G. Leo A. Coates, an electrical engineer in civilian life, performing an X-ray on a soldier in the 1st Australian Stationary Hospital at Moúdros. The X-ray was to determine the position of a bullet in the patient's one remaining leg.

Meanwhile, the Remington Junior had been donated to the Citizens' War Chest and loaned to the Australian Red Cross Society in New South Wales in April 1919. The loan stipulated the Red Cross give it to the Soldiers' Club when it disbanded, which it never did (disband, that is). The Soldiers' Club is better known as the Returned and Services League of Australia, which Dr Bryant had helped establish in 1916.

Sam Worthington as Philip Schuler in Deadline Gallipoli.

The incredible story of this Remington Junior began to unravel in late May, when I was asked by the producers of the four-hour mini-series Deadline Gallipoli (due for release next Anzac Day, April 25, 2015) about the chances of them acquiring an Empire Lightweight typewriter and another three-bank, the Remington Junior, to use in filming. I told them the only Empire Lightweight I knew to be in captivity was in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, where there is also a Remington Junior. But I added that I thought a Remington Junior, an even heavier semi-portable than the Empire Lightweight, was very unlikely to have been used by war correspondents at Gallipoli.
The screening of Deadline Gallipoli is scheduled to mark the centenary of the disastrous, ill-conceived ANZAC landings in the Dardanelles, Turkey, during which the lives of 8709 young Australians and 2721 New Zealanders were lost. Total Allied casualties were a monstrous 187,959, of which 56,707 were killed - for no military gains whatsoever. Winston Churchill had a lot to answer for.

The Powerhouse's Empire Lightweight

The Deadline Gallipoli producers obviously didn't like my honest, straightforward answers about these typewriters, and didn't bother to reply. I've since heard nothing more about this production, so cannot say what typewriters have been used in the filming. Shooting started in Adelaide in mid-June and was expected to last nine weeks, which means it will have been wrapped up around about now.

Deadline Gallipoli is about the landings, as seen through the eyes of four war correspondents: official Australian war historian Charles Bean, Englishman Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, young Australian photojournalist Philip Schuler, and Ashmead Bartlett's ally, Australian Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert Murdoch).

It is "the story of journalists who will not accept that truth be the first casualty of war". They "ensure that a strategic disaster becomes a legend of human heroism". Series co-producer Sam Worthington plays Schuler, Joel Jackson plays Bean, Hugh Dancy plays Ashmead Bartlett and Ewen Leslie plays Murdoch.

As I told the producers, the Corona 3 was overwhelmingly the typewriter of choice for Australian war correspondents at Gallipoli. Quite apart from it being by far the best typewriter for the task at hand, the journalists didn't have a lot of choice in 1914-18. It was the portable typewriter most readily available in Australia (through Stott & Underwood) at that time.

Ashmead Bartlett is known to have used an Empire Lightweight (bought in England) at some point during the campaign. But Bean and Murdoch definitely used Corona 3s. It is not yet known what Schuler used, but it is most likely to have been a Corona 3 as well.

This Remington Junior is in Alan Seaver's Collection

It may have been a reference to Dr Bryant's Remington Junior in the Australian National Library's Trove digital collections to that led the South Australian makers of Deadline Gallipoli to believe such a machine might have been used by a war correspondent at Gallipoli. Any journalist would have struggled to even get it ashore, let alone use it there.

The Remington Junior was most heavily pushed in Australia in the middle of 1917, through a sustained advertising campaign.

As for the one that did reach Moúdros, here's the rub ...

The Remington Junior was only launched in New York in 1914, so its use in an Australian MASH in Egypt later that same year leads to some very interesting questions. The Remington Junior donated by Muller to the 1st Stationary Hospital was sold by the United Typewriter and Supplies Company agency in Adelaide.

The Remington Junior was made not by Remington but by Smith Premier in Syracuse, a year after the Remington-controlled Union Trust (of which Smith Premier was an integral part) had been abandoned (in 1913; the Syracuse plant continued to operate until 1923). However, United Typewriter and Supplies Company, set up by the trust in Australia in 1895 to sell such Union models as the Smith Premier, was still trading in this country. The Stotts, meanwhile, had lost the Australian agency for Remington typewriters to Chartres in 1910. And yet the agent for the Remington Junior was, remarkably, Stott & Hoare. It makes one wonder who held the rights to sell what after the Union breakup!

Late 1910

The only logical explanation for this is convoluted. When Chartres took over the Remington agency, it retained the Stott & Hoare business school at Remington House in Sydney, and using Stott's long-established goodwill, operated it under its original name. It did not, however, take control of Stott colleges elsewhere in Australia. Stott continued its typewriter business in all other parts of the country, notably selling the Corona 3. Stott & Hoare's New South Wales advertising during the war years concentrated on the Remington Junior, while Chartres did not advertise under its own name in that state until 1920. And the only machine approximating to a portable which was available to Chartres to sell during World War I was the Remington Junior.

"Think it over ..."

"Make up your mind ..."

And "Be good to yourself during 1917 ..."

But was the Remington Junior a true blue Remington? As Alan Seaver says on his Machines of Loving Gracewebsite, "The Junior stands out among Remingtons for how truly unusual it is compared with other Remingtons ... In fact, the Junior shares many traits with the full-keyboard Smith-Premier No 10, and especially the Smith Premier Simplex, a stripped-down No 10 that also debuted in 1914. Most notable of these is the placement of the ribbon spools behind the carriage in a vertical side-by-side configuration. The spring drum is also oddly positioned, sitting perpendicular to the carriage with the cable passing down from the carriage along a pulley. The piece that looks like a winding key on a daisy is the spring-tensioner. Note the extremely basic keyboard. A single set of shift keys, a rudimentary shift lock tab, and back space are the only keyboard controls. The margin release is a lever up on the carriage. A line-spacing toggle behind the return lever is just about the only other amenity to be found."

Arnold Betzwieser's Smith Premier Simplex

Alan added, "You may be surprised to find that this is a segment-shifted machine. Though segment-shift had been around for some time (since the L.C. Smith No 2), this is the first application of the technology in a double-shifted keyboard that I am aware of. The type basket shifts down for capitals, and up for figures."

Richard Polt, on his Remington portables page at The Classic Typewriter Page, points out the Remington Junior is "Not a true portable but a 'luggable' typewriter ... 'It is smaller, it is lighter, it is designed for the simpler uses' says a 1915 ad. It is similar to the Century 10 typewriter, marketed around 1919-1921 by the American Writing Machine Company, which was controlled by Remington."