'The Duke' and the Remington Portable Typewriter

The Remington portable is on top of the filing cabinet as Jim Broadbent, playing Kempton Bunton in The Duke, is caught in the act of wrapping up the Goya by Helen Mirren, playing Bunton's wife Dorothy.

The model used in the movie

An early contender for the Movie With Typewriter Oscar is The Duke, a very popular and much acclaimed British comedy-drama about Kempton Canwon Bunton and the theft of Francisco Goya's painting Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London on August 21, 1961. This was the only time artwork has ever been stolen from the National Gallery. The delightful film stars Jim Broadbent as Bunton and Helen Mirren as his wife, Dorothy. The abundance of scenes showing Broadbent typing on a Glasgow-made grey Remington portable amply qualifies The Duke for our special category Academy Award. As well, there are lines of Leceister-made Imperial 66s in scenes shot at what purports to be Scotland Yard.

At the time of the robbery, Bunton was a 57-year-old unemployed driver, of Yewcroft Avenue, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the north-east of England. Constantly sacked from various jobs, Bunton had plenty of time on his hands to sit at his typewriter in a spare bedroom writing scripts for television mini-series. The stories in folders were piled up in a wardrobe in the bedroom, alongside the stolen painting. At the end of the movie, audiences are informed that none of the many scripts typed and submitted by this ambitious aspiring playwright were accepted for production by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Broadbent-Bunton is shown receiving one rejection letter from the BBC, telling him it doesn’t find much call for “grief” stories.

The real Kempton Bunton (1904-1976)

Between 1961-65, Kempton Bunton gave British police plenty of grief. Finally the Bunton case reached the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court in London, and was heard from November 4-9, 1965. This was the subject of a 2016 book by American lawyer Alan Hirsch, The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!: The Incredible True Story of the Art Heist That Shocked a Nation. Hirsh wrote that the presiding judge Carl Aarvold was “once oddly described by a journalist as ‘not only gracious in defeat but fluent in French, a rare combination’.” Hirsch pointed out that Aarvold made the odd judicial decision to instruct the jurors that they must acquit Bunton if they believed that he always intended to return the painting. “[Aarvold] was actually following the letter of Britain’s exceedingly odd larceny statute,” Hirsch wrote. “Bunton’s defence team wisely latched on to the wording of the law, which said you are guilty of theft only if you intend to ‘permanently deprive’ the owner of his possession. The problem for the defence was that while Bunton returned the painting, he did not return the frame [which the Buntons had lost]. All of this tied the judge up in knots during his instruction to the jury.” Even so, the jury managed to follow his instructions - finding Bunton not guilty of stealing the painting, but guilty of stealing the frame. Bunton served three months.

Bunton’s motive was to benefit “the good of mankind” and to pay off BBC TV licences for pensioners. His wife Dorothy (née Donnelly) considered her husband as, “above all a frustrated author who had written a novel and several plays without ever managing to get a line published”. However, 11 months after Bunton died, in April 1976, the Liverpool Daily Post put Bunton’s own typed words into print. The story was headlined, “How I Stole the Goya”.