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Travels With My (Olivetti Lettera 32 Portable) Typewriter (I)

March 24, 2015, 5:53 am
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Sick of the sight of it? Not quite. But sitting alone and seeing my byline flash up on the TV screen yet again, in a repeat episode of the ABC's Australian Story "All the Right Moves", got me wondering whether I'd made any right moves in my life. One slightly soothing positive did eventually came to mind: that having elected to be a "Fan With Typewriter" at an early age, I'd certainly been given the opportunity to see plenty of the world. The reminders were in the datelines, the many destinations from which my byline had appeared during 45 years of sports writing in various parts of the globe.
Crisscrossing the atlas, by air and by sea: These lines give an idea of the extent of my travels with a typewriter, from home bases in Australia, England and Ireland. The 37 different countries to which I have travelled may represent just 14 per cent of the world's nations, yet the distances were often quite vast. Sometimes it involved flying a polar route, and usually through many time zones. But no matter how far I travelled, or where I went, my Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter never once let me down.
Pages from passports;
some samples of my travel documents.
Back in 2000, writing from the Sydney Olympic Games for the Fairfax chain of newspapers was not all that far from my home base of Canberra. Nonetheless, there had been many times when "From Robert Messenger in Sydney" had appeared from as far away as 10,752 miles (17,203km). And when it did, it appeared atop of copy typed on an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable and filed by telephone to a copytaker - in his or her case, usually using a Remington International standard typewriter in some distant sound booth on the outer rim of a noisy newsroom. Sometimes, as in the case of a commissioned feature on Olympic Games walking champion Norman Read, typewritten in a hotel room in Palmerston North in New Zealand in 1976 for the London Sunday Times magazine, it might be more than a 1500 words long. Tracking down the reclusive English-born gold medallist turned out to be the easy part.
Toward the end of this year, 2015, I will mark half a century of travels with a typewriter. I had actually been given my first portable typewriter, an Underwood Universal, back in 1957, but it wasn't until I started a 47-year career in print newspapers, in 1965, that my travels with a typewriter began in earnest. Short distances at first, perhaps, but pretty soon I was moving about the country by train and plane, with my Olivetti Lettera 32 always in tow.
From the beginning, this typewriter never left my side. If I was covering local government or council or board meetings, or any other event for that matter, the Olivetti always went with me, and returned with me to the office early the next morning. I had good reason to appreciate its weight and compactness - my colleagues used Imperials or Brothers, which never seemed to me to be as convenient to travel with as my Olivetti. Even out of its slimline case, it could be carried about with ease and complete safety with just the three middle fingers of one hand holding the solid metal bar under the ribbon spools cover. What's more, my first editor, Russell Nelson, had used an Olivetti Lettera 22 since he had covered the Melbourne Olympic Games for Reuters in 1956, so that was one good enough reason for me to chose an Olivetti portable.
While Russell Nelson's appointment from a small country newspaper to cover an Olympic Games for Reuters was undoubtedly an inspiration, as I look back on it now, the thought of travelling the world with a typewriternever really crossed my mind. The idea was perhaps beyond my full comprehension in 1965. All I knew was that I wanted to be a sports writer, and I had held on to that dream from even before the age of 10. From 1957 on, I was the proverbial "sports fan with a typewriter". What that would come to entail in terms of travel, the opportunities to work in other countries, to see some of the greatest sporting events and performers the world had to offer, just didn't enter my head. If it had, I might not have been as keen as I was to so heedlessly forge ahead down my chosen path. But, then, as a 17-year-old, one doesn't give much consideration to the impact of career choices on one's ability to hold together relationships and families - or even to put a permanent roof over one's head for that matter. Half a century on, and it's a case of "Too late, he cried!" I know now that sports writing, and its associated travel demands, are simply not compatible with steady, long-term partnerships.
Instead of being like most of my old schoolmates, with a home and a steady home life, one marriage which has survived 30 odd years or more, and grandchildren at my knee, I am surrounded by typewriters and the souvenirs of writing sport in lands far and wide. Below are just a few of the awards and medals, the press passes, programmes and plaques. There are even notebooks that date from as far back as 1978. Still, I do have to say in my defence that each and every item here has a story or two to tell:
My start came in an isolated small town in an isolated small country - it sometimes felt like the end of the earth. We didn't even have a proper airport. But it did have its own abundantly-stocked typewriter store, Jim McNulty's on Albert Street, and across the road from McNulty's an extensive public library. It also had back then two daily newspapers, and a radio station staffed by people well able to open one's mind to notions of creativity. I grew up beside the Tasman Sea, and my first job was in the small evening newspaper beside the railway station. The larger world did beckon, in all directions.  And I had the enormous good fortune to live among endlessly fascinating and worldly townspeople. The whole district was alive with people rich in character, diverse in background and abounding in good stories. As for my career path, I simply could not have wished to be surrounded by a better team of mentors - and I mean anywhere in the English-speaking world. Apart from Russell Nelson as editor, the much-travelled author Frank Neate was cable copy sub-editor and the gifted if rather erratic chief reporter was Jack Turner. Other reporters, such as Scott Jones and Kevin Bell, were also well-travelled, full of intriguing stories of the world at large, and Ivan Agnew was to become another noted author.
These guys didn't just take the arrival of a fresh-faced newcomer in their stride. As they pranced to their desks and their portable typewriters, eager to get on with writing their stories, they simply nudged me at the deep end, and left me there to sink or to swim. Little did I realise it at the time, but this was precisely how they'd started their own careers. As it turned out, I swam, but it was almost two years before they let me that I wasn't treading water.
To be continued ...
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L.Ron Hubbard's Typewriters

March 26, 2015, 3:56 am
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Self-proclaimed: Is using a manual typewriter gerontophilia? A strangely inappropriate lust? Or an indecent pleasure?

March 27, 2015, 7:30 pm
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It's almost 20 years now since renowned English figure sculptor and death mask creator Nick Reynolds (1962-) - the son of a Great Train Robber who provides harmonica on The Sopranos opening theme tune Woke Up This Morning - indelibly linked journalist and writer Will Self with manual portable typewriters. Reynolds produced Self (A Portrait of Will Self), placing a sculpture of the writer's head on top of an Olivetti Studio 42 typewriter. Oddly enough, however, it was not until 2004 that Self abandoned modern technology to start writing fiction on his late mother's US-bought pistachio Olivetti Lettera 22 portable.
This is not a death mask; Self is, at the age of 53, still very much alive and kicking - and he continues to extol the virtues of portable typewriters, while revealing further sound reasons for his return to manual typing.
These began to emerge in print with an item titled "End of the Typewriter", which Self typed in the week following the decision by Brother to stop production of electronic "wedge" typewriters in Wrexham in November 2012. Self's article appeared in the London Times Life section.
"It saddens me that Brother has packed up shop," Self wrote, "but the last typewriter to roll off its very truncated production line was an electric model. I did enjoy the strange ultrasonic hum of my mother’s Brother electric in the 1970s, but while I may have begun typing at around this time, when I first began to seriously produce fiction on a typewriter it was on a manual — my by-then late mother’s own Olivetti Lettera 22, which she brought with her from the US when she emigrated in the late 1950s. [Self's mother was Elaine Adams (née Rosenbloom), from Queens, New York City, who worked as a publisher's assistant; she died of lung cancer at Easter 1988, a week short of her 67th birthday. In 1959 Adams married Peter Self, later a town planning professor at the Australian National University; he died in Canberra in 1999, aged 80.]
"I switched to working on a manual typewriter in 2004 (all my previous books had been composed either on an Amstrad word processor or more sophisticated computers), because I could see which way the electronic wind was blowing: dial-up Internet connections were being replaced by wireless broadband, and it was becoming possible to find yourself seriously distracted by the to and fro between email, web surfing, buying reindeer-hide oven gloves you really didn’t need — or possibly even looking at films of people doing obscene things with reindeer-hide oven gloves.
"The polymorphous perversity of the burgeoning web world, as a creator of fictions, seriously worried me - I could see it becoming the most monstrous displacement activity of all time."
At the time this article was published, Self told an interviewer, "I’ve gone back to using a typewriter for the first draft. It forces you to think. Instead of going, 'She wore a red dress. Wait, that’s banal, I’ll make it purple or green ...' you think, 'Right, what colour was her dress?' It brings order back into your mind." He also rephrased his own story, crediting the typewriter with thwarting procrastination. "My move into typewriters exactly coincided with broadband," he says. "If you work on a computer you could be watching porn or buying some reindeer oven gloves or whatever. Disable the Internet, that’s my advice [to budding writers]."
Now Self has gone a little deeper into the appeal typewriters hold for him, raising the questions in the headline above in his Diary in the London Review of Books earlier in the month.
Self wrote (American readers may not know that a "perv" is slang for an erotic glance or look):
    When I was a child I perved over my mother’s typewriters; first, her beautiful olive green Olivetti Lettera 22 with American keys, then later her IBM golfball electric which seemed to explode into kinesis if you touched it. I picked up an ancient Underwood of my own in a junk shop and used it to hammer out comedic plays. By the time I wanted to write less childish things, my mother had died, and since she’d been a relatively early adopter I’d inherited her primitive Amstrad PCW 9512 word processor. I wrote my first five books (and plenty of journalism) on that machine and thought it perfectly adequate to the task, but then in the mid-1990s its printer packed up. I invested in a proper PC that could connect to the Internet with a loud noise of whistling timpani, suggestive of Alberich forging the ring of the Nibelung. I didn’t find this too much of a distraction, because I only used the Internet to file my journalistic copy.
    In general I thought computers unlovely things, their functionalist design yet more evidence of the worrying convergence between the British built environment of the period and all the actual - as opposed to virtual - desktops it aspired to encapsulate. As for the computer screen that is nowadays ever before us, I can recall perfectly the primitive holotype with its horse-trough depth and greenish luminescence; surely its lineal descendants’ capacity to display almost infinite imagery has resulted in this unintended consequence: a leeching of aesthetic interest or engagement; the duff skeuomorphic icons denoting folders and programs have encroached, rendering all local space planar. ‘And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.’ Sometimes, if I worked for too long without a break, when I turned away from the screen the blinking cursor would go with me, and hover, heralding, above an ashtray or a mug. Naturally I desired computers - who didn’t? Shinier ones, smaller ones, slimmer ones, more powerful ones; the problem was I didn’t really know what to do with their myriad emergent capabilities. So, during this period I reserved my perving for notebooks and propelling pencils, Post-it notes and file cards.
    Then, in 2004, I was invited to contribute to a project in Liverpool: the artists Neville Gabie and Leo Fitzmaurice had persuaded Liverpool Housing Action Trust, the body responsible for dynamiting the city’s council high-rises and rehousing their tenants, to let them have a number of flats in a 22-storey block in Kensington, up the road from Lime Street Station. The idea was that various artists, writers and so on would take up occupancy for a period of months. I was allocated a flat on the 21st floor with astonishing views across the Mersey and all the way to Snowdonia, 70 miles distant. I didn’t have any firm ideas on what I was going to write about in my strange new atelier, but I knew I wanted to mediate living in the building, since the remaining tenants – perhaps a hundred or so, in a street-in-the-sky that had once housed five times that number - were being encouraged to get involved. For some time an urge had been growing in me to write on a manual typewriter. I didn’t know why exactly but it felt a strangely inappropriate lust, possibly a form of gerontophilia. I disinterred my mother’s old Olivetti, dusted it off, and resolved to type my daily word count, Blu-Tack the sheets to the scarified wallpaper of my Liverpool gaff, and invite the other residents up to view them. This I duly did. I found working on the Olivettiindecently pleasurable. I can’t touch-type; even so, my stick fingers produced satisfying percussive paradiddles, in between which came blissful fermatas, devoid of electronic whine and filled instead with the sough of the wind on the windows, down the liftshaft, and wheedling through the Vent-Axias. The new instrument altered my playing style: instead of bashing out provisional sentences, as I would on a computer, the knowledge that I would have to re-key everything caused me to stop, think, formulate accurately, and then type.  

It was laborious to begin with, and I had the nagging suspicion that, as so often in the past (I feel confident many will identify), I was seeking a technological fix for a creative problem. But I persisted, and after I’d completed the story in Liverpool (it’s called ‘161’ and appeared in my collection Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe), I wrote my next book entirely on the Olivetti. In retrospect, although the decision to revert to a redundant writing technology may have been prompted by the valetudinarian tower block, there was an underlying and more significant cause: wireless broadband had been installed in our house, and now whenever I was writing I was only a few finger-flicks away from all the pullulating distractions of the web. Much later I began to understand why exactly the new technology was so inimical to writing fiction, but to begin with my revulsion was instinctive: and I recoiled from the screen - straight into the arms of Shalom Simons. I’m not quite sure how I acquired Shalom, but as soon as I had him I began to worry about losing him. He must’ve been in his late 50s then (he’s 69 now), and while he’s never spoken of retiring, he has in recent years conceded: ‘I’m not looking for work.’ Apparently there is one other like him in Surbiton, but I’ve never been tempted to make overtures; Shalom seems curiously antagonistic towards this nameless conspecific. I suppose it’s the cosmic irony one would expect; just as the nanny and the Billy that Shem selected to preserve their goatish lineage probably butted and bored each other all the way into his father’s ark, so the last two typewriter repairmen in London are wholly antipathetic. [Simon is a typewriter engineer based at 36 Morland Road, Harrow, Middlesex.]
    Over the decade Shalom and I have consorted I have at times been visited with a terrible (and reasonable) anxiety: that he will shut up shop before I do, leaving me with these battlefield-wounded machines and no one to perform triage. My Wikipedia entry says that I ‘collect and repair vintage typewriters’; the very idea of it! The repairing, that is: a child of cack-handed epigones who never got over the ‘servant problem’, I wouldn’t know how to repair a potato for printing purposes, let alone a typewriter. But I do collect them: soon after Shalom began working on my Olivetti I started buying more typewriters; in part because my nasty habit was steadily turning into full-scale fetishism, but also because I wanted to give Shalom as much work as I could, simply to keep him at it. I’ve always been like this with artisans and workmen I viscerally need: manufacturing employment for them out of transgenerational anxiety and personal ham-fisted desperation. I speedily acquired a second Olivetti and a brace of 1930s Imperial Good Companions; a friend gave me a serviceable 1970s Adler, and, after long hours spent perving over a US website called The Vintage Typewriter Shoppe [Scott McNeill?], I lashed out and bought an early 1960s Groma Kolibri for $500. This last machine attracted my lustful gaze when it had a cameo part in The Lives of Others, in which East German dissidents behind the Wall in the 1980s jive to bebop and type samizdat.
In the film, the Groma is celebrated by one character as ‘the thinnest typewriter ever made’; this means it can be neatly concealed from the Stasi under a door lintel. I didn’t need my Groma because it was easy to hide – I needed it because I hadn’t seen anything quite as beautiful since my youngest child was born. Yes, it had got that bad: I mooned over the things, I caressed them, and I thrilled to the counterpoint between their blocky inertia and their percussive eruption into creative being. I wanted older and older machines, and seriously considered trying to acquire an example of Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s proto-typewriter of the 1860s, the Writing Ball (so called for its globular appearance, with the keys emerging from the core as pins do from a pincushion), a machine that was used by Nietzsche, among others. Throughout this pell-mell race into the past Shalom was my trainer, offering counsel, wisdom and expertise; although I never really felt he grasped the seriousness of my obsession, how for me the manual typewriter was coming to be more than a writing instrument, but rather a reification of the act of writing fiction.

Shalom grew up in an Orthodox family in Stamford Hill. His father, who ran an office-furniture business, intended him for a synagogue cantor, and when Shalom finished school he was sent to the yeshiva. However, Shalom said to me, wryly, ‘I was a good Orthodox boy and didn’t like the idea of working on Shabbat.’ Instead, he went to train as a typewriter engineer with Smith-Corona in Osnaburgh Street, then worked for a dealer with premises near Liverpool Street Station. After that he was employed by various other typewriter dealers: ‘The last one was in Camden Town, but then I got ill, and when I came back they didn’t want to know.’ Shalom went round various stationery suppliers and picked up work that way. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he kept on: ‘I did a fax machine course and one on electric typewriters, but I had enough work and I really couldn’t get my head round computer technology.’ When he told me this I developed a strange image in my mind’s eye: Shalom’s typewriter world shrinking and shrinking, but always able to contain him; he was a micro-organism swimming in this droplet of obsolescence, one that plummeted through fluvial time until, in 2004, it met me, a writer wilfully submerging himself in bygones.
    Not that Shalom’s life is quite as bounded by typing as my own; now he’s in semi-retirement he can devote more energy to his singing. He’s the first tenor for the Shabbaton Choir, which tours extensively; recent highlights include concerts in Israel and Los Angeles. You might have imagined that Shalom and I would clash politically - he being of the Orthodox and Zionist persuasion, me being a Jewish apostate who supports a two-state solution - but we never have. Shalom is one of those given to the homespun homiletic: ‘A happy person is a person who’s happy with his lot,’ he’ll say. Or, ‘Food on the table and your family happy, that’s all you need.’ It’s at this base layer of comity that we tend to communicate, all other potential disputes being incorporated into the tinking, clanking matter at hand: how is this or that half-century-old machine going to be coaxed back into utility? And not just my own burgeoning collection, but writer friends’ old typewriters I’ve encouraged them to let me give to Shalom. They’re often piqued by the idea of manually reverse-engineering their own compositional practices, but I know perfectly well that once serviced and cleaned their Remingtons and Hermes Babys will end up back in the cupboards and attics they were disinterred from, because, let’s face it, hardly anyone writes books on a typewriter anymore.
    Even so, as the technology takes its final bow there’s been quite a flurry of interest: Cormac McCarthy auctioning his Olivetti Lettera 32 for a quarter of a million bucks made big news. I was approached by Patek Phillipe to write about typewriters for an advertorial feature. I could see the synchrony of watches and typewriters: both beautifully efficient devices wholly animated by human power, object lessons - along with the bicycle - of what truly sustainable technologies should be. Less enticing was the offer from Persol, the Italian sunglasses manufacturer, to advertise their eyewear with a little film that would depict me frenziedly typing my ‘great novel’ on my ‘iconic’ typewriter. True, the money was good (€80,000 for a single day’s work), but the destruction of my sense of myself as a writer would’ve been complete and utter: ‘The End’ in blood-red Courier to the accompaniment of a firing squad of keystrokes.
    Beryl Bainbridge, who typed all her first drafts on an Imperial Good Companion (a delicious, steam-punky 1930s machine), went to her grave in 2010, preceded a year earlier by J.G. Ballard, the last writer I’d known personally -  besides myself - who took his books all the way to typesetting as manually generated typescripts. One of the last services I performed for Jim was to obtain a ribbon for his 1970s Olympia; after his death, his partner, Claire Walsh, gave me the machine. It’s an unlovely thing, its textured mushroom-coloured plastic casing anticipating the coming CPU towers and printers, rather than harking back - like the Good Companions - to the steel and glass engineering of Joseph Paxton. I meditated on the Olympia for some time, wondering if working on my dead mentor’s typewriter would either lend me some of his strange vision, or, on the contrary, rob my prose of whatever originality it might possess. In the event, after I’d written one piece on the Olympia, I had a letter from Jim’s daughter, Fay, who said she was distressed to learn I had the machine, since it had been an integral part of her childhood; and although her chronology was way out (she must have been thinking of its predecessor), I conveyed the Olympia to her with something like relief.
    Relief, I now realise, because just as I’d subliminally registered the inception of wireless broadband by changing my own corporate culture, so another transformation was now underway. Finishing my last novel I’d had various problems with the Groma, and since the parts were apparently no longer obtainable I’d bought a second machine. Watching Shalom fiddle about with the deteriorating Gromas I’d begun to have unworthy thoughts: how did I know he was actually any good as a typewriter engineer? It might be argued that the last living individual of a given species should be the fittest - after all, they’ve managed to survive the others’ extinction. But an alternative view is that the others underwent mutagenesis, becoming part of the burgeoning IT genotype, while Shalom, the poor dinosaur, roved the clashing, bashing, hammering lost world of obsolescence. But really my suspicions about Shalom - entirely unfounded - were symptomatic of a deeper malaise: I was falling out of love with the typewriter because I’d found a new old writing method to fetishise.
    For some time I hadn’t been manually retyping my first drafts (let alone all of them), but instead had begun to key them into a computer for reasons of speed and editorial convenience. I still thought of the typewriter draft as the ‘first’, but I’d discovered a certain resistance in myself to bashing the keys first thing in the morning, and so had taken to handwriting at least a couple of hundred words which I would then type up. In time the amount I was handwriting increased until I realised I was effectively composing a proto first draft this way. It dawned uneasily on me that I could very well cut out the typewriter stage altogether. And what a relief that would be: no more lugging the machine about when I wanted to work somewhere else; no more - entirely justifiable - complaints from my wife, who sleeps in the room below where I work, and who, despite the interposition of several layers of rubber matting, was still rudely awoken by my early morning drumming; and of course, no more anxiety about keeping the damn things working after Shalom finally retires. I mean, what was I going to do when that day inevitably came? Wander the leafy back roads of Surbiton calling out tremulously for a new saviour?
    I haven’t as yet started the next novel, and it may well be that once I begin I’ll recoil from the hard handy-graft, but for now my mind is made up and my heart has begun to sing: for years I’ve had a twinkle in my eye when I gaze upon the slim, silvery forms of the Mitsubishi propelling pencils I customarily use to take notes; finally I’ve decided to go all the way with them. There’s only one problem: as far as I can tell from a cursory web search, this particular model has been discontinued. I’ll have to ask Shalom if he can introduce me to a propelling pencil engineer before he bows out.
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Killing Me Softly With Her Movie

March 29, 2015, 9:28 pm
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These photographs were taken by Cameron Forbes for LIFE magazine's issue of March 31, 1972. They were taken at the Charles Theatre for David Wheeler's Theatre Company of Boston, where Forbes was lighting director and official photographer. They show Al Pacino rehearsing the title role of a misfit drafted into the US Army in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, a mordant, satiric anti-war drama by Vietnam veteran David Rabe, the first of Rabe's searing trilogy of Vietnam War plays and the one most directly expressive of this theme. The production opened in the late spring of 1972, while The Godfather, released on March 14, was playing to mammoth cinema audiences. Pacino had left immediately after finishing filming The Godfather to appear as a guest artist in the play - for $200 a week.
Forbes was most probably never paid anything for LIFE's use of his photos, taken and distributed as part of his job in helping publicise Wheeler's theatre company. Forbes's life in the late 1970s, notably his struggle with bipolar disorder, is now the subject of the movie Infinitely Polar Bear. Until his eldest daughter Maya Forbes lovingly wrote and directed the movie, Cameron Forbes's most memorable legacy had been these long-forgotten and unaccredited photos of Al Pacino. And that's sad, but true ...
Forbes's other daughter, singer China Forbes, recalls of her dad, "He was really talented, but he struggled with mental illness. He kept himself together to raise his girls, but after we left home … He never really had a career, so my mother decided she would have to provide for us as best she could." Encouraged by their father, China and Maya grew up steeped in creativity. "Dad got us painting, singing, acting. We would put on plays in the laundry room of our apartment block." She is currently working on a screen musical with Maya and a cousin, Ed Droste of indie art-rockers Grizzly Bear.
It's a long while since I have been as engrossed by a movie as I was with Infinitely Polar Bear. Yet, for all that, I was squirming in my cinema seat. For me, at least, the film is so close to the bone it was almost too uncomfortable to watch. The woman in Norman Grimbel's lyrics was "embarrassed by the crowd", as the young stranger "sang as if he knew me, in all my dark despair". I suddenly knew how she felt!
One reviewer has written that Infinitely Polar Bear is "nothing more than discomforting and slightly cringy viewing", which is true to a point - for someone who knows what it's like to behave like that. But then she concludes that the movie "does a lot while saying very little, ultimately doing no justice to those who experience mental illness, from within or without." As a long-term bipolar sufferer, someone who had made those around me interminably suffer, I can say with a great deal of surety and sincerity that this closing comment is no more than contemptible nonsense.
Maya Forbes, left, with her sister China Forbes
In the movie, the parts of Maya and China are brilliantly played by Maya's daughter Imogene Wolodarsky (left, as Amelia Stuart) and Ashley Aufderheide (right, as Faith Stuart; Faith was the name of Cameron Forbes's mother).
The film is primarily about Maya Forbes and her younger sister, singer China Forbes, being cared for by their father Donald Cameron Forbes (1939-1998) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1977-78, while the girls' mother, Peggy Woodford Forbes, was attending the business graduate school at Columbia University in New York City. It is a no-holds barred, personal view of living with a man seriously and often dangerously affected by bipolar disorder, so it is naturally very near to my heart. In fact, there were times - especially in the scene when late one night "Cam Stuart" rifles through stacks of cardboard boxes, pulling from one some tightly entangled, brightly coloured telephone, computer and electrical cables - that I thought I was looking into a mirror rather than at a screen. Then there is the childish argument over the ongoing usefulness of a dishwashing sponge. Talk about "Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words ..." This was like Maya Forbes"telling my whole life" with her words and her directions for this movie! That's how accurately Maya Forbes has portrayed what it's like to live with bipolar - perhaps more accurately than I have previously seen on a screen, big or small.
 The real Cameron Forbes
Mark Ruffalo as "Cam Stuart" (Cameron Forbes)
The real Peggy Woodford Forbes
Zoe Saldana as Maggie Stuart (Peggy Forbes)
Being left feeling so "exposed" by the end of it, for me the movie might have been a little better served with a series of brief synopses about what became of the main characters. So I have written my own:
Maya Forbes: Amelia Stuart in the movie. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 23, 1968. Maya graduated from Harvard University in 1990 and moved to Los Angeles that same year. She is the writer and director of Infinitely Polar Bear. Her other writing credits include the screenplay of The Rocker (2008) and many episodes of The Larry Sanders Show (one of my favourite TV comedies). She was a co-executive producer of The Larry Sanders Show in its later seasons and executive producer of the sitcom The Naked Truth and the TV miniseries The Kennedys. Forbes received Emmy and WGA Award nominations for her work on The Larry Sanders Show. She is married to Wally Wolodarsky, who was co-screenwriter of The Rocker and a producer of Infinitely Polar Bear.
China Forbes: Faith Stuart in the movie. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 29, 1970. China is a singer and songwriter best known as the lead singer of Pink Martini. She graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in 1988, then studied visual arts at Harvard University, graduating in 1992. She won the Jonathan Levy Prize for acting and worked as an actress for several years, performing off-Broadway in New York. She then became a musician, forming a band and recording a solo album. She sang the title song (Ordinary Girl) for the late 1990s television series Clueless and the version of Que Sera Sera used over the opening and closing credits of Jane Campion's 2003 film In the Cut. China is featured on Michael Feinstein's album The Sinatra Project, singing a duet of How Long Will It Last? She has a son named Cameron.
Peggy Woodford Forbes: Maggie Stuart in the movie. She was born in Chicago on September 24, 1941, while her father was interning at Provident Hospital. She attended Benton Harbor High School in Michigan, after her parents settled there in 1945 and her father opened a general practice in the twin cities of Benton Harbor-St Joseph. Her mother had earned an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago in 1960 and Peggy herself earned a BA in Comparative Literature from the Sarah Lawrence College, Yonkers, in 1963. Like her mother before her, in 1977, aged 35, Peggy returned to study and gained an MBA in Finance from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. She went on to Wall Street, working first in the futures market at E.F. Hutton and then from 1980 at Merrill Lynch. At the end of 1990 Peggy left her comfortable job at Merrill Lynch and became the first African-American woman to establish a registered investment advisory firm in growth equity management in the United States. "I ... concluded that if I was going to continue to work as hard as I did, and make the kind of sacrifices in my family life that I had, it would make more sense to have real equity in the company," she recalled. Woodford Capital Management did well as an institutional money management firm, but in 2005 Forbes merged her firm with Osborne Partners Capital Management LLC of San Francisco. Forbes now holds a senior leadership position, serving as one of the firm’s managing directors. She has remarried, to Harry B. Bremond, a retired partner of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, lives in Los Altos, California, and serves as board emeritus of TheatreWorks Inc.
Peggy was the daughter of Hackley Elbridge Woodford (1914-2005), from Kalamazoo, Michigan, one of the first Southern California physicians certified by the American Board of Family Practice, and his wife, Mary Imogene Steele Woodford (1919-2013). In 1970, Dr Woodford closed his practice in Michigan and moved to Pasadena to accept a partnership with the Southern California Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, where he was the first member to be certified as a specialist by the American Board of Family Practice.
As a youngster, Peggy Woodford Forbes had wanted to go into theatre but he father wanted her to study medicine or law. She failed in a bid to enter the Yale Drama School directors program and instead worked in television and theatre for many years. It was at Boston's public television station WGBH that she met her husband Donald Cameron Forbes. She was also the producer of Wheeler's repertory company in Boston.
Donald Cameron Forbes: Cam Stuart in the movie. Cameron was born in Boston on April 21, 1939; he died of pancreatic cancer at his younger daughter's home in Cambridge on July 21, 1998, aged 59.  The son of Gordon Donald Forbes (1915-1993) and Faith Fisher Forbes (1918-2009), he was raised in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University in 1961. He was a lighting designer for Boston's public television station WGBH (where he met Peggy Woodford) and lighting director and official photographer for The Theatre Company of Boston. Through his father he was related to US Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry (1943-) and his brother Cameron Forbes Kerry (1950-), General Counsel of the US Department of Commerce. The Forbes family is a wealthy extended American family, long prominent and considered part of the Boston Brahmin ėlite. The family's fortune originates from trading between North America and China in the 19th century and other investments, such as in railways, in the same period. The name descends from Scottish immigrants.
Cameron Forbes's maternal grandfather, Richard Thornton Fisher, was founder of the Harvard Forest. An accomplished painter, Cameron's mother Faith painted two soundboards for the Boston harpsichord maker, William Dowd and designed and painted a stained glass window for the Danville Congregational Church in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Gordon Donald Forbes, an electronics consulting engineer, was born in London, the son of Gerrit Forbes and Marthe De La Fruglaye.
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Typewriter Update

March 31, 2015, 5:18 am
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The Restored Remington
12 (or is a 10?)
 Now
 As it was




Donald Lampert and David Wells asked if I would share "trade secrets" on this restoration job. I've never hesitated to share whatever knowledge I've acquired from one of these projects, but in this case it's not quite that simple. In short, I have no secrets to share - if there were any, I've chucked them out of my head. This was such a monstrous task, I've tended to put the experience behind me and am trying hard to forget about it. As always, elbow grease was the No 1 ingredient.
What I do recall is that at the end of the first day of working on this, I had almost given up hope of succeeding and went very close to ditching the whole thing. Whatever I'd tried, as per previous restorations, wasn't working so well on this one, and I was left with a machine with a thin white smear over its workings. The next morning I decided on one last-ditched effort. I went down to the hardware store and asked the "experts" what I should use, thinking I might come home with one good product. Instead, $70 later, I was walking home with about six products. I could probably recommend any one or all of the six.
One thing I did do which I've never tried before was to take the typewriter outside and fire a high-powered water hose at it. It was a hot day, so I quickly took it back inside and dried it out by running the air compressor through it. From that point on, things began to look up.
In removing the Gorrin tabulation system, I was concerned I'd taken away more than I needed to from the back. But Richard Polt was right when he advised me to loosen the screws on the release levers, and the carriage skipping stopped. Thank you yet again, Richard! So now it's back to being a fully functioning typewriter, and it was worth all the trouble (and expense) it took to restore it. All's well that ends well. Except I wish I could offer Donald and David some useful tips - other than sheer determination and persistence, I can't think of any.
I was going largely by the serial number when I declared it to be a model 12, but Miguel Angel Chávez Silva added to the doubt I already had about this. I'm still not certain, but I suspect Miguel is also right and that this is a Remington 10.
                                 Help!
I have been offered 15 portable typewriters by a lady in New England, New South Wales, but being on the bones of my backside have no way of picking them up. Anyone coming through that region to Canberra that can help, please let me know.
Typewriters in the News
The typewriter is making a comeback, Kearney Hub
Typewriters are surviving the high tech age, CNN
Interesting Finds
Frans van de Rivière has acquired this very interesting machine, a Corona Silent "Typewriter Telegraph No8A" portable:
Richard Polt pointed out a similar machine was sold on eBay two years ago, one which Alan Seaver added had once belonged to Tilman Elster:
Frans also pointed to a 1977 Olympia SM9 with a Fraktur font being sold on eBay for 495 euro.
Glad to be of Service
I'm pleased my post on replacing the drawband on typewriters was of help to Mary E, the lady who is "resurrecting" a Remington Rand standard typewriter. Mary may be interested to know that the "gentleman" she refers to is the Oliver guru, none other than Martin Rice Jr. And yes, Mary, Marty is a true gentleman - and a scholar!
Spotted in Sydney
Typewriter-collecting encourager and cricket lover Peter Crossing made an 11th hour decision to go to the World Cup one-day semi-final between Australia and India in Sydney last week, after being offered a ticket by an Adelaide friend. Peter seldom fails to spot typewriters on any of his travels (Washington, Barbados, Hanoi), or to take photographs of same. This display he found at an art supply shop called Type in an arcade near the corner of George and Liverpool streets. These are, of course, grossly overpriced tinplate typewriters, not the Real McCoy.
Gone but not Forgotten
Sadly, Canberra will lose two typewriter collectors next week when Ray Nickson (above) takes up an appointment as a lecturer in law at the University of New England in Armidale. Ray will depart with his American-born wife Alice and their young daughter Cynthia - not to mention their large collection of Depression Era and other gorgeous old typewriters. They (that is the Nicksons and the typewriters) will be sorely missed around here. Canberra's population of Typospherians will drop by half.
Meanwhile, in Sydney, typewriter collectorRichard Amery has also been busy packing up typewriters - in his case from his electoral and parliamentary offices - and finding places to store them. Although Richard retired from politics last year, it was not until last Saturday that his 32-year stint as a Member of the New South Wales Parliament officially ended. That was when a new member for Mount Druitt, Edmond Atalla, retained the seat with almost 66 per cent of the vote. The swing of almost 10 per cent matched that for Labor through the rest of the State, but the Liberal-National Party Coalition was returned to power with a reduced majority. Richard's collection of Imperial Good Companions remains at Rooty Hill, but other machines he used in his offices have had to go into storage elsewhere.
It's 56533-8 - or it is a 3???
The L.C.Smith No 8 serial number
Richard Polt and Donald Lampert were absolutely spot-on when last week they directed me to the serial number on my Australian rebuilt L.C.Smith No 8 (see post here). As John Guthrie had commented, once one finds it, it seems to jump out like a large snake - and one is left wondering why it took so long to locate it. I must have searched for it 10 or 12 times before giving up; even after Richard and Donald commented on my post, with accurate directions, it still took another few hours and two separate hunts to pinpoint it. In the end I rubbed tennis shoe whitener over it, so I could read it (and photograph it clearly - not a good angle for cameras!)
HOWEVER ... finding it has only raised further questions. This serial number doesn't seem to ft with the Typewriter Database figures. Is it a five-digit number with a dash and an 8 (as in the model number)? Or is it a six-digit number? And if so, what's the dash representing? From my reading of the database numbers, Model 8s have six digits (and no dash). We know this machine is a complete rebuild (in 1947) - is it possible it started life as a Model 3? If so, the serial number would suggest 1922. Disregarding the dash would probably make it an early 1926 model.
Sorry Richard and Donald, but despite your best efforts in allowing me to find the damned thing, having found it I'm still mystified.
The Ubiquitous Nippo
Niels Oskam found this Gyonneportable typewriter (listed as a "Guyonne") on Etsy from the Netherlands. Niels said he could not find any info on it, "but it's a beauty". Sorry, Niels, but it's a common-or-garden Nippo, best known in most parts of the world as an Atlas, but also sold as the Graduate, Cherryland, Orven, Elgin Collegiate, Del Mar and Wellon ... and now the Gyonne. Nippo must have had a team of workers to just come up with model names! Other Nippos appeared as the Baby Alpina, Condor, Rexina, Clipper, Jaguar and, when the team ran out of names, P100 (aka Morse), P200 (aka Argyle P201) and P300.
The seller is spruiking it as a "Spectacular RARE Guyonne Portable Working Typewriter Baby Blue Grey-ish Qwerty Keyboard with At-Sign @ 1960's New Ribbon Metal Very Elegant". And that's just the header! "AmsterdamFinds"really gets carried away with the description: "Super rare and equally elegant female typewriter, probably French design and made in France [a long way from Japan, mate!]. See on the second picture how the cover opens like a kind of spaceship - spectacular, never seen that, anyone? Looking at the design and the way it is built, this machine must be from the 60's or even the 50's as the @-sign is on the keyboard, and I have only seen that on the earlier typewriters ... The brand is Guyonne. Never heard of, no documentation found. Anyone?"
And he or she is asking a staggering $A 246 for it. Two hundred and forty bucks for a Nippo! I don't think so!
Here are a few of my Nippos:





Fast and Furious:
Hossfield, Willins and
"Timmy the Typewriter"
George Hossfield, Stella Willins (with "Timmy"), Irma Wright and Albert Tangora at the National Business Show at the Grand Central Palace in New York City in 1929.
From left, George Hossfield, Stella Willins (with "Timmy"), Irma Wright and Albert Tangora. In the second row, behind Willins and Wright, is Barney Stapert. 
Lydia Pappas, an archivist at the University of South Carolina, was kind enough to alert me this morning to footage of what purports to be the world speed typewriting championships, filmed by Alfred Gold on October 25, 1929, at 342 Madison Avenue, New York City, for Movietone News, and donated to USC's historic film vaults by the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.
No 342 Madison Avenue was, in fact, the headquarters of the Underwood Typewriter Company. And as much as Underwood dominated and controlled the world speed typing championships, there was absolutely no way world championship events would have been staged in Underwood's own HQ building! The 1929 world championships had been held in Toronto, Canada, a month before this film was shot. What this film shows is the Underwood speed typing team demonstrating its skills in mock competition.
Have a gander at the size of the bell on that thing!!!
The 6 minutes 18 seconds film, which shows Underwood employee James Nelson Kimball directing the contestants, can be found here. It includes interviews and demonstrations with world champion George Hossfield and women's champion Stella Willins. USC's description is poor, and doesn't mention Kimball, or even the great Albert Tangora or Irma Wright, who are also seen in action. It calls Willins"Ms Stella" (not using her surname once), as if an actress had just popped in from a stage production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire to take part in the typing contest. (Okay, I realise the play wasn't written until 1947.)
By the way, the Underwood typewriter Willins used in all her world championship events and demonstrations, her favourite speed machine, was nicknamed by her "Timmy the Typewriter". It had a bloody big bell for a Timmy!
Hey, USC, her name is Stella Willins, NOT "Ms Stella"
USC also has a silent 1 minute 56 seconds film shot on March 25, 1927, showing George Hossfield typing at 157 words a minute. The scenes of Hossfield showing a group of stenographers how he types can be seen here. They include close-ups of Hossfield's typing.
Here is a 15-minute silent video, one of three 16mm reels produced by the Harmon Foundation in 1939, which include Stella Willins demonstrating:

Brooklyn Eagle Magazine, September 6, 1931
 
St Petersburg, Florida, Independent, February 16, 1938
The New Yorker, 1941
The neutron bomb
and the Olivetti Lettera 32
Los Angeles police commission president Steven Soboroff has acquired the typewriter of Samuel Theodore Cohen (1921-2010), an American physicist who invented the W70 warhead and is therefore generally credited as the father of the neutron bomb. Soboroff collects the typewriters of the celebrated or accomplished. Cohen's is the 30th added to his collection. 
In January, Soboroff acquired the typewriter of the actor Rudolph Valentino. It's not, I believe, an Olivetti Valentine (yeah, I know, the Valentine came out almost 43 years after the "Latin Lover" died).
Miss Typewriter
By Owen Smith
Who also designed:
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The Extraordinarily Brave and Brilliant Robin Hyde - and her Hermes Bay Portable Typewriter

April 2, 2015, 7:38 am
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A photograph taken by fellow New Zealand poet Charles Orwell Brasch (1909-1973) of the great writer, the tragic Robin Hyde (real name, Iris Guiver Wilkinson), typing in the garden outside Bishop's Barn, a country cottage in Wiltshire that Brasch had been loaned for his last three months in England before leaving for the United States on June 30, 1939. The photo was taken during the first of two visits Hyde made to the cottage within a month, on April 20, 1939. Four months later Hyde suicided in her rented attic room at 1 Pembridge Square, Notting Hill, London. She was just 33.
'By choice you stood always on disputed ground,
At the utmost edge of life ...'
- Brasch's tribute to Hyde
Photograph possibly taken by Hyde's former hospital medical superintendent Dr Henry Meredith Buchanan (1887-1974) on November 11, 1938, during a visit by Buchanan to Hyde's rented caravan at Pope's Hall in Kent, which she apparently called "Little China". Hyde had arrived by ship at Southampton on September 18.
' ... when I recall that thrusting indomitable figure, with a stick in one hand and a portable typewriter in the other, limping into the front line of a particularly nasty war ... then this is for me no figure of despair or defeat, but a true flag-bearer of the human cause. Iris was writing not just for China, but for the oppressed and afflicted everywhere'
- Tribute to Hyde from fellow New Zealand writer James Munro Bertram (1910-1993)
(A special thanks to Georg Sommeregger
for alerting me to the story of the incredible Robin Hyde)
Believed to be a 1937 self-portrait by Hyde
' ... whilst in your own little lighted cubbyhole, you bang the keys of a vicious-looking typewriter of ancient mode, and wish to God that somebody would invent new adjectives for describing society brides: I mean, new printable adjectives.'
- Hyde bemoaning her lot, as a women trying to earn a living as a newspaper journalist in late 1920s-early 1930s New Zealand and, merely because of her gender, being forced to write the social or shopping columns. But she still managed to insert controversial interviews or subversive comment in these.
One of the few blessings for the archivists trying to sort through the poetry and other writings left behind when a 33-year-old Robin Hyde took an overdose of Benzedrine in her rented attic in Notting Hill, London, on August 23, 1939, is that 32 months earlier she had bought herself a Hermes Baby portable typewriter.
Hyde purchased the typewriter on instalment on January 25, 1937, from Bill Mawle's British Typewriters and Office Equipment branch at 8 Queen's Arcade in Auckland, New Zealand. The serial number of 88485 would indicate the machine was made by Paillard in Yverdon, in Switzerland, in the second half of 1936. Mawle, who had a contract with Paillard to make this portable as the Baby Empire in West Bromwich, England, had established contacts with New Zealand in 1931 while he was sales manager for Imperial typewriters in Leicester. 
The ornate Queen's Arcade in downtown Auckland, where Hyde bought her Hermes Baby portable typewriter.
Three weeks after buying the Hermes Baby, on February 13 Hyde took it north for a solid workout, renting a cabin at Whangaroa Harbour to type the final draft of her autobiographical novel The Godwits Fly. She posted the typescript to her publisher in London in early March (the book was published in 1938) and almost immediately started typing the first draft of another autobiographical work. A painfully honest account of her previous 10 years, this was eventually published in 1984 as A Home in this World. By August 1937 Hyde had typed another novel, Nor the Years Condemn (her second book about James Douglas Stark*, also published 1938), while having earlier works, Wednesday's Children and a collection of poetry titled Persephone in Winter: Poems, accepted for publication. Nor the Years Condemn, a powerful commentary on New Zealand between the wars, was distinguished, like her travel articles for the New Zealand Railways Magazine and her best poetry, by a then-unique (for New Zealand poets) and remarkable sense of place.
(*James Douglas Stark, 1898-1942, was the Invercargill-born son of a Great Bear Lake Native American, Wyald Stark, who had settled in New Zealand from the Australian goldfields in 1857, and a Madrid-born mother. Wanted by police, Doug Stark stole the place of a drunken solder on a troop ship and found his way to Gallipoli, where he served in the 1st New Zealand Expeditionary Force. He showed extreme bravery on the battlefield and was recommended for both the Military Medal and the Victoria Cross, but because he was under punishment at these times did not receive the awards. Stark was also badly wounded twice. Because he was recommended for a commission and did not receive it he had his pips tattooed on his shoulders, as well as circles tattooed around his wounds. He was "notorious in the New Zealand Division for both his reckless courage when in action and for his total lack of military discipline when out of line". He was described as "brave enough to have been recommended for the VC, reckless enough to have served imprisonment, tough enough to have escaped from Le Havre prison". But as Hyde put it in her first book about Stark, Passport to Hell, "It was not considered the thing at headquarters for a soldier to win his country's highest honour while on probation for a proud and picturesque crime sheet.") Hyde described her novel as an "illustration of Walt Whitman’s line: ‘There is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in man'."
The year-old Hermes Baby travelled with Hyde when on January 18, 1938, she sailed for Sydney on the Awatea and from there for Hong Kong on the Changte, sailing via Brisbane, Cairns, Thursday Island and Manila. Hyde had planned to travel to Kobe then Vladivostok to take the trans-Siberian railway to Europe, but the Japanese occupation caused a delay in the connection. Having met James Bertram in Hong Kong, Hyde made the momentous decision to travel to China. In Shanghai she met fellow New Zealander Rewi Alley, already committed to his lifelong work for the Chinese people. Hyde travelled to the war front, the first woman journalist to do so, witnessing the barbaric realities which she had only imagined in the first Stark book, Passport to Hell.
Undeterred by Japanese bombing, she visited Canton (Guangzhou) and met Chinese generals and the writers Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow. She was able to obtain a pass for the front signed by Chiang Kai-shek. Some of her finest poems, the travel book Dragon Rampant (1939), and many articles emerged from her extraordinary journey into the war zone. And during it, Hyde still found time to write to her mother about the poems she was working on: "a longish series about Wellington, from Island Bay to your sewing-machine, and a slight one called Fragments from Two Countries… They’re in Hankow, with a suitcase and my typewriter."
Hyde was in Hsuchow when Japanese forces took the city on May 19, 1938. After it was bombed and captured, Hyde attempted to flee the area by limping 50 miles along the railway track, and was eventually escorted by Japanese officials to the port city of Tsing Tao, where she was handed over to British authorities. Assaulted by Japanese soldiers, she sustained a painful eye injury, which was treated by a Japanese doctor. While hospitalised in Hong Kong with a skin infection and digestive complaint, she still managed to interview Soong  Ch’ing-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen). Hyde finally arrived in England - via Manila, Belawan, Sabang, Colombo, the Suez, Port Said, Genoa, Villefranche and Algiers - on September  18, ill and penniless. In England she became involved with the China Campaign Committee, the Left Book Club and the Suffragette Fellowship. From a rented caravan in Kent, she wrote of China and insightfully of "the world we know, love, and are probably about to destroy". But she was in and out of hospital, suffering from depression, dysentery and anaemia.
At one time tarred by one critic as being part of a group of "lady writers. A bunch of bores in stuffy drawers", Hyde has belatedly become recognised as one of New Zealand’s most significant writers in poetry, fiction and journalism. She was born Iris Guiver Wilkinson in Cape Town, South Africa, on January 19, 1906, the second daughter of Edith Ellinor (Nelly) Butler, an Australian nurse who on her way ‘Home’ (to England) had met and married George Edward Wilkinson, an Englishman working on the installation of a post and telegraph system in South Africa. When Iris was a month old, the family sailed third-class in the Ruapehu for New Zealand and settled in Wellington. At 16 the ‘Schoolgirl Poetess’ joined the staff of The Dominion newspaper, but at 18 spent some months in hospital after a knee operation. She came out on crutches, lame for life and dependent on opiates for relief. The pain haunted her for the rest of her life.
Covering the 1925 national election for The Dominion, Hyde became friendly with social reformist William Downie Stewart, who had bought a Blickensderfer 5 from Alf Reed of the New Zealand Typewriter Company in Dunedin at the turn of the century - in part exchange for a Sholes & Glidden Stewart had bought during a visit to the United States.
A brief affair while Hyde was in Rotorua to receive treatment for her knee left her pregnant. The father was a handsome Auckland motor mechanic, Frederick de Mulford Hyde AFC (1897-1962), a man eight years Robin Hyde's senior. Hyde had in 1917 flown for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force Royal Flying Corps and rose to Second Lieutenant with the Royal Air Force. 
In April 1926 Robin Hyde resigned from The Dominion and sailed for Sydney. In September her son died at birth. She gave him the name [Christopher] Robin Hyde, then borrowed it back from the dead baby, to use as a ‘nom de guerre’ for her serious writing. On her return to New Zealand she had a nervous breakdown, and  in 1927 spent some months in Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer Springs. Recovering, she began to write again, and bought a typewriter (a predecessor to her Hermes Baby) with earnings from her prize-winning South African story One Soldier.
Her first collection of poetry, The Desolate Star, was published in 1929. In Wanganui she became pregnant again, after a brief fling with a married journalist, Henry Lawson-Smith (1895-1982), another World War I veteran. Lawson-Smith suggested she pay half (£20) the cost of an abortion. "Well, I thought, you can’t say we haven’t got sex equality all right", Hyde wrote. She refused the abortion; her second son, Derek Arden Challis, was born in October 1930. 
Hyde with her son Derek Challis, Palmerston North, 1931
Hyde was saved from penury by the offer of a job at £4 a week as lady editor of the New Zealand Observer, a popular Auckland weekly. Under various pen-names (lady editor as Iris Wilkinson, book and film page editor, special article writer as Robin Hyde, social page columnist as Jennifer Larch, and so on) she filled the pages. In the deepening economic slump her articles on vagrant women and soup kitchens contrasted with the fashion and balls she reported in the society pages. But the pressures were too great: deadlines, Derek’s needs, sordid boarding-houses, the temptations of morphine. In mid-1933 she tried to drown herself by jumping off the wharf at the bottom of Queen Street, Auckland. Rescued, she was arrested and taken to the cells for women delirium tremens patients at Auckland Hospital to await a trial. She was charged and languished in a basement ward of the hospital for six weeks, then entered the Grey Lodge at Auckland Mental Hospital as a voluntary patient.  
Vicki Baum wrote a positive review of Hyde's Journalese on this white Mignon.
In this refuge, encouraged by her doctors, Henry Buchanan and Gilbert Tothill, she resumed writing. After a year she was writing a robust account of New Zealand newspapers and journalists, and beginning research in the Auckland Public Library for a historical novel on Baron Charles Philippe Hippolyte de Thierry (1793-1864), a Dutch-born adventurer who attempted to establish his own sovereign state in New Zealand in the years before British annexation. The "robust account" appeared as Journalese (1934), a quickly written commentary on life and literature which was praised by the popular novelist Vicki Baum. Indeed, Hyde felt "much of the really unfair criticism is based on sexual grounds". Her historical novel Check to Your King (1936) addressed the role of colonisation in creating the contemporary plight of Maori. Her remarkable war novel Passport to Hell followed the same year. Much of Hyde’s prodigious output early in 1935 remains unpublished but included the first draft of The Godwits Fly. Later that year she was also working on Wednesday’s Children, an extraordinary "dream novel" which defiantly rewrites women’s experience. Her second collection, The Conquerors and Other Poems (also 1935) was the first by a New Zealander to be included in Macmillans’ Contemporary Poets series. It included some of her most haunting poems such as Babel Tower and one of her own favourites, Nirvana. In 1936 she travelled to Dunedin hoping to take up an invitation from Downie Stewart and write a historical novel based on the Hocken Library papers of Edward Markham, a 19th-century Englishman who had lived with the Maori of the Hokianga. When the library trustees withdrew permission she abandoned the project, although her research provided the basis for her hauntingly beautiful poem Arangi-Ma.
In her fiction and poetry Hyde had turned to Maori and Pakeha history and stories to find a distinctive New Zealand voice. She began studying Maori, and became more assertively feminist and socialist. The result was quite different from the style of contemporary male writers, especially in the attempt she made to articulate the experience of Maori and women. At its best, Hyde’s writing achieved a compelling vividness and insight. While she regarded herself as a poet first, during her lifetime she made more impact as a novelist. 
Hyde saw New Zealand’s future in the Pacific, not crouching "in the shadow of the old world". She wrote feelingly of those victims of greed and war living on society’s margins. As one who had suffered personal loss, illness and poverty,  she identified with the dispossessed.   
While the sequence of her written and published work following her purchase of the Hermes Baby can easily be traced, the poetry Hyde wrote between early 1937 and her death in August 1939 is what has caused archivists the greatest difficulty. She left an enormous body of work along with unanswered questions about her life and her work. Unfinished projects included a dramatisation of her novel Wednesday’s Children and a collection of poems with a distinctly New Zealand theme. Her papers were too disordered. But an important distinction in Hyde's typescripts from early 1937 onward helped with the general dating of her poems, many of which were posthumously published as Houses by the Sea in 1952. A vital discovery in the dating of a series of placename poems was that all the texts were typed using the same machine, the Hermes Baby.
This typewriter was easily distinguished from her previous one, which had a faulty typeslug. Typefaces were also used to discern the insertion of texts by her editors, especially Gloria Rawlinson (above). The typewriter Rawlinson used during the preparation of Houses by the Sea also had a characteristically defective typeslug. Evidence of Rawlinson is found on the typing she titled The Familiar and placed at Castor Bay (as Hyde had labelled the untitled text), while the version of Whangaroa Harbour which has a typed location at the end is also from Rawlinson’s typewriter. Using the typewriters to establish dates was important, as some of the placename poems were composed before 1937. For example, Hilltop and Lover, typed on Hyde’s earlier typewriter, are versions of the untitled If I set my lips to thee, tree typed on her Hermes Baby. The typewriter used by Rawlinson in the second half of the 1940s had a defective lower case ‘d’. The ‘d’ was damaged on the left hand face of the loop, preventing full registration of the letter.  Hyde’s Hermes Baby did not have this fault in the respective key. Examples of typing from Hyde’s first typewriter showed it had a defective lower case ‘a’. The upper horizontal part of the typeslug was damaged and did not print completely. The Hermes Baby had an accurate registration of this key and most others.
So what became of Hyde's Hermes Baby after her death? The portable typewriter was listed among her effects to be shipped from England back to New Zealand on December 23 1939. Hyde's executor, W. R. Edge, had been willed the earlier Hyde typewriter in 1935 and on February 12, 1945, he wrote to Hyde's sister Hazel, "Iris by her will left me a portable typewriter which I think was sent to Wellington with her effects. Do you happen to have it? If so I should like it!" It seems that it remained in New Zealand.
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Another Challenge: Restoring a 1954 Smith-Corona Model 88 Typewriter (I)

April 3, 2015, 7:32 pm
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At a sports history meeting on Wednesday evening, a friend said, "I've got another typewriter for you, it's in the boot of the car. It's a big old Smith-Corona." My eyes lit up. "But," he added quickly, noting my instant enthusiasm, "it's in a helluva mess. It's been sitting in a mate's barn out the back of Bungendore for quite a few years. He was about to throw it out, so I said I knew someone who might be about to fix it up."
It was pitch black in the carpark when we went outside to move the Smith-Corona into the back of the Typomobile. But even in the darkness I could get a clear idea of the enormous extent of the so-called "helluva mess". In the faint light of my friend's boot lamp, I could see that "fixing it up" wasn't going to be easy, but a mammoth undertaking. There was that fleeting moment when I felt like saying, "Thanks, but no thanks". But I do love a challenge. And I couldn't resist this one.
It's a 1954 Smith-Corona Model 88 with the serial number 88 (as in the model name, 88 characters), A4049021-15 (15 as in inches, the width of the carriage). Alan Seaver at Machines of Loving Grace points out that besides the two additional keys, which increase this model's capacity to 88 characters, you can tell a Model 88 from the earlier Models  6A and 7A by its uniform dark-green keys (the 6A and 7A have the same two-tone green keys as early Super 5 portables). Alan believes the E in his 1953 machine's serial number (88E4073754-13) indicates an Elite typeface. Alan also offers a PDF of the 88's manual here. On the Typewriter Database, Michael Höehne (1955, #88E4124332-11) and Peter Baker (Notagain, 1954, #88E4052570-13) have this model listed. Richard Polt has a similar Smith-Corona Deluxe Secretarial. 
Having not long previously completed the restoration of the old Remington, I wasn't exactly in the mood for another, similar task. Still, my thoughts went to Donald Lampert and David Wells, and my inability to properly record the process I used in restoring the Remington. I thought, if I take on this project, I'll try to photograph it step by step. So here goes ...
It wasn't until late on Thursday that I moved the Smith-Corona out of the Typomobile and into my house. And at that point, in proper light, I could tell that this typewriter didn't just represent a massive challenge, but in the state it was in it it was a health hazard inside my work area. The dirt and dried wattle leafs through the keyboard, and the cobwebs hanging off the carriage, were the very least of it. There was also the bird shite and the deeply encrusted rust all over.
Sticks and avian stools won't break my tools, I figured, nor would the remains of spider enclaves. And the missing right-side shift key was the very least of my concerns. At least the "magic margin setters" worked, and once they did the carriage moved, after a fashion (there's still a strange clunking sound in there somewhere). But perhaps I should have been alerted by the small start of something on the tray just to the right of the ribbon vibrator, in behind the right-side ribbon capstan. What an odd-looking, if tiny, structure!
But first there was my utter horror upon removing the platen ... Holy Dooley!!!
OK, first things first: Remove EVERYTHING that unscrews and can be taken off to be cleaned and/or repainted - that is, all panels, covers, rims etc. 1. The ribbon spools cover. Look for screws that will enable easy removal and replacement, rather than having to play around with springs or hinges and hinge rods. 2. When the platen can be easily removed, it makes life so much easier. Ditto the side, top and back panels around the carriage area. 3. Gently ease off the margin switch tops and other such knobs which block removal of panels, covers, rims etc, using very long-nosed pillars (see above, red handle). 4. Where there is a frontispiece that cannot be removed without first taking off keytops or switches, look behind it for screws that hold the switches to a rod or lever (see image below). 5. Use a sheet of paper, marked in sections, to place screws you have removed, so you will know where they go back. 6. In my case, I remove all trace of tabulation systems, as I won't be using them and find they just get in the way. So that includes the front tabulation bar and set and clear keys, the levers that run underneath the machine from the bar to the tabulation section screwed to the back of the machine, the tabulation section itself, and the tabulation bar that runs across the back of the machine behind the "magic margin" wheels and wire (see, along with tab section, back left, image above). All superfluous to my needs, and just add to the restoration workload. If, like me, you don't intend to use tabulation, get rid of it!
*NOTE: Be aware that when you use Google search to find proper descriptive names for various mechanical parts etc, you will instantly receive spam mail from China selling said parts. That, sadly, is the way Google works.
Now for my really big surprise. The "small start of something" on the tray beside the ribbon vibrator was an abandoned wasp nest. Two examples of the full-blown thing were found, inside both side panels of the typewriter, as well as a smaller nest at the back under the bell. This one was 4 1/2 inches long by 1 1/2 inches wide and more than an inch high.
These are most likely to be the nests of the black and yellow mud dauber, a sphecid wasp species, Sceliphron caementarium. The daubers are solitary insects which build nests out of mud, in sheltered locations, frequently on man-made structures. In 1996, Boeing 757 Birgenair Flight 301 crashed near Puerto Rico, possibly because of a blockade in a Pitot tube caused by a mud dauber's nest. They are almost rock-solid when fully dried.
 The mud dauber
The all-too-common European wasp
At the worst, these nests were built by the European wasp, Vespula germanica, which are very common around here, and can be dangerous. 
Male mud daubers sometimes bring spiders to nests to aid guarding. Usually the nests are used by the female wasps to store food (paralysed spiders) and lay eggs. The larvae outer shells and spider remains can be seen in the image below this one. 
What worried me more was the amount of rust on the inner frame.
While I contemplated ways of clearing this rust off, I soaked the removed parts overnight in hot, soapy water. After these are run over with a light scourer, it will be at least another day before they can be repainted. The inner layers of felt must be allowed to completely dry out first. It is essential that they are dry before applying any primer and top layers of new paint. It can become awful messy otherwise.
If there are brand names on removed panels which are to be repainted, scan them in before soaking the panels, playing around with the brightness and contrast to bring up the colour as best as possible. These scans can be used later to replace the brand names with home-made decals. Remember to keep a written note of the original width measurement.
Next: The big clean-up starts. You may be surprised by the early results!
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Restoring a 1954 Smith-Corona Model 88 Typewriter: Part II - The Reintegration

April 4, 2015, 4:59 pm
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Let the clean-up begin! Still on Day One, I took a bit of a break. I find this is always a good idea while restoring typewriters, as it helps to clear the mind. And there's nothing better to clear the mind than mindlessly watching TV. So I caught an afternoon program on SBS called Leonardo Da Vinci: The Restoration Of The Century (after all, it is Easter). It was about the restoration of Leonardo's final masterpiece, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, completed in the Louvre three years ago. In the process of watching the show, I learned a new word: reintegration . The Louvre restorers seemed to prefer it to "restoration". In large part, it seemed to refer to clean-up and touch-up. It actually means "To restore to a condition of integration or unity." And I thought, gee, this also describes much better what we do to old typewriters. A 61-year-old Smith-Corona typewriter is hardly a 512-year-old Da Vinci masterpiece of course, and this is far from being the "restoration of the century". But hey, it's the best I've got, at least for the time being!
Having taken as many parts off the typewriter as I could, or needed (wanted) to, I took the machine outside to put the air compressor through it and clear out any loose matter. Having an air compressor is, I think, vital to any such operation, when dealing with a machine such as this, filled with so many linkages, levers, dogs and racks and whatever.
Having cleared out the loose matter, I attacked the surface rust, first using an aerosol can paint remover to loosen the rust. I find this handy, as with a long nozzle attachment, it enables me to direct the spray to specific areas and avoid contact with rubber etc. There is a rust remover in a hand-pump spray container, but the spray tends to go all over and leaves a white film which is hard to clear off. 
I didn't need to leave the paint remover to work for too long before using a wire brush attachment on an electric drill to clear off all the surface rust. Pretty soon you start to see a vast improvement, enough to keep one's confidence high at the end of one afternoon's work:
At the start of Day Two, I gave the machine a foam bath using a foam degreaser, making sure to protect the keytops from losing their sheen on being subjected to the strong solvent agent in the degreaser: 
At this point I need to use the air compressor once again, obviously, and then start to work on cleaning up and ungunking specific areas, such as the linkages, both front and back under the typebasket, the typebars themselves, as well as the gunked up racks and rods at the back of the typewriter. To give a idea of the stuff I use, below are some of the cans and containers. The dry lubricant is handy as it contains Teflon as well as silicon and avoids dripping. The Penetrol rust treatment aerosol can, with the long nozzle attachment, is really EXCELLENT for dealing with corrosion in linkages, the sides of typebars and other hard-to-get-at areas, in the rack and other parts of the carriage. But plan ahead to give it a full day to work properly. I also applied CLR with a wire brush to the linkages and typebars - surface rust had made them very stiff. 
Meanwhile, the parts to be primed and repainted have been taken from the hot bubble bath, run over with a scourer and left to dry out (particularly the felt behind them):
While these are drying, it is time to contemplate the colour I will use to repaint the machine. My first thought is something close to the original colour, and I am leaning toward a high gloss darker grey, similar to Richard Polt's Deluxe Secretarial (bottom), which I think tones in well with the shiny, darker grey trimming around the keyboard and the frontispiece. I don't have the silver trimming on the sides, as seen on Alan Seaver's Model 88 below (and absent from Michael Höhne's 88 below it, on which the keyboard-frontispiece trimming, as on mine, is a darker grey. On mine, the holes are there for the side trimming, but it has obviously been lost somewhere along the way.). 
I am also considering other, non-original colours, such as cream or off-white (which always work well), a very pale blue (likewise), or maybe a pale lemon, fawn or green. Anyone with any colour suggestions, please let me know.
Next: As the warm weather returns on this long Easter weekend, and on my 67th birthday, let the painting begin!
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No painting today, the rain has come to stay

April 6, 2015, 6:14 am
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Sadly, for the time being at least, I've got nothing more to report on the Smith-Corona Model 88 restoration. "Rain has stopped play", as they say in cricket. But since there has been so much interest in the SC 88 project, I thought I'd better keep posting on it. Or rather, in the interim, until such time as play can resume, I'll post on some other, far simpler "reintegrations".
This one, on an Olivetti Lettera 22 which had seen far, far better days, was completed last week. The rubber rings through which the four frame screws go, top and back, had completely disintegrated, so I used grommets Richard Polt had sent me from Cincinnati, cut them in half and placed them top and bottom of where the screws go in. It worked a treat, as the mask feels as snug as one thing, no movement at all, and the firmness of the body really improves the typing action:
I could make no further progress on the Smith-Corona 88 today because, for the first time in yonks, we got some heavy rain. The next step is the repainting of the body parts and then finally the complete reassembly of the machine. The parts are all primed and ready to go, and the inner workings are looking spic and span (and typing beautifully). But without another spell of warm, dry weather, I can do no more. Rain is forecast for tomorrow, but then the weather will clear and I can resume work on the 88 on Wednesday.
Here are the parts hanging out on the clothes line so the inner felt can dry, and then the priming:
There has been consensus on the colour. Ted Munk sorely tempted me this morning when he mentioned a light green ("just imagine," Ted said, and I did, I did; I had even tried a light green primer on some parts to give me a better idea). But I have developed a very clear vision of a very shiny dark grey finish, like Richard Polt's Deluxe Secretarial, and it has given me the ambition to aim for something like this:
The body colour strikes me as matching the frontispiece and keyboard trimming. I like it. Not sure I'll get the same overall smoothness of the ribbon spools cover, though.
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Rainy Thai (and Burmese) Typewriter Day

April 7, 2015, 5:43 am
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As it turned out, the forecasters were right and we did get more heavy rain today. But I was woken up by blazing sunshine and thought I was going to be able to complete the Smith-Corona Model 88 reintegration project a day ahead of schedule. Before I had a chance to walk down the road to the paint store to buy the dark grey gloss spray paint, however, the heavens opened up - and how.
Yet the day wasn't without its considerable compensations. Within the space of an hour around midday, FIVE portable typewriters were delivered here, four of them as totally unexpected donations. Two came from the departing Canberra typewriter collector Ray Nickson, who dropped over a Thai keyboard Olivetti Lettera 32 and a lovely dark grey Underwood Universal. Oddly enough, the Underwood was bought in Rangoon (now Yangon) in Burma (now Myanmar), right next door to Thailand:
The building where this Underwood was sold still stands, on the corner of 554-556 Merchant Street and 35th Street, Yangon. It's an elegant, three-storied structure built in 1930 by Siegmund Oppenheimer & Co Ltd, a company which handled a diverse range of goods - from engineering and building materials to wines and spirits, military equipment, tents, wolfram-ore bags, hospital furniture, police uniforms, orchids, elephant harnesses and Underwood typewriters. It is now a branch of the Innwa Bank.
Oppenheimer and Co was founded in Burma in 1885 by Siegmund Oppenheimer (above, born Germany 1858; died Nice, France, St Valentine's Day 1920). He was the founding president of the Rangoon Trades Association.
Back to the Thai language Olivetti ... first thing I noticed as I worked through the keyboard was that the carriage didn't move when the two centre keys on each of the four banks (plus a third key on one bank) were pressed. Strange? Closer inspection revealed this oddity:
The nine typebars at the centre of the basket don't have the end nodules on them to activate the carriage. So when you get to those centre keys, you have to remember to use the spacebar to advance. I guess if I knew the Thai language and the reason for the carriage not advancing, it would be simple. Looking at this scan, it seems as if I might have forgotten to press the spacebar after the % sign (or the character under it?):
Ray and I had a quick look through the keyboards in the copy of Beeching's book which I had given him (as a going-away present) and came to the conclusion that this was closest to the keyboard described as "Siamese Standard 2" (Siam is an exonym that was formerly used as the name of Thailand, especially Central, Eastern, Western and Southern Thailand [except the provinces Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat].)
No sooner had Ray left (he and his wife Alice and daughter Cynthia are headed for Armidale, where Ray will lecture on law at the University of New England) than a Canberra gentlemen called George McLean turned up with three portables. George had let me know a few days ago that he had an Olivetti Lettera 32 for me, but then arrived with two Olympias as well - an SM9 in great condition, and a very purposeful Splendid 33, which needs a little bodywork (already started). So yet another "reintegration" is planned.
It was a day of frustration as far as finishing-off work on the SC 88 was concerned, but a very profitable one nonetheless. Not sure what I'll do with the two OL32s, but I'm aiming for Ted Munk's light green suggestion, this time for the Splendid 33. I think it will look great, matching the platen knobs and the shift keys.
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Fans With Typewriters - A Talk on the History of Sportswriting 1815-2015

March 11, 2015, 4:34 am
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My sports history presentation "Fans With Typewriters: A History of Sportswriting 1815-2015" took place today the University of the Third Age in Hughes, Canberra, and there was a packed auditorium. I took along 15 typewriters, as well as a spare Blickensderfer case, to help make my points, and came home with 16 portables (with the promise of the gift of another to come).
"We'd have had a Sholes-designed portable typewriter in the 1870s if it wasn't for Remington"
Demonstrating the weight difference in Blickensderfer cases.
A very special thanks to Peter Weil for providing me with so many great images to illustrate the talk, including pictorial evidence of early outdoor use of the Blickensderfer.
With course coordinator, political scientist and writer John Warhurst, left.
Turn of the century, above, 50 years later, below
For many years I searched in vain for the famous Corona 3-Dempsey-Firpo advert. Did it exist, or was it just a good story? In frustration, eventually I mocked up my own. Real or not, it had the desired effect.
"It would never have happened if I'd been using a Corona 3!"
15 American sportswriters
Jack London
Ernest Hemingway
Grantland Rice
Westbrook Pegler
Damon Runyon
Ring Lardner
Paul Gallico
Red Smith
Heywood Broun
Irwin Shaw
Norman Mailer
George Plimpton
Gay Talese
Tom Wolfe
Hunter S. Thompson
15 Australian sportswriters
William Josiah Sumner Hammersley (1826-1886)
Nathaniel Gould (1857-1919)
William Francis Corbett (1857-1923)
John Worrall (1861-1937)
Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson (1864-1941)
Reginald William Ernest Wilmot (1869-1949) 
Claude Gordon Corbett (1885-1944)
Alban George "Johnny" Moyes (1893-1963)
Edward Hugh Buggy (1896-1974)
Raymond John Robinson (1905-1982) 
John Henry Webb Fingleton (1908-1981)  
Percy James Beames (1911-2004)
Dallas George Stivens (1911-1997)
Henry Alfred Gordon (1925-2015
Peter Muir McFarline (1944-2002)
15 sportswriters from other countries
Sir John Frederick Neville Cardus (1888-1975) Britain
Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) Trinidad
Raymond Charles Robertson-Glasgow (1901-1965) Britain
Denzil Stanley Batchelor (1906-1969) Britain
Alexander Gaskell Pickard (1913-2006) New Zealand
Sir Terence Power McLean (1913- 2004) New Zealand 
Leslie Thomas John Arlott (1914-1991) Britain
Peter Wilson (-1983) Britian 
Alan John Ross (1922 2001) Britian
Denis Lalanne (1926-) France
Ian Wooldridge (1932-2007) Britain
Hugh McIlvanney (1934-) Britain 
Neil Allen, Britain
Neil Wilson, Britain
Ramachandra Guha (1958-) India
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Typewriters and Trains

April 8, 2015, 6:55 am
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Royal Bar-Lock typewriter, London West Railway in 1910.
Bijou portable typewriter, Gare du Nord, Paris, early 1930s.
A businessman dictates a message for a typist, in a specially designed office on board a London and North Eastern Railway's express service operating between Newcastle-on-Tyne and King's Cross (London) in 1934.
A passenger on the Canadian Pacific Railway typing on her Remington portable typewriter during a three-day journey across Canada in 1939.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill at work during a train journey in 1940.
Reporter Roy Rowan with a Royal portable typewriter on the Simplon Orient Express in Yugoslavia in 1950.
War correspondents on the Korean Press train in 1951.
Aboard the Eisenhower Campaign trail train: Reporters at work in the press car in 1952.
Rock Hudson in Grado in Italy on the set of the movie of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in 1957.
Germany secretary using an Olympia SF Splendid 66 portable typewriter in 1960.
Page Lambert with her Royal portable typewriter in 1965.
Pascal Inard spent eight months writing his time-travel mystery Web of Destinies on an Imperial 70 typewriter during his daily commute to work on a Frankston line train, from Cheltenham to Melbourne, in 2014.
 Remington portable on the Orient Express 2015
 Victor typewriter
World typewriter, 1890.
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Then & Now: The Restored Smith-Corona Model 88

April 9, 2015, 3:10 am
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 Less than a week ago it looked like this. Now it doesn't ...
It's actually taken only four days to transform it. Two days were washed out. To be honest, these photos don't do it justice. I just had another look at it - it is a real transformation.
Gone are the mountains of rust, the forests of leaves and twigs, the jungle of giant wasp nests, the spider webs and bird poo (plus the tabulation system, I readily confess).
I will detail the final stages of the repainting and reassembly ASAP. For the time being I'm enjoying having a nice looking, sweet working (and sweet smelling) Smith-Corona Model 88. 
Right now there are a few minor adjustment still to be made. For one thing, the replacement shift key (off a spare parts Royal Diana) isn't blending in so well, but fortunately I have left myself another option there.
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The Hero Uncle I Always Knew but Never Met

April 9, 2015, 10:12 pm
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Today, April 10, is the 119th anniversary of the birth of my uncle, Walter Gerald Messenger MM, my father's oldest brother. If, as a child, I had had the chance to get to know him, I feel certain I would have idolised him in the way my father and his younger siblings had done. But almost 31 years before I was born, Walter Messenger had given his life for the freedom of the French and Belgium people, something the villagers in the border town of Nieppe remember to this day.
The MM after Walter Messenger's name stands for the Military Medal, awarded for his bravery in the field at the decisive Battle of Messines on June 7, 1917.
Walter is buried in the Pont d’Achelles Military Cemetery at Nieppe, in plot I, row C, grave six.
Walter Messenger’s actions on the first day of the Battle of Messines resulted in his award of a Military Medal being “promulgated” by the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on June 27, 1917 – 13 days after the battle ended and just 25 days before Walter died. The order for his decoration was issued on June 30.
According to the citation published in the London Gazette on August 16, 1917, Walter was to be decorated for helping to lay and maintain vital lines of communications between advancing troops and their supporting gun batteries. “We had many breaks in the lines but [Walter Messenger] was always ready to ... mend the breaks, in many cases under heavy shellfire from the enemy. Thus our communications were kept up and it was largely due to [Walter Messenger and Harry Waterford Minnis].”
The full story of Walter's bravery is not contained in the brief Gazette citation. But I had known it since I was a child of six or seven. And just this week, I found the more detailed account - one which coincided exactly with our extended family's long-held knowledge of what had occurred, and which memorably (for a highly impressionable young boy) had involved a dead German officer’s Luger P-08. It which was published in The Nelson Evening Mail on September 28, 1917.
Walter was also awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. All of these, along with his Military Medal, were presented to his mother, my grandmother, Emma Louise Messenger (née Boddington).
The Commonwealth War Graves' Pont d’Achelles Military Cemetery at Nieppe is maintained by the people of the village, who have large hothouses on site to grow fresh poppies to place on the Anzac graves year round. The cemetery was begun in June 1917 and used by field ambulances until the German advance the following April. It was used by the Germans during their occupation, under the name of the Papot Military Cemetery, and was resumed by the Allies in September 1918. The cemetery contains 293 Commonwealth and 37 German burials from World War I.
The Battle of Messines was ignited at 3.10 on the morning of June 7, 1917, when 19 large mines containing more than 447 tons of ammonal explosives were set off beneath German lines on the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge. The explosion, which killed more than 10,000 German soldiers, was heard and felt as far away as Dublin. It was probably the largest planned explosion in history until the 1945 Trinity atomic weapon test, and the largest non-nuclear planned explosion until the 1947 British Heligoland detonation. The Messines mines detonation killed more people than any other non-nuclear man-made explosion in history. Smoke and dust from the supporting Allied barrage limited visibility on the battlefield to 100 yards.
Walter Messenger survived Messines, but died in an Allied army hospital in Nieppe on the night of July 22, 1917, aged just 21 years and 14 weeks old. Earlier that day he had been hit by shrapnel from a German shell on the front line he had helped establish after Messines, west of La Basse Ville at Fromelles. On July 22, German howitzers had bombarded the New Zealand troops continuously for more than seven hours, from one in the afternoon until dusk, smashing into their trenches with 11-inch shells, as the Germans tried to reclaim lost ground on the Western Front.
The heavier bombardment had started at 9.15pm on July 8, a fortnight earlier, and was concentrated on the centre of the trenches held by Walter's battalion, in the sector between Messines and the River Lys. There was no continuous line of trenches. The most advanced troops, of which my uncle was one, were in small outposts, which consisted of shell-holes connected up and adapted for defence, and which as a rule could not be approached by daylight. The intention had been to extend each post from either flank, as time went on, till all met in a continuous line. Walter didn't live to see that happen. He task had been to bury telephone cables in working areas that were so well forward that work could be done only at night, and the Germans shelled everywhere frequently. Casualties were high.
 A German artillery crew firing a camouflaged 15cm gun at Arras, south-west of Lille. The shells fired at the New Zealanders were 28cm. Below, Allied troops unload 15-inch howitzer shells at Menin Road, Ypres, Belgium, in October 1917. These things could do some damage!
Walter, like many fallen soldiers, was unfortunate to be where he was the day he fell. The New Zealand battery had been ordered to take part in a practice battery, away from the extreme right of the front line and in preparation for the coming ThirdBattle of Ypres. But the German bombardment meant it was unable to leave its post. Walter's battalion, the 1st Canterbury, had only three days previously relieved part of the 49th and 50th Battalions of the 13th Brigade of the 4th Australian Division on the front line, from La Truie Farm to a point midway between Trois Tilleuls and Loophole Farms.
Above, the pointer marks La Basse Ville, where my uncle was wounded by shellfire, and pinpoints Nieppe, where he is buried. The map below pinpoints the site of the Battle of Messines and Nieppe.
With the centenary of Anzac Day just 15 days away, I have been once more looking into Walter’s remarkable war record. He enlisted on April 17, 1915, one week after his 19th birthday. Walter lied about his age - he changed the year of his birth from 1896 to 1895, claiming to be 20 and therefore eligible to sign up. To cover his tracks, he used the address of the Empire Hotel in Blenheim, in the Marlborough province of New Zealand. He was in fact working as a shepherd much further south-west, at Molesworth Station near Hamner Springs, where his own uncle (his mother's brother) Robert John Boddington was station manager.
Private Walter Messenger embarked for Egypt as part of the Canterbury Infantry with the 6thReinforcements of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force on August 15, 1915, with less than four months’ training under his belt. He was to serve with the 1st Battalion Canterbury Regiment, which by the time of his death was part of the 2nd brigade of the New Zealand Division. Walter arrived in Mudros on the island of Lemnos, Greece, on September 29, 1915. By November he was fighting at Gallipoli, in the weeks before the evacuation, and spent Christmas 1915 back at Mudros. Walter embarked from camps in Egypt with the New Zealand troops on the Ascania on March 26, 1916, reached Alexandria on the 29th, and left the following day for Ismailia. On April 6, the 1st Canterbury Battalion arrived at Port Said, embarked on the Franconia on the 8th and arrived at Marseilles on the 11th, headed for the fighting on the Western Front. We can trace Walter's footsteps through Europe in Captain David Ferguson's The History of the Canterbury Regiment, NZEF 1914-1919, published in 1921.
From Marseilles Walter was taken on a 70-hour train journey to Steenbecque, south of Hazebrouck and west of Lille in central France. He went into camp at Morbecque. In early May, the NZ Division prepared for its arrival on the front line, and the 1st Canterbury Battalion moved to Estaires and then marched to Armentières outside Nieppe on May 13. On the night of May 20 it went into the front line. It must have been a terrifying experience for a young man, just turned 20. Walter's sub-sector included a salient known as "The Mushroom", described by war historian Ferguson as being "of evil memory". “The Mushroom” was forward of the trenches and at a point where the two front lines were only 60 yards apart.
After months of trench warfare in the Battle of the Somme, on October 1, as a preliminary to the Battle of Le Transloy, Walter's battalion helped capture strongpoints near Eaucourt L'Abbaye. In February 1917 it moved to Nieppe, as plans were put in place for the audacious Battle of Messines. One June 5, the 1st Canterbury Battalion took over the tunnels in Hill 63, the now famous Catacombs near "Hyde Park Corner" in Ploegsteert Wood. Of course, my uncle never got to see the real Hyde Park  Corner (in London).
A dummy tree used as an observation post on Hill 63, and below Australian solders at Hill 63, 1917.
At zero hour on the morning of June 7, the leading waves of the 1st Canterbury Battalion left the assembly trench, mostly (apart from Walter and his comrade Harry Minnis) in line in extended order, and advanced across No-Man's-Land till they were checked by the Allied barrage on the German front line. The battalion's major objectives were the capture and consolidation of the Blue and Brown Lines and included the Wytschaete-Messines Road and the strongpoint at Au Bon Fermier Cabaret. A specially detailed body of troops, of which my uncle was one, also set out for the houses on the northern side of the Gooseberry Farm-Messines Road.
My own my interest in Walter was reignited on a visit back to my home town Greymouth in New Zealand in May 2003. On discovering, for the first time, where Walter was buried, I told family that visiting his gravesite would be like finding “part of who we are”. Upon returning to Canberra, I simply did a Google search for Nieppe. A website for the town came up, with an email contact address. I wrote that I was interested to know about the cemetery and its upkeep, as I had an uncle buried there.
Incredibly, less than a day later I received five beautiful large, clear images of Walter’s grave and others of the cemetery. Unbeknown to me, I had contacted Bernard Decaestecker and his son Francois, who took care of public relations for the village and had a very special interest in the cemetery and its upkeep. It would be unthinkable, the Decaesteckers told me, that the cemetery would be kept in anything other than pristine condition.
“These men fought and died for our freedom. We’ll never forget”, Bernard wrote. Upon reading that, I readily admit that was I reduced to tears of emotion. My uncle's supreme sacrifice had clearly not been in vain.
My cousin Graham Messenger, of Brisbane, visited Walter's gravesite in 2007.
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RIP Richie Benaud, the Voice of Summer and the Voice of Reason

April 11, 2015, 3:29 am
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Richie Benaud at a Remington SJ standard typewriter while working as a police roundsman for the Sydney Sun in the late 1950s.
Everyone in the cricket-playing world - from Christchurch to Karachi, from Bridgetown to Birmingham and from Mumbai to Manchester - felt that, through his commentaries, they knew as a close friend and a regular guest in their living rooms the marvellous Richie Benaud, who died yesterday morning in Sydney, aged 84.
They knew him not just for his soothing style or as the most knowledgeable and engrossing of cricket commentators, but also as a former Australian Test captain - a position still considered by most Australians to be a far, far higher calling than that of the Prime Minister of the country.
One thing they might not have known about Benaud, however, was that, even after he had cemented his place in the Australian cricket team in the mid-1950s, he still had to hold down a "day job" to make ends meet. That "day job" was as an evening newspaper reporter, a back-up police roundsman on the Sydney Sun.
Benaud was known for playing with an unbuttoned shirt, and raised eyebrows with his on-field exuberance. He learned to bowl leg breaks, googlies and topspinners from his cricketing father Lou Benaud, a third generation Australian of French Huguenot descent.
The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, November 1949
Accurate prediction from the great spinner Bill O'Reilly in November 1949
What even the fellow journalists who have in the past 36 hours paid so many glowing, heartfelt tributes to Benaud did not mention is that he actually started working for the Sun in 1953 as a pay clerk. But his clear ambition was to write stories, not pay slips. And not ghost-written stories, either, but stories that would be sold on his considerable skill, not just his name.
In order to achieve his goal, Benaud accepted an astounding challenge from the Sun's American-born executive editor, Lindsay Clinch (1907-1984). Just as Benaud was to become world renowned as he "man in the cream jacket", so before him was Clinch known on Elizabeth Street, Sydney, as the "Little White God" and "Little Caesar". Clinch, who had been born in New York City, the son of an Australian clerk, told Benaud that if he was able to help the Australian cricket team regain "The Ashes" on a tour to England in 1956, he would give Benaud a job as a journalist. 
As it turned out, Australia couldn't win back The Ashes, but on Benaud's eventual return home, Clinch gave him his chance all the same. On the tour, Benaud had helped Australia to its only victory, in the Lord's Test, when he scored 97 off 113 balls. His fielding, in particular at gully and short leg, was consistently of a high standard, in particular his acrobatic catch to dismiss Colin Cowdrey. As well, he had also managed to squeeze in some journalism experience, writing a sports column for the News of the World in London and getting a television training stint at the BBC. A quarter of a century later, it was through his work with the BBC in England that I had my most memorable encounter with Richie Benaud.
At about 6.30 on the evening of Tuesday, July 21, 1981, I was sitting at a desk in the Press Room at the back of the old Winter Shed at the Kirkstall Lane end of the Headingley cricket ground in Leeds, Yorkshire, trying to make my Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter sing. It was one of those occasions when I sensed the demands on me were way beyond the norm. I had just witnessed the end of one of the most extraordinary matches played in the then 104-year history of Test cricket. England, which at one stage had been at odds of 500-1 to win the Third Test of the 1981 Ashes series, had beaten Australia, which at that same point had been 4-1 on. 
I had to find the appropriate words to convey to readers back in Australia the astonishing circumstances in which their team had managed to lose. It had been a glorious match, one of the greatest Test matches ever played. Yet, as if that wasn't enough to make what I was about to write exceptionally challenging, there was a dark cloud over England's achievement: two of the key Australian players had taken the odds of 500-1, and bet £5 each against their own team winning. This was not on the scale of the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, the most infamous in not just baseball history but sports history. Still, by Australian standards, it was pretty bad. Australia was in the depths of despair at having been beaten from what had appeared to be an unassailable lead. To make it far worse, two of its players were each walking away with a £2500 "loser's bonus" in their pockets. As I said, this was going to be no easy story to write. But it would be a read by hundreds of thousands of buyers of Herald and Weekly Times group newspapers. I had to find the right words to do it justice.
Before arriving in Leeds for the cricket Test, I have covered the 110th British Open golf championship, at Royal St George's in Sandwich. Texan Bill Rogers had taken the title, holding off German Bernhard Langer to win by four strokes. I did not think it an exciting Open, certainly not compared to the previous year's tournament at Muirfield in Scotland, but others would disagree. Having filed my typewritten copy at the end of the St George's championship, I had packed the Olivetti into the boot and driven up the 252 miles or more from the house I had shared with Tom Watson at Deal in Kent, through the night to Leeds. But before leaving, and anticipating a chilly overnight drive at the height of the British sporting summer, I bought a tournament jumper, as much a souvenir as something to keep myself warm.
My notes from the last day of the Headingley Test
I wore it again on the last day of the cricket Test. I was wearing in the old Winter Shed at Headingley when I looked up from my Olivetti to see Richie Benaud walking in my direction. He had made his way across from the BBC commentary boxes at the Stretford end.
Probably sensing I was struggling to find the words to adequately express everything that had just occurred, Richie stopped and said, "I hope you've taken out a Lotto ticket."
For a second or two there, preoccupied as I was with my story, I looked blankly at him.
Richie pointed to the "110th Open Championship, 1981" embroidered on my jumper. 
"If you were at the Open and saw this incredible Test match, your luck must be well and truly in. I'd buy a Lotto ticket if I were you."
His comment acted as a release. It lightened the sombre atmosphere in the Press Room, and suddenly I found my thinking had become much clearer. I was instantly "unblocked", sufficiently for the words to now flow. What Richie had said had made me realise that, taking everything into consideration, the most important aspect of the day's events was the brilliant cricket which had been played - by England, and by Englishmen Ian Botham and Bob Willis in particular. There was no way that the two Australians - Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh - betting against their own team could have changed any of that. They had taken the bet because they considered the odds to be ridiculous, which they were. Their indiscretion had no influence on the outcome. It was not Lillee or Marsh, but England, and more especially cricket, which had been the winners. The betting was a mere sidebar. It was crucial, in getting this story right, that that was to be clearly understood.
Ian Botham wins the Player of the Match Award in the immediate aftermath of the Test. I got my head chopped off.
For me, two salient things that have merged in all the long and glowing tributes that have been paid to Richie Benaud since he passed away in the early hours of yesterday morning have been: first, his undying love of cricket, and two, his readiness to help out other, younger journalists. So many sports writers, from Mike Coward to Gideon Haigh, Max Presnell to Andrew McGarry and Frank Crook, and Andrew Ramsey to Ron Reed, have mentioned this last attribute. They have offered so many instances in which Benaud went to the aid of fellow journalists.  
Above all, however, was that as much as Benaud might have been a great cricketer, a great Australian Test captain, and a great commentator (up there with Brian Johnson and John Arlott), he was most of all a great cricket lover. What made him such a universally loved and admired man was his lifelong determination to make cricket interesting again for the Australian masses, to stand up for the players and to make the game as readily available as possible - and as entertaining - to the masses in Britain and Australia through the media.
Benaud discusses the need to play attacking cricket during the 1960-61 series against the West Indies with Sir Donald Bradman ("cricket's Babe Ruth") at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
I first got to know Benaud when I covered the 1970-71 Ashes series in Australia for The Australian newspaper. He was then and remained to his dying day a thorough gentleman, a wonderfully warm and endearing colleague. Back in the late 60s, early 70s, I also got to know Benaud's younger brother, John, who also played Test cricket and became both sports editor and editor of the Sun. Like Richie, John didn't rely on his name to get ahead in the newspaper game - he was a journalist of immense ability, and a very likeable chap with it.
John Benaud
Richie Benaud once said that, "Of real benefit in being on television is that I have been a working journalist, starting on police rounds in 1956 on the old Sydney Sun with that great police roundsman and teacher, Noel Bailey. He taught me to write exactly the number of words required by the editor and showed me how to do it without a script, talking into a telephone, which nowadays for me relates to a microphone. I promise you it's more hard work than iconic.""Don't speak unless you can add to the picture," he wrote.
November 1941, aged 11 years and one month!
Benaud was a cricket all-rounder who could blend thoughtful leg spin bowling with lower-order batting aggression. In 1963 he became the first player to complete the Test double of 200 wickets and 2000 runs. Along with fellow all-rounder Alan Davidson, he helped restore Australia to the top of world cricket in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He played 12 years of Test cricket, from 1952-64, and in 1958 became Australia's Test captain. During Benaud's captaincy, Australia did not lose a series, and became the dominant team in world cricket. Over the half century from 1964 he would go on to forge a reputation as one of the greatest cricketing personalities - as researcher, writer, critic, author, commentator, organiser, adviser and student of the game.
Swapping a Remington for a laptop, Benaud still shows his tying skills, working here with one of his successors as Australian captain, Ian Chappell.
Farewell Richie. Marvellous innings!
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A Splendid Munk

April 12, 2015, 5:34 am
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This reintegrated Olympia Splendid 33 takes its new name, the "Splendid Munk", from a little bit of banter between the Very Reverend Ted Munk and myself over visions of a green repaint job. It's supposed to be a "Wilderness green", but it looks more like an apple green here. The portable was originally cream, but the paintwork was badly worn, uneven and chipped. Worse still, someone had daubed it all over (including across the spacebar) with green liquid paper. (Yes, there was such a thing as green liquid paper, I remember it well.) It looks a bit like an Optima P1 now.
Part of the clean-up involved green (and white) liquid paper on the platen, feed rollers, bail rollers and especially the Perspex card holders. These are the usual places this stuff clings on to, like real paint, and apart from anything else it's unslightly. It's easy enough to get it off rubber surfaces with Methylated Spirits. But for the Perspex, Shellite is the only thing. Does a great job. But the holders must be taken off the machine to clean them properly. The only thing not present and correct on this machine now is the Perspex guide across the back. Otherwise it operates like a very purposeful little Olympia.
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Cool Typings

April 13, 2015, 7:35 am
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Albert Tangora leads the Royal typing class on a beach in California, 1938
Ed Sullivan, Atlantic City, 1936
Dictation, Germany, 1926
Olivetti ICO MP1
1937
William Faulkner, Hollywood, Underwood 4, 1943
Helen Hull, Corona 4, 1946
Royal
Elsa Maxwell, Venice, Olivetti Lettera 22, 1963
Royal
Olivetti
Stan Freberg, Olympia, 1962
Ian Fleming, Jamaica, Olympia SF
Armenian writer Vahe Katcha, 1966
Karl Hess on a houseboat on the Anacostia River, 1969
Rudi Carrell, Marbella, Remington, 1974
John Blunsden covers Italian Grand Prix, 1975
James Clavell, Smith-Corona, 1977
Pierre Rey, California, Smith-Corona, 1988
Clint Eastwood plays John Houston character, Zimbabwe, 1990
British writer Rosamunde Pilcher, Silver-Seiko
Thomas Gottschalk and Ankie Beilke, Kenya, 1985
Ottfried Fischer and Nina Proll
Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, 2002
Fashion model, Marseilles, Hermes 2000, 2007
Helen Mirren in Hitchcock movie, Olympia
Hermes 3000
Olympia
Hermes Baby
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The Case For Günter Grass (1927-2015)

April 14, 2015, 6:40 pm
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Günter Wilhelm Grass (October 16,1927-April 13, 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. Grass died of a lung infection on Monday in Lübeck, aged 87.
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I Know What's in Richard Burton's Case, But What About Marlon Brando's Case?

April 16, 2015, 5:26 am
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Yesterday's mention of the Olivetti Lettera 32 case for the late Günter Grass reminded me of another couple of cases of famous people embarking or disembarking carrying their portable typewriter cases. 

In the case of Richard Burton, seen above disembarking from a private jet with Elizabeth Taylor at London's Heathrow Airport in September 1970, it's very obviously an Olivetti Valentine case. The image might be in black and white, but I can guarantee it's a Welsh red Valentine. On the side of the case is a Welsh dragon sticker.
But I'm much less certain of what Marlon Brando was carrying in his typewriter case when he set off for a vacation in the south of France in early August 1953.
Brando and his then regular lover, fellow actor William Redfield, had been thrown off the Ile De France in New York harbour because, for the fifth time, Brando had lost his passport. Brando was refused an emergency passport by the State Department. 
Somehow the passport turned up and Brando and Redfield hightailed it over to the airport and caught a flight.
 Well, some may say it's a Royal De Luxe. After all:
But this photo was taken in 1955. And it's a case of a different case.
In between, in 1954, Brando was back in France, this time in Bandol in the Var department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region. And this time pursuing a woman, 19-year-old fisherman's daughter Josanne Mariana-Berenger. Here they are together in a hotel room, with Brando (yes, believe it or, that's a slim him) typing on a ... Royal DL.
One thing we do know for sure, Marlon had his iPad with him:
They got engaged, by the way, but never married. 
Of course, in Brando's case it may have been a case of having more than one typewriter. As in the case of Orson Welles, for example (but mostly an Underwood Noiseless):
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On First-Name Terms

April 16, 2015, 5:31 pm
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20 real or fictional people
and their first names
(answers below):
1. C. Glidden (as in Sholes & Glidden)
2. S. Baldrick (Blackadder)
3. C. Kramer (Seinfeld)
4. R. C. Allen (as in R.C. Allen Business Machines)
5. F. Colombo (Colombo)
6. C. Cagney and M.B. Lacey (Cagney & Lacey)
7. Dr J. H. Watson (as in Sherlock Holmes)
8. Q. Magoo (Mr Magoo) 
9. J. J. Rambo (Rambo)
10. L.C. Smith (as in L.C. Smith typewriters)
11. Captain G. Mainwaring (Dad's Army)
12. W. of Ivanhoe (Ivanhoe, Walter Scott)
13. E. Remington (as in E. Remington & Sons)
14. S.D.C. Olivetti (as in Ing. C. Olivetti & C. S.p.A.)
15. Captain H. Drummond (Bulldog Drummond)
16. J. Maigret (Inspector Maigret)
17. O.J. Simpson
18. Commander J.A.T. Bond CMG, RNVR (born Essen, Germany, November 11, 1920)
19. Miss F. Lemon (Poirot's secretary, Agatha Christie)
20. J.T. Underwood (as in Underwood Typewriter Company)

Answers:
1. Carlos Glidden
2. Sodoff Baldrick
3. Cosmo Kramer
4. Ralph Clayton Allen
5. Frank Colombo
6. Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey
7. John Hamish Watson
8. Quincy Magoo
9. John James Rambo
10. Lyman Cornelius Smith
11. George Mainwaring
12. Wilfred of Ivanhoe
13. Eliphalet Remington
14. Samuel David Camillo Olivetti
15. Hugh Drummond
16. Jules Maigret
17. Orenthal James Simpson
18. James Andrew Thomas Bond, 007
19. Felicity Lemon
20. John Thomas Underwood
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