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The Braxton Bragg Underwood Portable Tpewriter

April 19, 2015, 4:25 am
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Henceforth this little humdinger, which I have vowed to keep, will be known by me as the Braxton Bragg Underwood portable typewriter. I'm quite well aware that in the past 55 years, Braxton Bragg Underwood has been subjected to some bad Press, being more often than not branded a bigot and, worst still, a white supremacist. But perhaps, more lately, his character has come to be reappraised, and today he is likely to be judged as someone at least capable of a more enlightened attitude. As we approach the 80th anniversary of the trial of Tom Robinson, I tend to lean in that direction, though nobody seems prepared to go so far as a Evelyn Beatrice Hall Voltaire-esque line suggesting "I may disapprove of what you do, but I will defend to the death your right to do it". Even if it's true that in the summer of 1935, Braxton Bragg Underwood hung out The Maycomb Tribune office window, next door to the county jail, taking aim with a double barrel shotgun, fully prepared to see off the Old Sarum Mob.
The men shuffled back into their cars and were gone.
    I turned to Atticus.  “Can we go home now?”  He nodded.
    “Mr Finch?  They gone?”
    “They’ve gone,” he said.  “Get some sleep, Tom.  They won’t bother you anymore.”
    From a different direction, another voice cut crisply through the night:  “You’re damn tootin’ they won’t.  Had you covered all the time, Atticus.”
    Mr Underwood and a double-barrelled shotgun were leaning out the window.
And on that subject, one can forget the Hollywood-inspired notion of a spacious newspaper office in a small mid-1930s Southern town, where the editor-cum-reporter-cum-sub editor-cum typesetter could sit in comfort amid acres of uncluttered space. The Maycomb Tribune office wasn't big enough for Braxton Bragg Underwood to bang away at a big old Underwood 5, let alone have a choice of two working desks. After all, he practically lived there. Bung in a writing table, an ever-present gallon jug of cherry wine and a Ward and Sons Central Gun Works 12-gauge double barrel shotgun beside a camp bed, and there wasn't room to swing a cat. So even if the county courthouse was just across the square, Braxton Bragg Underwood's choice of writing weapon would have been one light and compact enough to carry about, like a little Underwood four-bank portable. Or even a Corona 3. He'd given the Underwood 5 away to the young 'uns.
A few things to consider:
1. There was such a person as Braxton Underwood. He was born in Kentucky in 1872, and his dad was called John Underwood (one for Ripley's Believe It Or Not, I concur). Sadly, I have no idea what became of him.
2. It has always been assumed that Harper Lee based the character of Atticus Finch on her father, Amasa Coleman Lee (with Harper above). So much so that when 'Coley' Lee died on April 15, 1962, one US columnist wrote,  "A great many people paused for a moment when Atticus died." And with good reason - 'Coley' Leewas a lawyer in Monroeville, Alabama. But he was also, from 1929 to 1947, editor of the Monroe Journal. Indeed, he was editor of the Journal in the period in which To Kill a Mockingbird is set, 1933-35. 
Atticus Finch forsakes The Maycomb Tribune for the Mobile Register and Scout can't understand why.
So was 'Coley' Lee the inspiration for bothAtticus FinchandBraxton Bragg Underwood? (The surname Finch was Harper Lee's mother's maiden name.) From 1927 to 1939, 'Coley' Lee also served as a member of the Alabama House of Representatives.
Harper Lee rediscovers her old haunts.
3. The name Braxton Bragg Underwood was obviously inspired in part by the Underwood 5 typewriter which 'Coley' Lee gave his daughter Harper and which she and Truman Capote took in turns from the Lee home to the from Faulk home, where Capote (the son of Lillie Mae Faulk, but back then known as Truman Persons) spent his summers. The kids would probably have preferred the little portable, at least for the tree house!
4. Local opinion held Mr Underwood to be an intense, profane little man, whose father in a fey fit of humour christened Braxton Bragg, a name Mr Underwood had done his best to live down.
Braxton Bragg Underwood takes his name from Braxton Bragg (1817-1876), a consistently cantankerous and generally inept Confederate general who is reputed to have single-handedly contributed almost as much to the outcome of the Civil War as the whole of the Union Army. Bragg was born in North Carolina. He became principal Confederate commander in the Western Theatre and military adviser to the Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The son and husband of slave owners, and a slave-owner himself, there were rumours that Bragg's mother was imprisoned for allegedly murdering an African-American freeman, and that Bragg was born in jail. During the Civil War, a fellow officer told him, "You have played the part of a damned scoundrel." Once considered the most disagreeable man in the US Army, a superior officer told him, "My God, Mr Bragg, you have quarrelled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarrelling with yourself!" His troops twice attempted to assassinate him. After the Civil War his plantation in Thibodaux was confiscated by the Federal Army and served as a shelter, the Bragg Home Colony for freed slaves. Bragg lived briefly in Lowndesboro, Alabama, north of Monroeville, and became superintendent of the New Orleans waterworks, but he was soon replaced by an African-American as the Reconstructionists came to power. In 1871 he was employed by the city of Mobile, south of Monroeville, to improve the river, harbour, and bay, leaving after quarrelling with a "combination of capitalists".
5. It is also evident that town drunk, the evil Bob Ewell (above, played by James Anderson) was given his name by Harper Lee after General Robert Edward Lee. Civil War historians take very differing views on whether Bragg and Lee liked one another very much. The consensus, however, seems to be that "detested" would be putting it rather mildly.
6. One theory suggests that To Kill a Mockingbird is based on Coley Lee's experience, while still a title lawyer, of defending two African-American men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. His clients, a father and son, were hanged.
7. Given Harper Lee's clear grasp of Southern history, it's possible a figure such as Braxton Bragg Underwood might have been based, to some degree, on notable campaigning Southern journalists and editors such as Henry Woodfin Grady (above, 1850-1889), who helped reintegrate the states of the former Confederacy into the Union after the Civil War, and the duplicitous Thomas Edward Watson (below, 1856-1922). Watson long supported black enfranchisement in Georgia and throughout the South, as a basic tenet of his populist philosophy, condemning lynching. However, by 1908 Watson identified himself as a white supremacist and ran as such during his presidential bid. Indeed, Watson turned out to be anti-Semitic as well, and the personification of pure evil. In 1913 he called for the lynching of Jewish prisoner Leon Frank and celebrated this vile act in print, then intimating that another Ku Klux Klan be organised. In other words, a truly, truly nasty piece of work.
8. To Kill a Mockingbird infers Braxton Bragg Underwood went the other way. The claim he was a racist comes from the mouth of Atticus Finch himself:  
In the morning, Aunty, who knew about what happened last night, said that children who slipped out at night were a disgrace to the family. Aunty also said that Mr Underwood was there the whole time and nothing bad would have happened.
    “You know, it’s a funny thing about Braxton (Mr Underwood),” said Atticus.  “He despises Negroes, won’t have one near him.”
    Aunty took offense to Atticus saying this comment about Mr Underwood in front of Calpurnia.  “Don’t talk like that in front of them.”
    “Talk like what in front of whom?” he asked.
    “Like that in front of Calpurnia.  You said Braxton Underwood despises Negroes right in front of her.”
    “Well, I’m sure Cal knows it.  Everybody in Maycomb knows it.  Anything fit to say at the table’s fine to say in front of Calpurnia.  She knows what she means to this family.”
    “I don’t think it’s a good habit, Atticus.  It encourages them.  You know how they talk among themselves.  Everything that happens in this town’s out to the Quarters before sundown.”
    “I don’t know of any law that says they can’t talk.  Maybe if we didn’t give them so much to talk about they’d be quiet.”
Estelle Evans as Calpurnia, with Jem and Scout.
Gregory Peck (Atticus Finch) and Mary Badham ('Scout') read the script 
After Tom Robinson was found guilty and killed while trying to escape jail, Jean Louise "Scout" Finch gained a far clearer understanding of the implications of these events by reading Braxton Bragg Underwood's editorial in The Maycomb Tribune:
Mr B. B. Underwood was at his most bitter, and he couldn't have cared less who cancelled advertising and subscriptions. (But Maycomb didn't play that way; Mr Underwood could holler till he sweated and write whatever he wanted to, he'd still get his advertising and subscriptions. If he wanted to make a fool of himself in his paper that was his business.) Mr Underwood didn't talk about miscarriages of justice, he was writing so children could understand. Mr Underwood simply figured it was a sin to kill cripples, be they standing, sitting, or escaping. He likened Tom's death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children, and Maycomb thought he was trying to write an editorial poetical enough to be reprinted in The Montgomery Advertiser.
"How could this be so, I wondered, as I read Mr Underwood's editorial. Senseless killing - Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openly and convicted by twelve good men and true; my father had fought for him all the way. Then Mr Underwood's meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed."
Gregory Peck, John Megna as Charles Baker 'Dill' Harris (the Truman Capote character), Phillip Alford as Jem Finch and Mary Badham as Scout Finch.
So what's elicited all this renewed interest in To Kill a Mockingbird? A reappraisal of Braxton Bragg Underwood, a racist whose prejudice was overridden by his sense of justice? Well, maybe. Maybe it's time he got a little good Press. He must have had some redeeming features, surely? But I have a grandchild on the way, and the would-be parents, being great lovers of Harper Lee's classic, along with the paternal would-be grandmother, are thinking about the name Scout, if it's a girl. I guess I'm just entering into the spirit o0f it all, by naming an adorable little portable typewriter the Braxton Bragg Underwood.
Mary Badham as Scout and Phillip Alford as Jem find something left by Arthur 'Boo' Radley (Robert Duvall).
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Typewriter Update

April 20, 2015, 2:26 am
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Typer, typer, burning bright
A few weeks ago I felt compelled to paraphrase the great Ogden Nash by commenting, "I think that I shall never get to see, an ETCetera cover lovely as a Royal McBee. Perhaps, unless the Burns should fall, I'll never see a Royal McBee at all." ETCetera ephemera columnist Peter Weil, who has researched and written extensively on the Burns typewriter, immediately hit back with a rewording of William Blake:
Typer, typer! BURNining bright
In the collections of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy shining symmetry?
ETCetera editor Ed Neuert responded to this little outburst of amateur poetry among the journal's board members by challenging them to come up with something which rhymed with Blickensderfer. I'm not sure the entries are fit to print.
But Peter's "Typer, typer!" effort just happened to coincide with a bonfire in Bonn, Germany, where a Nakajima Elite RS 500 portable appeared to have been set alight. It was all in a good cause, apparently - to take photographs to illustrate an article on "Freedom of expression, journalism, writers". It's described as a "Representative photo on censorship and repression. Our picture shows a burning typewriter, a burning book and a burning newspaper." 
Remembering Ernie Pyle
Rachel Goodman of the Indiana Daily Student reported that the great  Scripps-Howard war correspondent Ernie Pyle was remembered on Saturday, the  70th anniversary of his death, when a wreath full of red and white flowers was placed next to his statue outside Franklin Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, along with two single flowers in front of his typewriter.
Other happenings included the reopening of the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in his birthplace, Dana, Indiana, and a ceremony where Pyle is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. Pyle was a journalism student at IU and then became a reporter at the LaPorte Herald and the Washington Daily News. He died on April 18, 1945, on Iejima (then known as Ie Shima), an island north-west of Okinawa Island, after being hit by Japanese machine-gun fire.
Typewriter Glamorama
Not so sure that I can explain these images of American writer Bret Easton Ellis with the same brevity as I could the Bonn burning of a Nakajima Elite RS 500. So I won't try. Except to proffer the opinion that it's a little Underwood F-Model. And add that the photographs were taken by Tom Craig in the hills of Los Angeles. Nice pics, though ...
Right Royal back off!
But of all the typewriter-related pictures I've seen this month, this is my pick. I love it. It was taken at a stenographer's competition in the US in 1930. The second pic(k)? Harpo Marx, The Marx Brothers in The Big Store, 1941:
And the third pick. Six weeks after Idi Amin fleed from Uganda on April 11, 1979, officials told people who had had typewriters looted during his reign of terror to go to Mekerere University in Kampala to look for their stolen goods.
Imperial Desk Companion
I've no reason to be the cause of further frustration for Sydney typewriter collector Richard Amery, especially now that he has officially retired from politics and is a man of leisure. Yet it seems that just about every time Richard gets a notion into his head that his extensive collection of Imperial typewriters is almost complete, I come across another one. 
A couple of friends of mine were clearing out their house when they came across this Oxford Monthly magazine they'd souvenired on a trip to England in 1961. It has an advertisement for an Imperial Desk Companion. It may be no more than an Imperial Good Companion Model 6 or 7 with a wide carriage and carriage supports. But it looks larger than that to me, more like a semi-portable. Has anyone ever seen one in the metal?
Typewriters in the News
Write your own book on a typewriter at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books  Smokin' Hot Indie Lit Lounge.
What is it? It’s a typewriter! by Carole Currie, Asheville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times. "In all the Goodwill donations, flea market and garage sales I have participated in, there is only one thing I regret getting rid of and that was my father’s old Underwood typewriter. It was a small black machine, and by now it would look like a museum piece."
Protect Your Typewriter! by Vance Lauderdale, Memphis, Tennessee, The City Magazine. "A 1903 newspaper ad offered customers a way to 'Protect Your Typewriter'— something few people worry about today. I don’t know anyone who still uses a real, manual typewriter today. Believe it or not, I have a few of them, and just for a lark I’ve banged out letters to friends, who no doubt thought that once again the electricity to the Mansion had been cut off. Well, not always. I just liked the way the letters looked, and especially the different shades and texture of the type on the paper, depending on how hard you struck the keys.And mistakes? Well, they just added to the vintage charm. Anyway, like everybody else, one day I was looking through a 1903 issue of the Memphis News-Scimitar - just a typical night at the Lauderdales’ - when I spotted this ad for a gadget that would, as the ad clearly proclaims, 'Protect Your Typewriter'. And it must have done its job well, because just look how calmly that man is walking down the street, with not a care in the world for the valuable typewriter at his side."
With Typewriters And Rotary Phones, Tech Firm Goes Analog For April Fools’ Day, Cambridge, Massachusetts. "A Cambridge technology firm built a time machine on Wednesday, rolling back the clock to April 1, 1957. Workers arrived on the 14th floor of Endeavour Partners’ Kendall Square office building only to find rotary phones and manual typewriters where their computers used to be. A portrait of President Eisenhower looked down sternly from the wall."
WHAT'S A TYPEWRITER? It's what this Typhoon Yolanda survivor still uses to work her kids through college, wrote Lottie Salarda about Marilyn Ecap in Tacloban City, The Philippines. "For 24 years, a woman with a small table and an old mechanical typewriter have been fixtures in front of Liceo Del Verbo Divino, formerly known as Divine Word University, along Imelda Street in Tacloban City."
Typewriter Alert! Neenah Police in Wisconsin investigated suspicious packages found near Kohl's. Police say a woman had two typewriters with her and took them out of her car to make room. She forgot to put them back in and left them. Witnesses then saw two men in a car drive off fast, saw the typewriter cases and called police to report what they had perceived as suspicious activity. The owner of the typewriters called police to clear things up.
This lithograph for an Adler Modell 7 was created by Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972) in 1909. It was printed by Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Berlin.
Now for the BAD news  ... the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, chose to illustrate Teresa Leonard's Past Times piece "In the ’20s and beyond, the typewriter was the key to feminism" with this inappropriate image. There's barely a trace of a typewriter in it!:
Robotron Guide
Miss Typewriter
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Typewriters Forced to Tell Lies

April 21, 2015, 7:56 am
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Unlike Charles Bean's Corona 3 portable typewriter, now part of the World War I exhibitions in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, we know for certain that this 1912 Royal Standard No 5 typewriterwas at Gallipoli, though not on that fateful day - April 25, 1915 - when the ANZAC legend was born.
This is the truth. What typewriters were most tellingly used for at Gallipoli, however, was to disseminate falsehoods - to give the families of New Zealand and Australian soldiers at Gallipoli the entirely false impression that their husbands, fathers and sons were doing well, showing dash and courage to have the Turks on the run, that wounds were slight and "nothing could stop them". Truth is the first casualty of war, and Gallipoli is THE classic example:
The Sydney Morning Herald, May 7
The Royal typewriter was taken to Gallipoli by Brigadier General Evan Alexander Wisdom, who in March 1915 transferred to the Australian Imperial Force as brigade major of the 5th Infantry Brigade. Wisdom took the typewriter with him from Egypt to brigade headquarters on Gallipoli in August 1915 and it saw out the rest of the campaign there. In that time, it typed many an "official" li(n)e.
It has to be one of the most travelled typewriters in military history. Bought in Australia by Major General William Holmes in June 1914, the Royal went with Holmes to Rabaul, came back to Sydney, then travelled to Egypt, then with Wisdom to Turkey, Ismailia (where it was carted around on a small donkey), France and England, and finally back to Australia and New Guinea.
The New Zealand Herald, Auckland, April 28
With the centenary of ANZAC Day just 76 hours away, it's now impossible to turn on a TV set or a radio in Australia and not see or hear something about the 1915 Gallipoli landings. There is much mention of "glorious deeds", of "myths" and "legends" and "heroics", but most of it is honest and historically accurate enough to also include the word "failure". Even, occasionally, "disaster".
The New Zealand Herald, Auckland, May 3
The New Zealand Herald, Auckland, May 10
The New Zealand Herald, Auckland, May 11
"Stupefying heroism!"
"Unique in history of modern war!"
The Sydney Morning Herald, May 18
One hundred years ago, it would have been impossible to open a newspaper without reading something about Gallipoli. Back then, too, "glorious deeds" and "heroics" were words which were often plastered across the pages in bold headline type. Bold headlines, but also bold lies ...
The Sydney Morning Herald, May 18
The claim of 7000 Turkish losses on one day is a complete lie!
Whatever we might think and say about some of the appalling historic inaccuracies in the TV and radio programs being thrust down our throats right now, for Australia and New Zealand newspapers of late April and early May 1915, there was only one excuse: they were being deliberately and grossly misled by British government and military censorship, propaganda and misinformation.
This is the Corona 3 that Charles Bean, Australia's official war correspondent and later official war historian, is alleged to have used at Gallipoli. He certainly used it later in World War I, on the Western Front.
At Gallipoli, the word "typewriter" had two meanings: one was a machine-gun, used to kill men; the other for a machine used to kill the truth.
Back in Australia and New Zealand, wives, children and parents waited anxiously for word. Naturally, they believed that word, when printed in their newspapers, would be the truth. Instead, they were fed lies about a successful landing and an advance. The massive casualties were either not reported or shockingly understated. It would be four months before the typewriters of two journalists - Englishman Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Australian Keith Murdoch - would begin to type the words that would reveal what had really happened. And what was still happening on Gallipoli.
The landing at Anzac Cove, also known as the landing at Gaba Tepe, and to the Turks as the Arıburnu Battle, was part of the amphibious invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula by the forces of the British Empire, launching the land phase of the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War.
This map appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald the day before the landings.
The assault troops, mostly from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), arrived from Egypt across the Aegean Sea and landed at night on the western side of the peninsula. Although they failed to achieve their objectives, by nightfall the ANZACs had formed a tenuous beachhead.
The exact number of the day's casualties is not known. The ANZACs landed two divisions but more than 2000 men had been killed or wounded. Up to 400 alone lay dead on the beaches. The New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage says one in five (that is 600) of the 3000 New Zealanders involved became a casualty. The Australian War Memorial has 643 dead between April 25-30 and 1805 in May. The Australian Government estimates 2000 wounded left Anzac Cove on 25 April, but more wounded were still waiting on the battlefields to be evacuated. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission documents that 754 Australian and 147 New Zealand soldiers died on April 25. During the whole Gallipoli campaign, 8708 Australians and 2721 New Zealanders were killed.
War correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett didn't land at Gallipoli until 9.30 on the night of April 25. By that time, the carnage had been going on for 17 hours. Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatch about the landing at Anzac Cove was the first to reach Australia and a detailed account was published in Australian papers on May 8. Staff at General Headquarters had not recognised Bean as an official correspondent and his dispatch was not published in Australia until May 13.
Ashmead-Bartlett’s early dispatches praised the prowess and bravery of the troops, but they later became more critical of campaign leadership and what he believed was the futile sacrifice of so many men. On May 10 his dispatch in the Daily Telegraph in London warned readers of the strength of the Turkish troops. This differed from previous reports and was certainly a very different message from that in official communiques.
The Sydney Morning Herald, May 20
On May 27 Ashmead-Bartlett lost all his notes and possessions with the sinking of HMS Majestic off the Gallipoli peninsula. He returned to England to replace his typewriter and wardrobe and while he was there he attempted to advise politicians of the problems at Gallipoli. Back in Turkey, he continued to find his dispatches going missing or, those that did get through, cut to shreds. Commenting on what was blacked out of his typewritten copy, Ashmead-Bartlett said, "The articles resemble chicken out of which a thick nutritious broth has been extracted." Underneath the censor's thick black pen were the typewritten words of truth the public demanded and deserved to know. But the war lords were hellbent on lying ...

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Finishing the Smith-Corona 88 Restoration Job

April 21, 2015, 6:58 pm
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I'm afraid I got sidetracked a week ago and didn't complete the series of posts on the restoration of the Smith-Corona Model 88 standard manual typewriter. By the way, Alan Seaver has a PDF of a manual for this model here.
If only owners would read and follow this section of the manual, massive restoration jobs such as this one might not be necessary.
I notice the manual shows how the machine can be fitted for a carbon ribbon. Of course, it's always handy to have a manual like this available when reassembling a typewriter - especially if you've temporarily forgotten what goes where!
Among the comments on the previous post in this series were some very pertinent questions from Donald Lampert, who asked, "Was it worth it, as a practical typing unit - is it a quality typer, and how does it 'feel'? Awaiting the final chapter - does it live happily ever after, or should it have been given a quiet burial?"
1. It was a costly exercise, well over $100 to restore. So no, it wasn't really worth it. It is a practical typing unit and a quality typer which feels great to use. But I doubt I will get a lot of use out of it. I'm primarily a portable man. Nonetheless, I just hate to see any typewriter looking the way this one did.
2. Happy ever after? Well, it's looking pretty happy with itself at the moment, having been brought back to life. Who wouldn't be happy to be revived, to be restored to as-new? I simply couldn't bring myself to envisage a quiet burial, even when it was in the shocking state it arrived here in. I felt positive it could be made to look great again. But what now? I don't know, maybe some nice person will come along and give it a good home, where it will get plenty of use. It's a heavy working machine, after all. Then again, maybe not ...
Another comment asked about the keytops. "It seems common for them to get hazed over, as if it's mildew." Yes, very true! But this is the easy part. Start with a spray of light lubricant, hold one hand over the typebars to keep them down and firmly rub all the tops. Repeat until the keytops start to sparkle again. Where the haze remains, use a small dab of a light, non-scratching cleaning cream, then quickly spray with the lube again and wipe off. Remember to clean the cream off the edges and underneath the keytops. If removing liquid paper or the like, use Shellite so as not to leave a smear. Finally, rub the keytops with a tiny amount of oil or Silicone lube.
On to the "reintegration" ...
The final day of the project started with the clean-up jobs on things I had taken off the typewriter while I went through the process of getting rid of the inner mess - the deeply encrusted rust, the filth, the leaves, twigs, spider's webs and wasp nests. Having primed and repainted the parts, it was time to address the corrosion on the ends of the platen and the bird faeces and liquid paper on the platen rubber. The metal between the platen knobs and the platen always seems to attract rust and muck. The knobs often get drops of liquid paper on them. This is the opportunity to get rid of it all.
A small pad of fine-fibre steelwool dipped in Meths is good for getting the platen nice and smooth and clean.
Before reassembly, the parts that are hard to get at when the mask is back on should be given one last polish up and lube. This is especially so with the typebasket - it's all very well for a typewriter to outwardly look as if it's in great nick, but the machine is useless if the typebars remain covered in rust and are gunked up. All the keys should be thoroughly tested to ensure they are all working smoothly. It's amazing what crap can get down inside the slots on the segment. Remember to run a wire brush over the slugs themselves. A liquid like Shellite cleans and quickly dries, so it won't make the typebars stick. 
At the same time as attending to the typebasket, check the linkages between the key levers and the gearing under the segment, as well as the gearing connections. It is usually the top typebars on each side and the exposed levers and gearing (at the sides of the typebasket) which cop most of the corrosion. But with the mask off, remember to turn the typewriter on its back and clean and lube the exposed underneath rods and linkages too. 
With the platen and the parts that cover the margin rack and magic margin mechanism off the machine, it is opportune to make sure this whole normally enclosed area is thoroughly clean. It's a prime catchment area for massive amounts of dirt and gunk. Use brushes and cotton buds dipped in spirits to get down into small, narrow areas to clean them up. At the same time, clean up the feed rollers and their tray. Tool cleaner and compressed air spray cans are handy.
There was a shift key missing from my machine. I gently removed the inner core of the keytop, which remained on the lever. I had spare keytops from the removed tabulation mechanism, but the slots on the inner cores needed to be widened and lengthened in order for them to fit on to the larger shift key lever. Once I had done that, I glued the core back into the keytop and used a dab of Vaseline to ease the keytop back on to the lever.
The reassembly starts with the paper plate, guides and gauges, the top back cover and the carriage end pieces. I then work down the back end before starting on the side panels. When putting the side panels back on, put the machine on its back to ensure the tabs on the bottom of the panels slot correctly under the back sections and the boots.
With this machine, the side "chrome" trimmings were missing but the holes for them remained. So I used pin stripping from a car detailing shop to cover the holes, cutting it in such a way as to create an angled rather than straight end. The pin stripping can also be used across the bottom back section to join up with the side panels.
With the side panels back in, it was time to start on the front sections. Ribbon direction and colour selector switches have to be properly reattached once the frontispiece is replaced, ensuring they work as they should. One thing to watch for is that the spacebar grips fit under the front section properly, so that the spacebar sits down and the grips bounce off the front section as they should. It's all too easy to forget them!
Happy restoring!
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Ngaio Marsh's Google Doodle Typing GIF

April 22, 2015, 4:16 pm
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Today's Google Doodle is a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) celebrating the 120th anniversary of the birth of New Zealand writer Dame Ngaio Marsh. Ironically, while this is a "first" for a typing Google Doodle, Marsh didn't in fact type her own works.
Ngaio (pronounced Ni-O) is a Māori word which comes from the Mousehole tree.
Marsh's typescripts were all typed on an Imperial 50 standard manual typewriter, seen here in Marsh's house in the Cashmere Hills outside Christchurch in New Zealand, which is now a Marsh museum:
Marsh's long-time secretary, Rosemary Greene, typed from the author's handwritten manuscripts.
Edith Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch on April 23, 1895. She died there on February 18, 1982, aged 86. A crime writer and theatre director, she was internationally known for her creation Inspector Roderick Alleyn, a gentleman detective who works for the Metropolitan Police in London. She had 32 detective novels published between 1934 and 1982.
Thus Marsh was one of the four original "Queens of Crime", alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham.
Marsh, right, meets Agatha Christie at the Savoy Hotel in London in June 1960. 
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End of The Canberra Times as we know it

April 23, 2015, 4:44 pm
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Cool typewriting Jack left, computer-using Jack right
The end of The Canberra Times as we know it (and have done for more than 40 years) arrived on Wednesday afternoon when editor-at-large Jack Waterford announced he will leave the newspaper in April 30. Waterford, one of the Southern Hemisphere's most outstanding print newspaper editors, is also one of the last to have enjoyed a career which embraced manual typewriters (Olivetti 82s) at its concupiscent start and computers at its flaccid end.
Yesterday's Canberra Times declared in a large page one headline that this would be the "end of an era". It's more than that, much more. As Australasia's remaining print newspapers continue to be allowed to go to the dogs, The Canberra Times has been able to hold its own in revenue. Its owners, Fairfax, actually don't like to admit that, because they are so totally besotted with "new media platforms" that they think online newspapers are the only way to go. Their on-going efforts to run this print newspaper into the ground have thus far failed - for one main reason: Waterford still writes for it. And Canberrans have shown they want to read Waterford in print, not online. Waterford on the Web is just not the same thing. It's like eating Vegemite without the toast.
Waterford said, "Having recently acquired a few fresh grandchildren, I have decided to step back and enjoy some of the other things life has to offer while still maintaining an interest in politics and the people of Canberra." Waterford will continue to write a weekly column as a freelance contributor, but massive gaps will be left in The Canberra Times editions on the other five days of the week.
Waterford joined The Canberra Times as a copyboy in February 1972. In 1985 he won the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award for his pioneering work on accessing government documents through Freedom of Information legislation. He became deputy editor in 1987, editor in 1995, editor-in-chief in 2001 and editor-at-large in 2006. In 2007 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours "For service to journalism, particularly as a commentator on national politics, the law, to raising debate on ethical issues and public sector accountability, and to the community in the area of Indigenous affairs." He was also Canberra Citizen of the Year. 
Coonamble
John Edward O'Brien Waterford was born in the small country town of Coonamble, New South Wales (population 2998, plus several thousand more sheep) on February 12, 1952, and educated at St Joseph's College, Hunter's Hill, Sydney. He graduated in law from the Australian National University (where he used a VariTyper). He was appointed to a Jefferson Fellowship at the East-West Center in Honolulu in 1987 and is a board member of the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre.
I am proud to list Waterford among the 12 great print newspaper editors for whom I worked:
Russell William Nelson (1923-1983;
Greymouth Evening Star)
Sir Orton Sutherland Hintz (1907-1985;
The New Zealand Herald, Auckland)
Adrian Milford Deamer (1922-2000;
The Australian, Sydney)
Owen Mackay Thomson (1932-1998;
The Australian, Sydney, and The Sunday Independent, Western Australia)
Timothy Patrick "Tim Pat" Coogan (1935- ;
The Irish Press, Dublin, Ireland)
Sir Harold Matthew Evans (1928 -;
The Sunday Times, London)
Ian Leonard Hummerston (1931-2006;
The Daily News, Western Australia)
John Kenneth Hartigan (1947 -;
Sun Newspapers, Brisbane)
Robert Edward Cronin (1944 -;
The West Australian)
Warwick Bryce Wockner (1947 -;
The Townsville Bulletin)
Peter James Fray (1962- ;
The Canberra Times)
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Our Own Roll of Honour

April 23, 2015, 8:17 pm
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A distant relative of mine, Commodore Henry Eagle, US Navy, whose father fought in the 1812 American War of Independence.
Tomorrow marks the centenary of that day when the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) made their fateful landing at Gallipoli in Turkey. From 1916 onwards, the anniversary has been marked each year by Anzac Day, a day of remembrance that broadly commemorates all Australians and New Zealanders "who served and died in all wars, conflicts and peacekeeping operations" and "the contribution and suffering of all those who have served". Sadly, while this embraces Iraq and Afghanistan, it does not include the "Frontier Wars" in either country.
A Kiwi Messenger, but not one of us
Mount Messenger in New Zealand, for example, is named after Māori Wars veteran Colonel William Bazire Messenger of the Taranaki Militia, who commanded the 10th New Zealand Contingent to the Boer War and pulled out his own teeth. But he doesn't get to be considered tomorrow. Anyway, he's not one of us. How can I be so sure? Read on, McDuff.
Anzac Day is also unofficially recognised and observed in Newfoundland, as this was an independent dominion and the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was the only North American unit to fight at Gallipoli.
Didn't realise it was a competition?: The New Zealand Herald, Auckland, May 4, 1915
Like most New Zealanders and Australians tomorrow, I will be thinking of those close relatives who fought in the two World Wars. One in particular is my uncle Walter Gerald Messenger, who was at Gallipoli in 1915. He survived that slaughter and was awarded a Military Medal for his bravery at Messines, but died on the Western Front in 1917. However, as the day salutes all those who served in "all wars, conflicts and peacekeeping operations", we should perhaps be acknowledging all ancestors and relatives, close or otherwise, who have taken part in any military action, anywhere at any time.
Noeleen Mulholland
Happily, I am in a position to be able to do that. I have a cousin, Noeleen Mulholland, in Wellington, New Zealand, who has devoted many years of her life to growing to an incredibly healthy size our family tree, taking its roots and branches all the way back to the late 17th century, to my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Symon Messenger. Noeleen is the daughter of the late Noel Cedric Messenger MBE, a World War II veteran.
Walter Gerald Messenger
Apart from Walter Messenger, Noel was one of five other uncles who served in World Wars. Noelwas awarded the Africa Star after serving in North Africa in 1940-43. Geoffrey Walter Messenger, and, for various services in the Pacific Theatre, John Thomas Webber, James William Webber, Cyril Adam Webber and Russell Aicken Webber all enlisted.
Noel Cedric Messenger MBE
Then there are two great-uncles, Rifleman Ernest Nelson Boddington, who died of a war-related illness in England in 1917, and Lieutenant William George Boddington, who was killed in action in Papua New Guinea in 1942 while serving with the Australian Army. The Boddingtons belonged to my grandmother's family.
On my grandfather's side, Lieutenant William Geoffrey Messenger, born in 1885 in Hambledon, Surrey, received a Bar to the Distinguished Service Cross before he died in 1919. Jack Stephenson Messenger, born in 1899 in Kingston, Surrey, became an air raid warden and died in 1944 at Muntok, Banka Island, Sumatra, as a result of enemy (Japanese) action. 
Noeleen's 279-A4 page long tree gives us the opportunity to salute not just Anzacs, but also our forebears in the United States and Britain who took part in conflicts - reaching back to the 1812 American War of Independence. In all, six members of the extended family served in World War I and another 15 in World War II.
The start of our family's military links can be traced to Dublin-born Henry Eagle, a major of an Irish brigade in the War of 1812, stationed on Long Island. Two of his brothers were in the British military, one a surgeon, the other a major in the East Indies. His son, also Henry, was a commodore in the US Navy and the uncle and father-in-law of Thomas Henry Messenger, born in New York in 1840. Thomas' mother was Christiana Eagle Messenger, Henry Eagle II's sister.
The mortar schooner flotilla commanded by David Dixon Porter during the April 1862 attack on the forts below New Orleans.Vessels shown, from left: Westfield, Adolph Hugel, Para, William Bacon, Oliver H. Lee, C.P. Williams, Henry Janes, George Mangham, Racer, Horace Beals, Sarah Bruen, Samuel Rotan, John Griffith, Rachel Seaman, Maria J. Carlton, Sidney C. Jones, T.A. Ward, Sea Foam, Maria A. Wood, Octorara (Porter's flagship) and Matthew Vassar.
Another member of the US branch of our family, Emma, the daughter of Harry Messenger, married Edward G. Furber, acting master of the USS Para, a schooner acquired by the Union Navy during the American Civil War. She was used by the Navy to patrol navigable waterways of the Confederacy to prevent the South from trading with other countries.
Wilfred Chaundler Messenger
One of my favourite relatives is Rifle Brigade Captain Wilfred Chaundler Messenger, born in 1891 in Hampshire, England, who died in 1917 in Rouen, France, from wounds received in action at Langemarck. His commanding officer wrote, "He was a splendid soldier" and the battalion chaplain said of him, "I can say with absolute truth that I have never met an officer whom I respected more, or one whom his men loved better." In 1916 he was buried for three hours in a mine explosion in the Ypres Salient, and was so well loved by his men that he was rescued "by the devotion of his servant".  
In early 1944, the US 5th Marines liberated Tiny Messenger's Iboki Plantation in New Guinea from the Japanese occupiers.
But for colourful characters, the pick of the bunch must be Harry Trimble Messenger, born in 1901 in Guildford, England. A fearless aviator, "Tiny" Messenger drank himself to death at his Iboki plantation in New Guinea in 1941. Described as "a bit of a lad", he was nicknamed "Tiny" because he was 6ft 7in tall and weighed 280lb. He enlisted in the Australian Army in Rabaul in 1940. Malcolm Wright's The Gentle Savage says, "Messenger, another planter on the coast [he was manager at Iboki] belonged to another age. A massive man with a red Van Dyke beard, Tiny had been a pilot in the early days of the Royal Air Force ... he told of the scores of well-known women that he seduced. He was fat, boozy, riddled with malaria, and on his leg he had a large tropical ulcer that would never heal. When war was declared he disappeared.  He went to Australia, had medical treatment and volunteered for the Australian Imperial Force. He was accepted and became the most enthusiastic private in the army. It would not be long before he got sergeant's stripes. But his old enemies were at work. He got malaria and was put into hospital; the ulcer broke out again and Tiny was discharged medically unfit. He returned to Rabaul, where he did not remain long; he picked up a cargo of liquor [mostly rum] and returned to his plantation where, in a few months, he drank himself to death. When the Japanese occupied his plantation a short time afterwards, Tiny's ghost must have been very angry."
'Arsy-Glassy' Higgins
Perhaps slightly less colourful (at least according to Gertrude Bell) was Air Marshall Sir John Frederick Andrews Higgins, another aviator and ladies man. At least he had a funnier nickname: "Bum and Eyeglass" (or "Arsy-Glassy" for short). Higgins was born in Farnham, Surrey, in 1875, attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and was seriously wounded while serving with the Royal Artillery in the Boer War. In 1912 he was one of the first students of the Royal Aero Club's Central Flying School, was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps (Military Wing) as a flight commander, and assisted in carrying out some of the earliest experiments into firing guns from an aircraft. He was wounded in France in 1914 but returned there in 1916 in command of No 3 Brigade in the Battle of the Somme. Promoted to Major-General in the Royal Air Force on its formation in 1918, he later had command in Iraq. Knighted in 1925, from 1930 he worked for an aircraft company in India, but with the outbreak of World War II War he was recalled and appointed Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief. 
A painting depicting the Battle of Jutland
Engineer Commander Edward Hinkman Tucker Meeson was killed on the HMS Defence in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Previously, in the HMS Laurel, he took part at the Battle of Heligoland Bight so satisfactorily that he was promoted to commander and was made a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order. He was present at the sinking of the Blücher and at the evacuation of both Anzac Cove and Cape Helles.  
Albert Clay Messenger, was born in 1927 in Port Washington, New York, the grandson of Albert Ayers Messenger, one of the early property owners in Sands Point and for whom Messenger Lane (above) was named. Al Messenger served with the 88th Division (Blue Devils) in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations Infantry Company as a field medic. A source of family pride was that he could claim the distinction of having two great-grandfathers who fought for the Confederacy, one with the Army of Northern Virginia and the other with Company E 23rd Division North Carolina Infantry Regiment. What's more, he married into the Kurtz family!
Regis Gignoux, born in 1923 in Le Pin, Champtoce, France, and a graduate of the Groton School and Yale University, was a US Army Air Forces pilot with the rank of lieutenant in World War II.  His daughter Peg was designer in the display department of Shillito's, a department store in Typewriter City Cincinnati. Her great-great-great-great-grandfather, John Jay, was the first Chief Justice of the United States.
Margaret Langrish, born in 1922 in Croydon, Surrey, spent her formative years in Sydney but returned to England to serve as a radio operator in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during World War II. Harold Keith Langrish, a Flying Officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, died in Germany in 1944. He is buried in the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery, Nordrhein-Westfalen. Anne Seaber Harris was an officer in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II.
Thus, all told, I've got plenty of "family" to honour tomorrow.
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The Bard of Bunyah and his Brother Portable Typewriter

April 24, 2015, 11:36 pm
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Australian poet Les Murray at his home in Bunyah with his
Brother Deluxe 762TR portable typewriter.
The Troglodyte on the
Privacy of Typewriters
Both of Australia's leading poets and Nobel Prize contenders use manual portable typewriters in preference to computers. One is David Malouf, of Brisbane, who uses an Erika 105 (below).
The other is Les Murray, the Bard of Bunyah, who uses a Brother Deluxe 762TR.
Les Murray typing. He can be seen typing and being interviewed about his use of a typewriter (and liquid paper!) here.
Cattle fattening land around where Les Murray lives.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in Nabiac on the North Coast of New South Wales on October 17, 1938, and grew up in Bunyah. As well as being a poet, he is an anthologist and critic. His career spans more than 40 years and he has published 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings. His poetry has won many awards and he is regarded as "the leading Australian poet of his generation". In 1971 Murray resigned from his "respectable cover occupations" of translator at the Australian National University and public servant in Canberra to write poetry full-time. Murray has described himself as the last of the Jindyworobaks, an Australian literary movement whose white members sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry. In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker that Murray is "now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets". He is almost universally praised for his linguistic dexterity, his poetic skill and his humour. Murray's strength is the dramatisation of general ideas and the description of animals, machines or landscapes. He explores social questions through a celebration of common objects or machines, and dislikes modernism.
His poem "The Privacy of Typewriters", originally titled "The Typist" in 2012 (see top of post) before significant changes were made to it, first appeared in the New York journal Little Star last year.

I am an old book troglodyte
one who composes on paper
and types up the result
as many times as need be.

The computer scares me,
its crashes and codes,
its links with spies and gunshot,
its text that looks pre-published
and perhaps has been.

I don’t know who is reading
what I write on a carriage
that doesn’t move or ding.

I trust the spoor of botch,
whiteouts where thought deepened,
wise freedom from Spell Check,
sheets to sell the National Library.

I fear the lore
of that baleful misstruck key
that fills a whiskered screen
with a writhe of child pornography

and the doors smashing in
and the cops handcuffing me
to a gristlier video culture
coral line in an ever colder sea.
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Melbourne Print Museum Typewriters

April 26, 2015, 4:26 am
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Our man in Victoria, Michael Klein (occasional guest columnist with his Typewriter Technician recollections) has alerted me to a display of typewriters in Melbourne. It is at the Melbourne Museum of Printing in West Footscray. The museum's online typewriter page is still "in preparation", but declares the museum "has about 100 typewriters. No real antiques: nothing earlier than about 1925." Despite this claim, Michael's son got photos of some being exhibited, and they include a Featherweight Blickensderfer that is definitely pre-1925:

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The 'Australian Soldier' Who Killed Lord Kitchener: His Lover and His Typewriter

April 27, 2015, 8:25 am
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'Australian soldier Captain Claude Stoughton'
promoting US World War I bonds.
Australian passions have been inflamed. First, hundreds of thousands of them turned out at dawn services in various parts of the globe for emotional ceremonies celebrating the centenary of Anzac Day. Only to be admonished for doing so by a young TV soccer reporter, who tweeted, "The cultification of an imperialist invasion of a foreign nation that Australia had no quarrel with is against all ideals of modern society ... Wonder if the poorly-read, largely white, nationalist drinkers and gamblers pause today to consider the horror that all mankind suffered ... Remembering the summary execution, widespread rape and theft committed by these ‘brave’ Anzacs in Egypt, Palestine and Japan ... Not forgetting that the largest single-day terrorist attacks in history were committed by this nation and their allies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... Innocent children, on the way to school, murdered. Their shadows seared into the concrete of Hiroshima." The nation was outraged and the reporter was summarily sacked. At least news reader Hugh Riminton had the intestinal fortitude to comment that while the reporter's tweets were "untimely, immature and in one case offensively wrong" ... "But lest we forget, our Diggers died for free speech." Someone also raised the issue of Je suis Charlie. This was far from satire, of course; still, as misguided, "untimely and immature" and "inappropriate and disrespectful" as they were, they were one person's opinions.
Asquith's squeeze: Ms Stanley
Feelings were already running high. On the eve of Anzac Day, a Sydney columnist pointed out that on January 13, 1915, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had put forward the Gallipoli landings idea to a British War Council crisis meeting in London while Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was otherwise preoccupied writing his third love letter of the day to Venetia Stanley, a mistress 35 years his junior. Lord Kitchener said Churchill's plan was worth trying, so Asquith added to his love letter that he'd "see if it meets with your [Venetia's] approval". How dare, the columnist asked, the British PM put the lives of tens of thousands of Australian and New Zealand lives in the hands of his young female 'playmate'?
I have no doubt that in the poignant and sometimes tense atmosphere of Saturday, there were a few Australians and New Zealanders thinking, "If I'd only been there, I'd have killed Asquith, Churchill and Kitchener."
Well, as it turns out, an 'Australian' did kill Kitchener, 18 months after the London meeting and a year and six weeks after the Gallipoli landings. Or so he claimed ... 
He was Captain Claude Stoughton of the Western Australian Light Horse Regiment, a man who had "seen more war than any man at present" [in 1914] and to have been "bayoneted three times, gassed four times, and stuck once with a hook". Such stirring talk led to Captain Stoughton appearing before New York audiences dressed in uniform and telling war stories, and using his image to promote the sale of Liberty Bonds. One historian noted, "Captain Stoughton's career took off. His talks made decent money, his heroism earned him respect, and ladies found him alluring." 
Problem was, there was no such person as Claude Stoughton. But the fellow masquerading as this fictitious Aussie soldier did, in fact, claim to be responsible for the death of Lord Kitchener. Indeed, he told his story for a book called The Man Who Killed Kitchener and wanted a movie made of it.
Kitchener sailed from Scrabster to Scapa Flow on June 5, 1916, aboard the HMS Oak before transferring to the armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire for his diplomatic mission to Russia. While en route to the Russian port of Arkhangelsk during a Force 9 gale, Hampshire is believed to have struck a mine laid by the newly launched German U-boat U-75 and sank west of the Orkney Islands. Kitchener, his staff and 643 of the crew of 655 were drowned or died of exposure. Kitchener's body was never found.
While all this seems quite straightforward, there are still some astonishing theories about Kitchener's demise. The one that has 99 years on proved "most difficult to disprove" concerns a South African-born, Oxford-educated German secret agent and US citizen called Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne.
The theory goes that, posing as a Russian duke, Duquesne had joined Kitchener on the Hampshire and signalled the German U-boat. Duquesne allegedly made his own escape using a life raft before the ship was torpedoed and was rescued by the U-75. He claimed to have been awarded the Iron Cross for his act.
What is known for certain is that Duquesne was a man with "an all-consuming hatred of England" (his sister Elsbet had been raped and murdered and his mother Minna imprisoned by Kitchener's army in South Africa) and according to his biographer was "a walking, living, breathing, searing, killing, destroying torch of hate".
Apart from "The Man Who Killed Kitchener" and Captain Claude Stoughton, Duquesne also used the nom-de-plumes Frederick Fredericks, Boris Zakrevsky, Major Frank de Stafford Craven, Colonel Beza, Piet Niacud, George Fordam, The Duke and, most colourfully, "The Black Panther".
Duquesne was born the son of a hunter in East London in the Eastern Cape on September 21, 1877, and died in the City Hospital, Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), New York City, on May 24, 1956, aged 78. He is buried at Potters Field, Hart Island, in the Bronx.
From the Eastern Cape to the Bronx, Duquesne led a life of extraordinary daring.
The law caught up with him one last time on June 28, 1941, when he was arrested by FBI agents in the Manhattan apartment of his lover, his anti-British and anti-Semitic co-conspirator Evelyn Clayton Lewis. They nabbed Lewis and the pair's typewriter at the same time, and in turn 31 other members of the infamous Duquesne Spy Ring. These arrests led in 1942 to the largest espionage conviction in US history.
Lewis, the daughter of wealthy investment broker Charles Beverly Lewis (1869-1943), was born in Batesville, Arkansas, on February 23, 1903. When she was a teenager, the family moved to Dallas, Texas. After her arrest as an unregistered agent, she pleaded guilty, admitted she had let her own country down, and was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. The day she was released, February 28, 1943, her father died of diarrhoea in Dallas, aged 73.
Evelyn married John William Kingwell in Louisiana in 1945.
Duquesne's career of crime makes breathtaking reading. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902) he was captured and imprisoned three times by the British and once by the Portuguese, and each time escaped.
He infiltrated the British Army, became an officer and led an attempt to sabotage Cape Town and assassinate Kitchener. Captured and sentenced to death, he tried to escape prison in Cape Town and was sent to jail in Bermuda, but escaped to the United States and became an American citizen in December 1913.
The young Duquesne
In World War I, he became a spy for Germany and sabotaged British merchant ships in South America with concealed bombs. After he was caught by federal agents in New York in 1917, he feigned paralysis for two years and disguised himself as a woman and escaped by cutting the bars of his cell and climbing over the barrier walls, thus avoiding deportation to England. 
Duquesne fled to Mexico and Europe, but in 1926 moved back to New York and assumed a new identity as Frank de Stafford Craven.
Note: Not "tweeting" but "twitting"
In 1932 he was again captured in New York by federal agents and charged with both homicide and for being an escaped prisoner.
Duquesne the New York Herald journalist in 1913.
In between all this, Duquesne served as an adviser on big game hunting and was personal shooting instructor to Theodore Roosevelt, lobbied the US Congress to fund the importation of hippopotamuses into the Louisiana bayous, worked for Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America and later RKO Pictures as part of the publicity staff, was a New York Herald journalist and a war correspondent.
Duquesne had become a German spy in 1914 and was sent to Bahia, Brazil as Frederick Fredericks. He planted time bombs disguised as cases of mineral samples on British ships and he was credited with sinking 22 ships. He moved to Buenos Aires and reported his own death in Bolivia at the hands of Amazonian natives. Duquesne returned to New York around May 1916 and the next month left for Europe posing as the Russian Duke Boris Zakrevsky.
Duquesne's World War II registration
In the spring of 1934, Duquesne became an intelligence officer for the Order of 76, an American pro-Nazi organisation.
Duquesne's "entrapment" in the office of Harry Sawyer, June 25, 1941,
three days before his arrest.
On June 28, 1941, following a two-year investigation, the FBI arrested Duquesne and 32 other Nazi spies on charges of relaying secret information on US weaponry and shipping movements to Germany. The 33 were sentenced to serve a total of more than 300 years in prison. Duquesne was sentenced to 18 years. In 1954 he was released owing to ill health, having served 14 years.  
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The Way We Were - With Typewriters

April 27, 2015, 11:41 pm
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The outstanding British foreign correspondent Richard West died in Deal, Kent, on Saturday, aged 84. The Guardian, The Spectator and The Telegraph have run interesting obituaries - or, in the case of The Spectator, a rehash of a 1989 profile (see the praise from Graham Greene for West's insightful review of The Quiet American).
Used as the prototype of the fictitious freelance journalist hero in the 1973 book Harris in Wonderful, West (Harris) was described as surveying "the contemporary scene with a sort of bemused wonder, conspicuously harmless until he gets near a typewriter".
The Telegraph obituary for West drew a fascinating comment from Adrian Lithgow, who worked with West on the Mail on Sunday. Lithgow, now managing director of George Berkeley Public Relations, worked  for the West Lancs Evening Gazette, Sunday Mercury, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Business and BusinessAge and since 2010 has also been an editor at BastideLife. Lithgrow wrote about West's astonishing skill:
"I remember when West came in to the newsroom of the Mail on Sunday to write an article, sat at an old Remington and proceeded to type. He didn't look up, consult a note, go back to correct himself, but wrote the 1000-word piece without hesitation, repetition or deviation. Got to the end after about 20 minutes, assembled the copy and put it in the in-copy tray and then left without a word to anyone expect a five-minute detour to see the then editor Stewart Steven. And his article appeared in the next edition without any sub-editor's correction. That was doing it in style!"
I'd like to challenge any young would-be journalist today (Jasper?!) to do that:
1. One typewriter.
2. 20 minutes.
3. No hesitating.
4. No consulting notes.
5. 1000 words.
6. No stopping for corrections. No need for corrections later.
Go! (JL: I wouldn't ask you to do something I haven't done myself!)
Perhaps the budding journo could try something else West did: One-time North Country newspaper colleague Michael Frayne (Travels With a Typewriter) recalled that West once wrote an article on a sheep dog trial through the eyes of a sheep.
Richard Leaf West was born in Chelsea, London, on July 18, 1930, the son of Douglas West, a publisher and sometime journalist who was once literary editor of the Daily Mail. He was raised in North America during the World War II years. A reporter and author, Dick West will be best remembered for his coverage of the Vietnam War and Yugoslavia.
Neal Ascherson's The Guardian obituary points out that West claimed “liberal censorship” at home, the precursor of political correctness, was stifling his attempts to report that moral permissiveness – drugs, porn, “radical politics” – were a bigger cause of US defeat than military failure.
Far from being a big boozer by normal journalistic standards, West went for a drink one night in Saigon, woke up the next morning on the edge of a paddy field, thumbed down a lift and asked the driver what was the nearest city. "Singapore, of course" came the reply. Which is about 680 miles from Saigon, as the crow flies.
West started his newspaper career at the Manchester Guardian (where he was assigned to cover the sheep dog trials) and later the Daily Mirror in London. As letters editor at the Mirror, he tried to spice up the pages with letters he wrote himself, including one headed "Why can’t we have a teenage Pope?”, as well as the classified ads page with “Beaters wanted for budgie shoot in West Midlands”.
West soon got involved in far more serious matters and went on to work in Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, Central America and Indochina. He was married to a former colleague of mine, the Irish journalist Mary Kenny (who gave the world that wonderful Private Eye expression, "Discussing Ugandan Affairs"). In his later life West produced biographies of Daniel Defoe and Chaucer. He once wrote a controversial book (River of Tears) about Rio Tinto Zinc. Far from being offended, an Australian director bought up 200 copies to give to his executives. The book also inspired Harris in Wonderland.
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Typewriters in the Führerbunker

April 28, 2015, 6:05 pm
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Ingo Mersmann, owner and managing director of the German spy museum 'Top Secret' in Oberhausen in western Germany, sits at an Adler standard typewriter purported to have been used by Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge in the Berlin Führerbunker in the final weeks of the Third Reich. Mersmann is recreating parts of the massive bunker, and the exhibit is scheduled to open in September. I suspect the machine Mersmann is shown using in these publicity shots is actually a post-war Adler. The model comes up regularly for sale on German online auctions:
In the weeks leading to Anzac Day, SBS screened a series of classic war movies, including Apocalypse Now Redux, We Were Soldiers, the Oscar-nominated 2004 German-language film Der Untergang (Downfall) and Kokoda. It was the first time I had ever watched Downfall in full and naturally I was fascinated by the part of Traudl Junge (1920-2002), Hitler's secretary, played by Alexandra Maria Lara. The more so for Lara's adept use of  Continental standardand Remington portable typewriters.
Checking out just how accurate the portrayal had been, I was surprised to find Junge had at one time wanted to settle permanently in Australia. She lived in Sydney with her younger sister, Inge Kaye (born 1923), in 1975-76, spent a further 18 months there in 1982-83, and visited Melbourne in 1992 and 1995. Australian authorities rejected her application for permanent residency because of her role in the Third Reich. But Junge's mother, Hildegard Humps, who strongly disapproved of her daughter's work with the Nazis, did emigrate to Australia, arriving in June 1954 aboard the Fairsea. She stayed for only two years before returning to Munich, where she died in 1969.
This is said to be the "original" Junge typewriter. In the movie Downfall, Alexandra Maria Lara, playing the part of Junge, is seen using a Continental:
Lo and behold, with Downfall still fresh in the memory banks, this morning I learned about the 'Top Secret" exhibits. Mersmann, born in Bielefeld in 1954, last year became owner and managing director of the Institute of Espionage GmbH in Oberhausen. He has been an art dealer since 1975 and also claims to have worked for the West German intelligence service. He is now a "recognised international expert on the subjects of espionage, counter-intelligence and terrorism".
Mersmann's recreated Führerbunker will comprise five exhibits, including Hitler's rooms, Junge's office, the radio room and the clinic of Hitler's doctor Theodor Morell.
In Downfall, Junge (Lara) is also seen using a Remington portable to type Hitler's will. Below is a Continental portable (serial number R348995, 1941?), later auctioned as one allegedly identified by Junge as the typewriter she used in the bunker. It has a "custom-made" 4mm (0.1575 inch) Antiqua font, apparently so Hitler could read the type for speeches without wearing his glasses. It came from the Collection Haucke in Wolfenbüttel with a detailed and signed 1970 letter from Junge identifying it as one of three models which accompanied her in the last two years of the war, between Hitler's "Wolf's Lair"(The Wolfsschanze in the Masurian woods about five miles from the small East Prussian town of Rastenburg, now Kętrzyn in Poland) and the bunker. With it was original blank Der Führer stationery and carbon paper.
Traudl Junge was born Gertraud Humps in Munich on March 16, 1920. She died in her home city, aged 81, on February 10, 2002. She was Hitler's last private secretary, from December 1942 to April 1945.
After typing Hitler’s will, she remained in the bunker until his death. In May, Junge got as far as the Elbe but was unable to reach the western Allied lines, so went back to Berlin, where she was arrested in July 1945, imprisoned and interrogated by both the Soviet and the American military. Later, in post-war West Germany, she worked in secretarial jobs and for many years was chief secretary of the editorial staff of the weekly illustrated magazine Quick.
At Hitler's encouragement, in June 1943, Junge married Waffen-SS officer Hans Hermann Junge, who died in combat in France in August 1944. In 1989 Junge's manuscript about her life throughout the war was published in the book Voices from the Bunker by Pierre Galante and Eugene Silianoff. Also that year she was interviewed for the BBC documentary The Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler. Her memoirs Until the Final Hour, co-written with author Melissa Müller, were released in 2002, when she was interviewed for the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary. Parts of this interview were used at the start and end of Downfall.
Also in the Oberhausen exhibit is this Olympia Robust portable typewriter said to have been used by the Gestapo. It is identical in all aspects to the one in its original wooden box, bought in Australia a few years ago, which I once briefly owned:
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Louie, Louie, Mr Tambourine Man, Dylan and His Typewriter

April 29, 2015, 5:37 pm
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Dylan on the Royal Caravan in the workspace above Cafe Espresso (59 Tannery Brook Road), Woodstock, New York, 1964.
Driving home from university last evening, I heard Andrew Messenger deliver the news on ABC Radio that Jack Ely had died in Terrebonne, Oregon, aged 71. In case anyone was wondering who Jack was - indeed, who TheKingsmen were - Andrew played a snippet of the unforgettable Louie Louie, the song that in 1964 was the subject of a Robert Kennedy-instigated FBI investigation into obscene lyrics. 
This one song was even the subject of an entire book, Dave Marsh's 1992 Louie Louie: The History and Mythology of the World's Most Famous Rock 'n' Roll Song: Including the Full Details of Its Torture and Persecution at the Hands of the Kingsmen, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and a Cast of Millions; and Introducing, for the First Time Anywhere, the Actual Dirty Lyrics. 
As Messenger pointed out, it was Ely, a then guitarist with the Portland band, who delivered the "lyrics indecipherable at any speed". Apparently his incoherent vocals were partly the result of his braces. In February 1964, an outraged parent wrote to Attorney-General Kennedy alleging the lyrics were obscene. The FBI investigated the complaint and in June 1965 its laboratory obtained a copy of the recording. After four months of investigation, the FBI concluded that Louie, Louie could not be interpreted and was "unintelligible at any speed". But drummer Lynn Easton later admitted he had yelled "F***" after fumbling a drumstick at 54 seconds into the song.
Dagenham-born Colin Larkin
Memories of writing about the Louie Louie saga myself, during a prolonged study into the history of rock and pop music more than 15 years ago, recalled the work of my then "guru", the British writer Colin Larkin, editor-in-chief and founder of the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Popular Music. The London Times described this workas "the standard against which all others must be judged". Larkin is now CEO and editor-in-chief of the "Best Things on Earth" online multi-media rating site.
The compiler of the most extensive database of popular music in Europe and the US, Larkin also wrote the All Time Top 1000 Albums in 2000, and added to this book his All-Time Top 100 Singles. I was so impressed by this latter list (that is, I agreed with almost every selection) I downloaded all 100 tracks and, as advised by Larkin, put them on five discs for the benefit of myself and some very grateful friends.
Larkin wrote of it, "The most opinionated list in this book. I will not even begin to defend the absence of Chuck Berry, ABBA, Queen, the Smiths, Frank Sinatra and so on. This is the choice of the author, as of today. The fact is that Mr Tambourine Man still does make me shiver ... Time will tell, of course. Trust me with this list, it would make a SPIFFLING 5-CD SET for the longest of car journeys."
At No 1 is Mr Tambourine Man, which was at least in large part written (well, completed anyway) by Bob Dylan on a portable typewriter while in the back of a station wagon the day after he had visited civil rights activists Bernice Johnson and Cordell Reagon in Atlanta, Georgia, in early 1964. Dylan had started writing the song at the Waldorf Astoria in Toronto, Canada, in late January-early February of that year. During a couple of days of revelry at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Dylan did some more work on Mr Tambourine Man on his typewriter.
Anyway, without further ado, here is the Top 10 of Larkin's All-Time Top 100 singles:
1       The Byrds– Mr Tambourine Man (1965): "Still a rush to flatten the hairs on the forearm every time it is played on the radio. Roger McGuinn’s 12-string opener has to be the definitive. Four of the five original Byrds sound like sweet little angels on the vocals."
2       Spencer Davis Group – Gimme Some Loving(1966). It was with great delight that a few years later I got to meet Spencer Davis and we discussed how much we agreed with Larkin's choice of the original (Hammond organ and backing singer-less) version of this song.
3       Bob Dylan– Like a Rolling Stone (1965): "Another showcase for the Hammond organ, this time played by Al Kooper. His frills add to Dylan’s first masterpiece of the modern rock era. Truth, pathos, irony and life, dusted off in a few minutes."
4       Scarlet Party – 101 Dam-Nations(1982).
5       Booker T and the MGs– Green Onions (1962): "Although the Hammond organ once again features prominently [through Booker T. Jones], the real clincher is the fruity sound it makes in combination with Steve Cropper’s Telecaster guitar. An incredible, unrepeatable piece of music, copied by millions but never remotely challenged."
6       The Kingsmen – Louie Louie (1963): "It doesn’t matter what they were singing about. Richard Berry may have taken the lyrics to the grave with him, but he left us with this magnificent opus of sound. To think the Beach Boys did it as well. Take another listen to the drummer, he comes in at least half an hour late."
7       The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night (1964): "[A] perfectly constructed song. And Lennon really sounds sincere when he sings, 'You know I work all day, to get you money, to buy you things'.’’
8       The Kinks– Waterloo Sunset (1967): "Was it Terry Stamp meeting Julie Christie on Hungerford Railway bridge or not? Either way, millions of other couples have experienced the same sunset. Ray Davies’ most evocative song, beautifully opened by Pete Quaife’s rumbling bass."
9       Big Youth– Concrete Jungle (1973).
10    The Beatles– Strawberry Fields Forever (1967): "It really is a piece of music that was 40 years ahead of its time, but that’s 'nothing to get hung about'."
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Getting Gabriel García Márquez's Smith-Corona 5TE Ready For Exhibit

April 30, 2015, 4:32 pm
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Consuelo Gaitan, left, National Library of Bogotá director, and curator Alejandra Padilla with Gabriel García Márquez's Smith-Corona 5TE electric portable typewriter at the National Library in Bogotá.
Gabriel García Márquez must be up there with Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams, not just as a writer (though only two of them, including García Márquez, won Nobel Prizes) but for the range of typewriters with which he was photographed. Which is perhaps understandable, given García Márquez once told Paris Review, "I have another problem in that I can only work in surroundings that are familiar and have already been warmed up with my work. I cannot write in hotels or borrowed rooms or on borrowed typewriters." Oddly, however, the García Márquez typewriter now on the exhibition circuit is not one he was photographed using, at least as far as I can find. It's a Smith-Corona 5TE, the world's first electric portable.
The typewriters García Márquez was photographed using also, presumably, don't include the one given to him by his parents, Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, on his 21st birthday, on March 6, 1948, since García Márquez lost it only a month later. It went missing in the turmoil of El Bogotazo, the massive riots that followed the assassination in Bogotá, Colombia, of Liberal leader and presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, during the government of President Mariano Ospina Pérez. The 10-hour riot left much of downtown Bogotá destroyed. García Márquez had pawned his typewriter and it disappeared in the looting that followed. But when Fidel Castro smashed a typewriter on the ground during El Bogotazo, García Márquez swore to Castro that that was his typewriter.
To mark the first anniversary of his death, on April 17, 2014, García Márquez has been celebrated in Mexico City and Bogotá, with hundreds of public readings in Mexico and an exhibition in Colombia displaying the Smith-Corona 5TE, upon which, it is claimed, he wrote Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude,) in 1967. The items exhibited came from the University of Texas in Austin, to which García Márquez's family sold his personal archive for $2.2 million.
Some of Gabriel García Márquez's other typewriters:
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia, and died last year in Mexico City, aged 87. 
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The 'Lady Edison' and her Typewriter

May 1, 2015, 6:17 pm
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Beulah Louise Henry (1887-1973) with her "Protograph", November 25, 1929.
The "Protograph" attached to a Royal 10
Beulah Louise Henry at the exposition of Women's Arts and Industries
at the Hotel Astor, New York, October 2, 1931.
'I cannot make up my mind whether it is a drawback or an advantage to be so utterly ignorant of mechanics as I am, I know nothing about mechanical terms and I am afraid I do make it rather difficult for the draughtsmen to whom I explain my ideas, but in the factories where I am known, they are exceedingly patient with me because they seem to have a lot of faith in my inventions.'
 - Beulah Louise Henry
Beulah Louise Henry was known as the "Lady Edison" for the number and variety of devices she invented. The first of her inventions, a vacuum-sealed ice cream freezer, was patented in 1912. Henry went on to be considered the most prolific woman inventor of the 20th century. Henry was granted 49 United States patents and was responsible for 110 inventions.
Henry's wide array of inventions included the "Protograph", a device attached to a typewriter that produced an original and four typewritten copies without carbon paper. Between 1932 and 1970 she was issued with 12 patents relating to improvements for the typewriter, including devices for feeding and aligning paper and attachments for duplicating documents. 
Henry was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 28, 1887, and attended North Carolina Presbyterian College and Elizabeth College in Charlotte. She had moved with her family to Memphis, Tennessee, by 1920 and had settled in New York City by 1924. There she founded two companies, the Henry Umbrella and Parasol Company and the B.L. Henry Company. Later she worked as an inventor for the Nicholas Machine Works from 1939 to 1955. She also served as a consultant for many companies that manufactured her inventions, including the Mergenthaler Linotype Company and the International Doll Company. Among her inventions was the first bobbinless sewing machine.
Henry was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.
Henry with two of her inventions, a Linotype machine and an umbrella, 
from Popular Mechanics, April 1928

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Odd Places To Put a Typewriter

May 2, 2015, 4:42 pm
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Actor Clark Gable types in the back of a van in 1937.
Berlin police study a crime scene and record their findings on a typewriter.
 A woman sits on a very wide carriage Remington in 1927.
Zorro, a dog belonging to actors Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, takes a look at their typewriter, Hollywood, 1924.
Various soundscapes for use in radio dramas are recorded on a cylindrical condenser microphone and an older marble block microphone in 1930. 
 A journalist on the Graf Zeppelin airship in Europe in  1930.
Arthur Koestler, the  Hungarian-British author and journalist, on an Arctic Flight in the airship Graf Zeppelin in 1931.
In what was then known as British Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) locals are taught to type in 1926.
Pianist and singer Erwin Bootz accompanies Aldo Pinelli on typewriter in 1939.
A typewriter emerges from a bunker in the arms of a Wehrmacht officer during the Battle of Breslau, a three-month-long siege of the city in Lower Silesia, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1945.
 A student from India and a merchant from Syria at the US Embassy in Berlin to receive money from their home countries in 1940.

Hans Reimann (1889–1969), German satirist, novelist and playwright. He wrote under the pseudonyms Max Bunge, Hans Heinrich, Artur Sünder, Hanns Heinz Vampir and Andreas Zeltner and typed on a library ladder in 1931.
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RIP Ruth Rendell, Ravens and the Remington 315 Manual Portable Typewriter

May 3, 2015, 4:33 am
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There is, of course, no such typewriter as a Remington 315 portable. There is an Olivetti-made Underwood 315, a Dora masquerading under a different name. But the closest one might get to it among Remingtons is the 333, made by Brother in Japan. The Remington 315 was the invention of British detective novel writer Ruth Rendell, who died on Saturday, aged 85. The Remington 315 manual portable provided the key bit of evidence in Rendell's 1985 Inspector Wexford novel, An Unkindness of Ravens.
I guess it must be difficult for more modern detective novel writers to avoid going down paths already well trodden by Arthur Conan Doyle and his creation Sherlock Holmes. In An Unkindness of Ravens, Rendell forged ahead into very old Conan Doyle territory - Holmes had solved a case based on a typewritten letter 94 years before Wexford.
Sidney Paget's illustration of Laura Lyons at a Remington typewriter (which it's not) in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
But, then, Holmes, as a detective who applied early forensic science to his work, was away ahead of his time. He unlocked the mystery of Hosmer Angel in “A Case of Identity”, one of his 56 short stories. Conan Doyle completed this yarn on April 10, 1891 – less than 17 years after the typewriter had first appeared. Set in October 1890, “A Case of Identity” was published in Strand Magazine in July 1891.
Rendell's An Unkindness of Ravens was her 28th book. (By the way, the name for her protagonist occurred to Rendell after a trip to Ireland; she initially considered the names of two counties, Wexford and Waterford, but one was already taken by a former Canberra editor. Anyway, she was fond of names that included the letter "x".) Wexford comes from the Old Norse Veisafjǫrðr.
Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford
In An Unkindness of Ravens, Wexford finds himself thrown into an investigation involving a militant feminist organisation known as "Arria", who have taken the raven as their symbol. A man's resignation letter is found by police to have been typed on a Remington 315 typewriter. A critic noted, "When it came to the [police] checking of the typewriters, Rendell could not resist to throw in her knowledge of the - then - latest developments in typewriters, such as the golfball and the daisywheel, although they had no bearing on the case. The machine on which the letter had been typed was an old manual model without exchangeable typeface." The novel includes a typewriter repair and maintenance service run by a James Ovington, who is working on an Olivetti typewriter. The Remington 315 had a flaw in the apex of the capital A, in the ascender of the lower-case t, and at the head of the comma. 
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, was born in South Woodford, London, on February 17, 1930. Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford was her best-known creation, but Rendell also generated a separate brand of crime fiction that explored deeply into the psychological background of criminals and their victims, many of them mentally afflicted or otherwise socially isolated. This theme was developed in a third series of novels, written under her pseudonym Barbara Vine.  
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The Intrepid Aviator, his Remington Portable Typewriter, and his Ship Dog Schnauf

May 3, 2015, 6:30 pm
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Gunther Plüschow, his Remington Model 2 portable typewriter and his Hamburg ship dog Schnauf ("Puff" or "Breath") in Patagonia in 1928, on Plüschow's first trip to South America.
Munich-born Gunther Plüschow was a German naval aviator, aerial explorer and author. His feats include the only escape by a German prisoner of war from Britain back to Germany in either World War. Upon his return home he became famous as the "Aviator Hero of Tsingtao" (Qingdao) for his daring deeds after the Siege of Tsingtao.
Plüschow was the first man to explore and film Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia from the air and was killed on a second aerial expedition to Patagonia,  in 1930-31.
On November 27, 1927, Plüschow took his Remington Model 2 portable typewriter aboard the wooden two-masted cutter Feuerland to Punta Arenas, Chile. His engineer, Ernst Dreblow, brought his seaplane, a Heinkel HD 24 D-1313, aboard a steamer. By December 1928, the airplane had been fully assembled and the inaugural flight brought the first air mail from Puntas Arenas to Ushuaia, Argentina. In the months following, Plüschow and Dreblow were the first to explore by air the Cordillera Darwin, Cape Horn, the Southern Patagonian Ice Field and the Torres del Paine of Patagonia.
 Schnauf goes ashore in Plüschow's lap in a canoe
In 1930 Plüschow returned to Patagonia to explore the Perito Moreno Glacier. There, both he and Dreblow were killed in crash near the Brazo Rico, part of Lake Argentino, on January 28, 1931, 11 days short of Plüschow's 45th birthday.
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50 Great Ladies, 47 Great Typewriters

May 4, 2015, 8:45 am
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Lithuanian-born German poet and illustrator Aldona Gustas photographed at her home in Berlin with her Hermes Baby portable typewriter in December 2011. (She seems to have an older typewriter in its case as well.) Gustas, born in the Lithuanian village of Karceviškiai on March 2, 1932, has lived in Berlin since 1941. Between 1962 and 1980 she published 11 poetry books and several anthologies. Many of her books also feature her drawings and graphics. In 1972 Gustas co-founded an important artistic forum in West Berlin, the "Berliner Malerpoeten", a group of artists who both wrote and illustrated their works. This group included Günter Grass, Günter Bruno Fuchs and Wolfdietrich Schnurre. The central theme of Gustas' poetry is love and playful eroticism in a Utopian world of fantasy. 
German actress, singer and voice actress Ilse Werner in a retirement home in Lübeck with her Adler Tippa portable typewriter in 1991. She was born Ilse Charlotte Still on July 11, 1921, in Batavia, Dutch East Indies, and died of pneumonia, aged 84, on August 8, 2005, in Lübeck.
Fashion journalist Karla Eckert in her office in 2000 with her Erika Model M portable typewriter. Eckert, born in Hamburg on August 20, 1908, died on June 12, 2002. She was a fashion writer for the German press agency DPA, having worked after World War II as a cultural editor for the British news service which became DPA.
Austrian television journalist Margret Dünser with her Adler Tippa portable typewriter. Dünser (27 July 1926-5 June 1980) wrote the book High Life.
American artist Caroline Raymond Mytinger at her Corona 4 portable typewriter in New York City in 1929 after returning home from three years painting in the South Sea Islands. Mytinger was born in Sacramento on March 6, 1897, and raised in Cleveland. In 1926 she travelled to the Solomon Islands and Papua-New Guinea with her childhood friend Margaret Warner and produced paintings and two books. Mytinger later settled at an art colony in Monterey on California's Pacific coastline. She died there on November 3, 1980, aged 83.
The great Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm on September 18,1905) is seen here typing on a Remington Model 2 portable typewriter as she plays the part of special Soviet envoy Nina Ivanovna "Ninotchka" Yakushova (Нина Ивановна "Ниночка"Якушова) in the 1939 film Ninotchka. The Swedish film actress was in 1999 ranked by the American Film Institute as the fifth greatest female star of all time, after Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman. She died in New York City on April 15, 1990, aged 84.
A German secretary uses a special bib and sleeve protectors in 1940.
In 1930 Leonharda Pieper Bötticher (1898–1977) types a script for her writer, comedian and painter husband Joachim Ringelnatz, banned by the Nazis in 1933 as a "degenerate artist". Joachim Ringelnatz (the surname meaning grass snake, or seahorse) was the pen name of Hans Gustav Bötticher. The couple married in 1920 and Hans nicknamed his much younger pupil-wife Muschelkalk (limestone). She became his indispensable assistant for all his publications.  
German writer Hedwig Courths-Mahler at her typewriter in her Berlin apartment in 1931. Born Ernestine Friederike Elisabeth Mahler in Nebra (Unstrut) on February 18, 1867, she died on November 26, 1950, in Rottach-Egern, Bavaria. She used the pseudonyms Relham, H. Brand, Gonda Haack and Rose Bernd.
The serenely gorgeous Klara, Stockholm-born Jenny Ingeborg Hässler Eberth (November 10, 1889-August 14, 1977), de facto wife of the Swedish "Match King" and crook Ivar Kreuger, sits at her early version Erika 5 portable typewriter to write her life story in 1932. Ingeborg Eberth was working as a physical therapist in Stockholm when she met Kreuger in 1913. She broke off the relationship in 1917 and moved to Denmark, where she married a Danish engineer named Thorkild Eberth (1887-1970). After some years however, she divorced Eberth and moved back to Stockholm to reunite with the evil Kreuger. The new period with Kreuger lasted until around 1928. Kreuger (1880-1932) was a Swedish civil engineer, financier, entrepreneur and industrialist who built a global lighting match and financial empire. The latter was in truth more or less a Ponzi scheme, leading to Kreuger being labelled a "genius and swindler" and to being described by John Kenneth Galbraith as the "Leonardo of Larcenists".
In March 1927, Lady Zoe Gertrude Dudgeon Oakley Maund Caillard, second wife of financier and Vickers, Sons & Maxim Ltd director Sir Vincent Henry Penalver Caillard (1856-1930), became the first "titled lady" to open her own chemist shop - at The Belfry on West Halkin Street in London. Lady Caillard was born in Marylebone, London, in September 1868. When she died in London, on January 16, 1935, half of her estate valued at £17,755 9 shillings and 8 pence went to her motor mechanic. She is seen here with an Underwood 4 portable typewriter.
An American secretary takes a breather in 1930.
Another one gives us a big smile, same year.
Austrian-born screenwriter Gertrude Fanny 'Gerte' Illing (July 21, 1904-May 1990) ponders what next to write with her Remington Model 2 portable typewriter in 1933.
Another serene beauty, seen here typing in 1933, is German-American writer Heidi Huberta Freybe Loewengard (aka Katrin Holland, aka Martha Albrand; born September 8, 1914 in Rostock, Germany). The 1950 American film Captain Carey, U.S.A. was based on her novel No Surrender, which concerns the workings of the Dutch underground during World War II. The author of more than 40 novels, Freybe began her prolific career in Europe before immigrating to the United States in 1937. Once in America, she enjoyed continued success, mostly as a writer of mystery and suspense novels, several of which were serialised in The Saturday Evening Post. Starting out as Katrin Holland, in 1935 she adopted the pseudonym Martha Albrand. Freybe became a naturalised American citizen in 1947 and was married first to Joseph Loewengard and later to Sydney J. Lamon. She died at her New York City home on June 24, 1981, at the age of 66. After her death, the PEN American Centre established the Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 1988 and the Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir in 1997.
British character actress Viola Mary Watson Lyel (1899-1972) at her typewriter in 1935. Born in Hull, Yorkshire, on December 19, 1896, Lyle enjoyed a long stage career, appearing in the West End and on Broadway. Her roles ranged from Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to melodrama and drawing room comedies. Among the writers in whose plays she created roles were A. A. Milne, J. B. Priestley and Terence Rattigan. In films she had a career lasting almost 30 years. Lyel died in England on August 14, 1972.
Typing on a Remington Model 1 portable typewriter in 1932 is gastrologist Martha Tützen von Zobeltitz, wife of German writer and journalist Fedor Karl Maria Hermann August von Zobeltitz (1857-1934).
A very serious young American typist, 1935.
Working an Adler Modell 7 typewriter in 1936.
Mrs Jessie M. Pickens (born 1902), a state board of health secretary with the Works Progress Administration in Jefferson City, Missouri,  in  1937, was the model for the typist and the sunbonnet girl in painter Thomas Hart Benton's History of Missouri mural (below). Jessie and Thomas were childhood friends.
A happy, fresh-faced young secretary at the Olympia typewriter headquarters in Berlin in 1938. Little did she seem to know, or care, that big changes were just around the corner.
Another attractive German secretary in 1938.
Baroness Heinke von Löw and Steinfurth works for the Red Cross in Berlin in 1940.
A German secretary with her Triumph typewriter in 1941.
Her Triumph wielding counterpart in 1954. She is Liselotte Schmidt, 28.
A keen Olympia typist in 1941.
A German secretary tests out the then new Olympia SGE electric typewriter in 1950.
Rut Hansen Brandt(born January 10, 1920), Norwegian-born writer and one-time wife of German chancellor Willy Brandt, types on her Erika Model M portable typewriter in 1957. Rut Brandt became highly popular in Germany and a noted public figure in her role as First Lady of Berlin and the chancellor's spouse. Born Rut Hansen in Hamar, she worked initially in a bakery in Norway and then as a tailor's apprentice. At 16, she joined a socialist youth group which conducted political activities against the German occupation during World War II. In 1942 she fled to Sweden and married a Norwegian friend, Ole Olstadt Bergaust, who died in 1946. In 1944 Hansen met Willy Brandt, who had fled Germany. After Bergaust's death, Brandt and Hansen married in 1948. However, when in 1979 she discovered Brandt had had an affair with Brigitte Seebacher (later his third wife), Rut Brandt filed for divorce. The divorce was granted in 1980. When Brandt died in 1992, Brigitte would not allow Rut to attend the funeral - a decision which did not go down well in Germany. Rut Brandt died on July 28, 2006, in Berlin, aged 86.
German writer Gerlinde Zürner in 1959
German actress Brigitte Kaethe Grothum plays the part of Margaret Lois Reedle during the filming of the 1961 movie The Strange Countess (Die Seltsame Gräfin) based on Edgar Wallace's 1925 book of the same title. Grothum was born in Dessau on February 26, 1935. She has appeared in 50 films since 1955.
Swiss-born actress Liselotte Pulver ('Lilo') with an Adler typewriter, playing the role of Fräulein Ingeborg in One, Two, Three, the 1961 American comedy directed by Billy Wilder and based on the 1929 Hungarian one-act play Egy, Kettő, Három by Ferenc Molnár, with a "plot borrowed partly from"Ninotchka (see Garbo above), a 1939 film co-written by Wilder. The film is primarily set in West Berlin during the Cold War, but before the construction of the Berlin Wall. Fräulein Ingeborg is the sexy secretary of C.R. "Mac" MacNamara (James Cagney), a high-ranking executive in the Coca-Cola Company. Liselotte Pulver (born Berne, October 11, 1929) was one of the stars of German cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, where she was often cast as a tomboy. She is well known for her hearty and joyful laughter. Pulver lives in Perroy, Canton Vaud, on the shores of Lake Geneva; she also has an apartment at the Burgerheim, a retirement home near Bern.
A German secretary with the then new Olympia SGE 20 typewriter in 1960.
German writer Barbara Noack types on her Royal portable typewriter at her home in Berlin-Grunewald in 1965. Born in Berlin on September 28, 1924, Noack had to work in a munitions factory during World War II, but then returned to study at a Berlin art school. Her career started as an illustrator and journalist for various Berlin newspapers. Noack's second novel, The Zurich Engagement, in 1955, was a major success. In addition to conventional love stories for a female readership, Noack described in later works in her own experience as single mother with a ​​teenage son. The author lives in Berg am Starnberger See.
German communist and political publicist Margarete Thüring Buber-Neumann at her typewriter in 1968. Buber-Neumann was born in Potsdam on October 21, 1901; she died on November 6, 1989, in Frankfurt am Main. The daughter of a Potsdam brewery director and sister of journalist Babette Gross, she came through the Wandervogel movement and joined the Young Communist League of Germany (KJVD) and in 1926, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In 1922 she married Rafael Buber, the son of the Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber. They separated in 1925 and divorced in 1929. Buber-Neumann became the partner of Heinz Neumann, a member of the politburo of the Communist Party and member of the Reichstag. In 1933 she was in Spain and the next year pair moved to Switzerland. In 1935, Neumann and Buber-Neumann settled in Moscow, where Neumann was arrested in 1937, sentenced to death and was executed. As a "wife" and "socially dangerous element", Buber-Neumann in 1938 was sentenced to five years in a prison camp in Karaganda (Qaraghandy) in Kazakhstan. From 1940 she was detained for five more years at a Communist concentration camp in Ravensbrück, where she got to know Franz Kafka's friend Milena Jesenská (who died in this camp in 1944). Between October 1942 and the spring of 1943 Buber-Neumann was the personal secretary of the SS Oberaufseherin Johanna Langenfeld. On April 21, 1945, Buber-Neumann was released from the concentration camp and went to her mother in Thierstein. After World War II she worked as a journalist. Of great importance was her testimony in the trial Kravchenko against Les Lettres Françaises (1949).
Danish singer and movie actress Gitte Hænning-Johansson, seen here in 1970 with a Royal 10 standard typewriter, was born in Århus, Denmark, on June 29, 1946. She rose to fame as a child star in the 1950s and moved to Sweden in 1958. Hænning was among the most successful Schlager (hit music) singers in Europe in the post-war era, and continued to be popular in Germany and Denmark even as American music increasingly dominated the airwaves in the 1970s. Surprisingly she recorded a jazz album with the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band in 1968. In the 1980s she changed her image and performed more adult music. From 2004-06 she starred with two other Scandinavian entertainers, Wenche Myhre and Siw Malmkvist, in a huge stage and tour success. The live CD of their show entered the German charts. She entered the charts for the first time in Sweden in 1960 and 50 years later entered the charts again, in Germany.
German actress and author Simone Rethel-Heesters is seen here at an Adler Univeral standard typewriter in their role as Monika Heyer in the television series Fuenf Tage hat die Woche. She was born on June 15, 1949, in Herrsching, the daughter of painter and designer Alfred Rethel, granddaughter of aircraft designer Walter Rethel and a descendant of the painters Otto Rethel and Alfred Rethel. From 1992 until his death, Rethel was  married to Johan Marius Nicolaas "Johannes" Heesters (1903-2011), a Dutch-born television and film actor and recording artist, with a career dating back to 1921. Active almost exclusively in the German-speaking world from the mid-1930s, he was a controversial figure for his actions during World War II and his success in Nazi Germany. As for Rethel, in addition to her work as an actress, she is also a painter and photographer, and is an ambassador for Germans to "grow old with dignity and remain active". 
Writer Esther Margareta Katzen Vilar is seen here using a Triumph Durabel portable typewriter in 1972. She was born on September 16, 1935, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and trained and practised as a medical doctor before establishing herself as an author. She is best known for her 1971 book The Manipulated Man and its various follow-ups, which argue that, contrary to common feminist and women's rights rhetoric, women in industrialised cultures are not oppressed, but rather exploit a well-established system of manipulating men. Vilar's parents were German-Jewish emigrants. They separated when she was three. In 1960 she went to West Germany on a scholarship to continue her studies in psychology and sociology, after studying medicine in the University of Buenos Aires. She worked as a doctor in a Bavarian hospital for a year, and has also been a translator, saleswoman, assembly-line worker in a thermometer factory, shoe model, and secretary. In 1961 Vilar married German author Klaus Wagn. She later got a divorce, but claimed: "I didn't break up with the man, just with marriage as an institution".
Two German office workers admire the work of an Olympia SM 4 portable typewriter in 1950.
German poet and author Ingrid Hella Irmelinde Bernstein Kirsch at her Erika 14 portable typewriter in 1972. Sarah Kirsch was born on April 16, 1935, in Limlingerode, Prussian Saxony; she died in Heide (Holstein) on this day two years ago, aged 78. She changed her first name to Sarah in order to protest against her father's anti-semitism. She studied biology in Halle and literature at the Johannes R. Becher Institute for Literature in Leipzig. In 1965, she married the writer Rainer Kirsch. She protested against East Germany's expulsion of Wolf Biermann in 1976, which led to her exclusion from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). One year later she left the country herself, nevertheless being critical of the west as well. She is mainly known for her poetry, but she also wrote prose and has translated children's books into German. According to one review, "the great German-language post-war poets were largely East German (or Austrian) born in the mid- to late-1930s, which included towering figures such as Volker Braun, Heinz Czechowski and Sarah Kirsch, who was the most prominent female representative of that generation."
Hitler keeps an eye on this secretary's typing in 1937.
A German secretary studies her notes before using her Triumph Norm portable typewriter in 1940.
This German secretary is still all smiles in 1941.
Not so much this Red Cross worker in Potsdam in June 1940, however.
Typing on her beautiful white Mignon typewriter in 1931 is writer and musician Hedwig 'Vicki' Baum. Baum was born in Vienna, Austria, on January 24, 1888. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in an orchestra in Germany for three years. She later worked as a journalist for the magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, published by Ullstein-Verlag in Berlin. She was married twice: first, from 1914, to Max Prels, an Austrian journalist who introduced her to the Viennese cultural scene; and, from 1916, to Richard Lert, a conductor and her best friend since their childhood days. During World War I Baum worked for a short time as a nurse. She took up boxing in the late 1920s and trained with Turkish prizefighter Sabri Mahir at his Studio for Boxing and Physical Culture in Berlin. Marlene Dietrich and Carola Neher also trained there. Baum began writing in her teens. Her first book, Frühe Schatten, was published when she was 31. She is most famous for her 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel which was made into an Academy Award-winning film, Grand Hotel. She emigrated to the United States with her family after being invited to write the screenplay for the film. Her literary works were banned in the Third Reich. She became an American citizen in 1938. Her memoir, It Was All Quite Different, was published posthumously in 1964. She wrote more than 50 novels, and at least 10 were adapted as motion pictures in Hollywood. Baum died of leukaemia in Hollywood on August 29, 1960.
Dorothy Celine Thompson is seen here in 1930 using a Remington Model 2 portable typewriter while her husband, fellow writer Sinclair Lewis, uses a standard. Thompson was born at Lancaster, Erie, New York, on July 9, 1893. She was a journalist and radio broadcaster who in 1939 was recognised by Time magazine as the second most influential woman in America after to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and as one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. She is regarded fondly by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism". She attended Syracuse University as a junior, studying politics and economics and graduating in 1914. Shortly after graduation, Thompson moved to Buffalo, New York, and became involved in the women's suffrage campaign. She worked there until 1920, when she went abroad to pursue her journalism career. She was married three times, most famously to second husband and Nobel Prize in literature winner Lewis. She married her third husband, the artist Maxim Kopf, in 1945, and they were married until Kopf's death in 1958. Thompson died in Lisbon, Portugal, on January 30, 1961.
German actress, singer and writer Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef (born Ulm, 28 December 1925) is seen here in Los Angeles in 1985 at a Remington SR-101 electric typewriter. Knef began studying acting at the age of 14, in 1940. She left school when she was 15 to become an apprentice animator with Universum Film AG. After she had a successful screen test, she went to the State Film School at Babelsberg, Berlin, where she studied acting, ballet and elocution. During the Battle of Berlin, Knef dressed as a soldier in order to stay with her lover Ewald von Demandowsky, and joined him in the defence of Schmargendorf. The Soviets captured her and sent her to a prison camp. Her big break in the US came in 1954 when she was offered the lead role in the musical Silk Stockings by Cole Porter, based on the film Ninotchka (see Garbo, above). Knef died in Berlin on February 1, 2002, suffering from a lung infection, aged 76. She had moved back to Germany after reunification.
German film actress Anneliese Uhlig types on a Remington SR-101 electric typewriter in Santa Cruz, California, in 1992 (and above that, in Santa Cruz in 1984, on an IBM Selectric typewriter). Uhlig, born in Essen on August 27, 1918, made her film debut in 1937, and went on to appear in a number of leading roles in Germany cinema during the Nazi era. She was also one of a number of foreign figures to appear in Italian films during the era.
German stage and film actress and voice actress Mathilde Dorothea 'Tilly' Lauenstein uses an electronic typewriter in Berlin in 1996. Lauenstein was born on July 28, 1916, in Bad Homburg; she died on May 8, 2002, in Potsdam. After attending school in Bad Homburg, Lauenstein went to Berlin and completed an acting course. Her first theatre role came at the age of 18 in Stuttgart. After the war, in West Germany, she took roles in dramas, comedies, thrillers and mystery and horror movies. As a voice actor, she was the German voice of Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, Simone Signoret, Barbara Stanwyck, Deborah Kerr, Susan Hayward, Lauren Bacall, the English-speaking Marlene Dietrich and in Gone With the Wind Olivia de Havilland. One of her last jobs was the synchronisation of Gloria Stuart in Titanic.
German actress and pop singer Lonny Kellner-Frankenfeld types on a manual portable Triumph Durabel (without ribbon spools cover) in Wedel bei Hamburg in 2000. Kellner-Frankenfeld was born on March 8, 1930, in Remscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia; she died on January 22, 2003, in Hamburg. In 1952, Kellner made her first film appearance, as a pop singer with the song Manhattan Boogie in the film Queen of the Arena. 
German singer, dancer and actress Eva-Susanne 'Evelyn' Künneke with an Orga Privat typewriter on her desk at her home on the Charlottenburg Giesebrechtstraße in Berlin in 2000. Künneke was born in Berlin on December 15, 1921, the daughter of operetta king Edward Künneke and his wife, the opera singer Katarina Garden (Katarina Krapotkin). Evelyn received ballet lessons with Victor Gsovsky, acting classes with Ilka Grüning and Leslie Howard and singing lessons with Maria Ivogün. In addition, she worked as a fashion model. She was second solo dancer for the Berlin State Opera but made ​​a splash as a tap dancer in Berlin cabarets and music halls. In 1944 she was convicted of defeatism and sent to prison in Berlin-Tegel. She died of lung cancer in Berlin on April 28, 2001, aged 79.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Triumph

May 5, 2015, 4:22 pm
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Triumph 131f electric typewriter is one of the late great German filmmaker's items which have gone on display at the "Fassbinder - JETZT" exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The exhibition opened yesterday and runs until August 23.
Organised by the Deutsche Filmmuseum in Frankfurt to mark what would have been Fassbinder's 70th birthday in a few weeks' time (had he survived his benders past 37), the exhibition also includes the director's leather jacket, Bayern Munich soccer shirt, a pinball machine, dictaphone and VCR player.
Fassbinder, born in Bad Wörishofen, Bavaria, on May 31, 1945, was one of the most important figures in New German cinema. He maintained a frenetic pace in a career that lasted less than 15 years, completing 40 feature-length films, two TV series, three short films, four video productions, 24 stage plays, four radio plays and 36 acting roles in his own and others’ films. He also worked as an author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theatre manager. Underlying Fassbinder's work was a desire to provoke and disturb. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity. Fassbinder died in Munich on June 10, 1982, from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates. 
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