A Pakistani Portable Typewriter: A Curiosity Breeding Little Joker (ITAM 2)

An Underwood portable is used to type official documents in Karachi in 1950.

More than 60 years later, I find, to my complete surprise, that Pakistan

later made its own portable typewriters.

Is it the only Islamic republic to make typewriters?

For me, at least, the number of countries around the world which manufactured typewriters grew quite unexpectedly by one when I acquired this Pakistan-made Lemair portable. So as part of International Typewriter Appreciate Month, I'd like to salute Pakistan:

Jinnah’s Typewriter

By Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Your typewriter has been found

in a tangle of seaweed

clacking over the waves of the Arabian Sea

in sand-grit staccato

for sixty odd years

churning the same speech

first in the key

of partition trains rattling

with the dead

then the massacre of ’71

the “hunter-killer”

MQ-nines

The sea

smooth as carbon paper

clones a speech with every wave:

Unity, Faith, Discipline

What was spilled

came back as hardened coral:

Each time a still-birth

Your typewriter keeps time

with the beggar-women

sobbing

by the shore

Quaid-I-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah

The poem refers to Quaid-I-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), the founder of Pakistan, who is often quoted as having said, "that he and his typewriter made Pakistan". What Jinnah had actually said came when asked, "Who else contributed to the realisation of Pakistan?" "My typewriter or maybe my secretary".  But many Pakistanis like to hold on to the imagery expressed in the claim, "The greatest thing about Jinnah’s legacy is that he could snatch away a country from the colonial British without ever serving prison terms during the independence movement. He just required a typewriter and Suhrawardy [close associate and later Pakistan Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy]."

K H Khurshid

Jinnah's nation-forming typist was, in fact, his private secretary,  Khurshid Hassan Khurshid. Born in Srinagar in 1924, Khurshid died in a road accident near Lahore on March 11, 1988. A commentator wrote, “Khurshid died travelling in a public bus to Lahore on a rainy night in 1988. What surprised everyone was not the accident that had killed him at a crucial point in Kashmir struggle for dignity and recognition but that the man who had been the Quaid-i-Azam’s handpicked private secretary through the history-making years 1944 to 1947 was travelling, not in a black chauffeured limousine but in an ordinary bus with the same ordinary people who had made Pakistan possible.”

The company marketing these portable typewriters in Australia was Lemair (now Tecma Lemair), founded at Hoxton Park Road, Liverpool, Sydney, in 1958, to import, rebrand and market white goods. It later branched into the sewing machine and typewriter trades as Lemair-Helvetia, selling mostly rebranded Brothers from Japan. (Helvetia, by the way, is the female national personification of Switzerland.) 
When Brother started to market portable typewriters under its own name in Australia, Lemair expanded its range by going elsewhere to source machines. I knew one source was Portugal, I didn't know another was Pakistan.

The Pakistani-made portable typewriter seen here was sold in the US as a Sears Model 5297, made by Messa-Maquinas de Escrever at Algueirão–Mem Martins, outside Lisbon. The case clasp forming part of the typewriter base plate is a distinctive feature of these models.
This was the first Portuguese-built version of the German ABC 1001 and was produced between 1966-68. Mechanically it is a later variation of the machine best known internationally as the Cole Steel, which originated as the Wilhelm Wagenfeld-designed ABC portable typewriter. 

Wagenfeld designed the ABC portable for Koch’s Adler Nähmaschinenwerke AG, which sold the relabelled machines to Cole Steel Office Machines Inc, an affiliate of the Cole Steel Equipment Company, New York. In 1965, after Cole Steel became a part of the Litton empire, Koch’s offloaded the tools and naming rights for the ABC to Portugal. Messa had been set up to make German Siemag (short for Siegener Maschinenbau AG) typewriters. Siemag moved its plant from Eiserfeld, Siegen-Wittgenstein in North Rhine-Westphalia, to Mem Martins in 1963.

Quite how this same model came to be made in Pakistan, and when, is beyond me.

This portable typewriter comes in a very small package. I have placed beside the case, for a size comparison, a garden gnome made for me by my son of Piri Weepu, the All Blacks (New Zealand rugby) haka (war dance) leader:

Piri can be seen here saying, in Maori, 

"Happy International Typewriter Appreciation Month".