From The Met to the Mettype: A Christmas Saga That Links the Mystery of a Grizzly Murder with the Joy of a Toy Typewriter

As some followers of this blog may have seen, in the past few weeks I’ve been trying to drastically downsize a very large collection of toy typewriters, accumulated many years ago. As I dug through boxes and chests packed with the toy machines, I came across the tattered remains of a carton containing a British-made Mettype, originally bought as a gift for Christmas 1961, sixty years ago today. The typewriter itself is in pristine condition, and the wrapping inside what was left of the carton probably accounts for its excellent state. On the basis of what I found, I’m imaging the little girl who was given the toy typewriter for Christmas was called Judy.

I had photographed Judy’s Mettype almost 10 years ago, for a post on Samuel Berger designs, but had never previously paid much attention to what was used to pack around it. I was in for a surprise. The most prominent item is a copy of the Southampton (England) Southern Evening Echo, from Thursday, October 12, 1961. And the lead article concerns the arrest of the man charged with what became infamous in Britain as the hugely controversial “A6 Murder”. There is a sort of link, as the typewriter is a METtype and the man racing to Blackpool to make the arrest, Detective-Superintendent Robert Acott, was from Scotland Yard in the London Metropolitan Police Service, known as the MET.

My interest in the “A6 Murder” was naturally aroused and it didn’t take me long to find out a bit about it. It was committed by one James Hanratty (1936-1962), one of the last eight people in Britain to be executed before capital punishment was effectively abolished. He was hanged at Bedford Jail on April 4, 1962, after being convicted of killing a 36-year-old scientist Michael Gregsten, shot dead in a car on the A6 motorway at Deadman's Hill, near Clophill, Bedfordshire, early in the morning of August 23, 1961. Gregsten's mistress, Valerie Storie (left, 1938-2016), was raped, shot five times, and left paralysed. The couple had been abducted at gunpoint in their car at Dorney Reach, Buckinghamshire. Hanratty's family fought for decades to have the verdict overturned. Eventually, in 2002, the Court of Appeal ruled that a DNA test conclusively proved Hanratty's guilt beyond any doubt.

Hanratty’s capital murder trial started at Bedfordshire Assizes on January 22, 1962, and lasted 21 days, the longest in English legal history up to that time. The jury entered a unanimous verdict of guilty. Hanratty's appeal was dismissed on March 13. An “A6 Defence Committee” was part-funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and it later tried to disprove Hanratty's conviction.

What struck me was that the horrid details of Hanratty’s crime are in such stark contrast to what else was placed with the Mettype in its crumbing carton. These are pieces of greaseproof baking parchment that Judy had used in her typewriter to write verses from well-known Christmas carols. She even illustrated Once in Royal David's City, which was written as a poem by Irishwoman Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander and first published in 1848 in her hymnbook Hymns for Little Children. A year later, the English organist Henry John Gauntlett discovered the poem and set it to music. Once in Royal David's City tells the story of the Nativity of Jesus. Other hymns in the collection include All Things Bright and Beautiful (Maker of Heaven and Earth). Judy typed:

Judy also typed some of the words from O Little Town of Bethlehem, based on an 1868 text written by Philadelphia Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks and sung in Britain to Forest Green, a tune collected as an English folk ballad called The Ploughboy's Dream by Ralph Vaughan Williams and first published in the 1906 English Hymnal. 

Could be there be more of a contrast between what was printed on paper items found in one box?