The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Imperial Typewriters, Pre- and Post-Litton

Factory Direct

Imperial’s Gift of a Good Companion

to a Good Companion

also

The End of Days

Imperial's Hull workers take on Litton

Plan to make typewriters of their own

It would be an incredible experience to visit a typewriter factory today. Imagine how cool it would be to do that and then be given a free, brand-new portable typewriter!

More on that story shortly. In the meantime ...

Vikram Shah’s comment on my post about Ernest Hemingway and the Kansas City Star’s style sheet arrived just as I was sitting down to write about my friend Elizabeth Manning Murphy and her Imperial Good Companion 5 portable typewriter.

Elizabeth is one of Australia’s leading editors and an author on the art of writing and editing, so it seemed highly appropriate to hear from Vikram on these subjects.

“It strikes me,” wrote Vikram, “that many of the [Kansas City Star style] rules shown here seem not to apply to most of my high school English classes. Until AP composition my junior year, I was taught basically that longer sentences meant less headache at the keys and more pages to turn in. Nowhere in there was quality a huge concern. When my teacher suddenly told me that my writing was subpar, I quickly learned to write with meaning, with heart, with a correct prose style, and I believe it'll stick with me.”

It’s a shame Vikram’s teacher hadn’t read Elizabeth Manning Murphy, president of the Canberra Society of Editors, which last August published Elizabeth’s much-acclaimed book Working Words: For Editors, Writers, Teachers, Students of English Grammar and Wordsmiths All.

Elizabeth had previously written such works as Effective Writing: Plain English at Work (1989),

Working Words is a collection of “chats” about aspects of editing and writing, many of which happened as a direct result of requests made to Elizabeth from working editors, would-be-editors and people who didn’t learn the “whys” and “wherefores” of English grammar at school. Chapters include “Punctuation: marks that matter”, “What is style?” and “The future of words”.

Elizabeth is a trained linguist, a consultant in communication skills, an editor and a trainer in effective writing. She is an associate of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (Britain) and received the honorary award of distinguished editor from the Institute of Professional Editors, Australia, in 2008. She graduated with an honours bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the Australian National University in Canberra.

Paul Hetherington, of the Writing Program, University of Canberra, said of Working Words that it is a “very interesting and straightforward companion [Good Companion?] for people concerned with good written English and editing. It addresses important issues about style, grammar and punctuation, and combines these elements in a chatty, accessible and practical way. There's also very useful content about liaison and communication, which is especially valuable for beginning editors."

OK, so these are Elizabeth’s credentials. Now for her favourite writing machine: At the end of a guided tour of the Imperial Typewriter Company’s factory in Hull in the north-east of England in about 1961, Elizabeth and a friend were astonished to be given gifts of Imperial Good Companion Model 5 portable typewriters each.

Elizabeth still has her IGC 5, 51 years on, and it’s much used but still in immaculate condition. The serial number is 5D 048, which suggests it was part of the remaining stock of a model about to be phased out for the Model 6 (introduced 1961).

Imperial had added to its original factory in Leicester, in the East Midlands, with the Hull factory in 1954. Hull was to be devoted to portable typewriter production while Leicester concentrated on the Imperial Model 66 standard-sized machine.

THE END OF IMPERIAL

Fourteen years after Elizabeth’s visit, the Imperial typewriter factory in Hull was not such a happy, giving place. Litton Industries had announced on February 21, 1975, that it would close its Leicester and Hull typewriter factories, saying they were “unprofitable”. As workers filed home, a coffin draped in a Union Jack sat in the city’s streets, signifying the end of a once great typewriter brand. See.

On March 7, the Tribune magazine, Britain’s independent democratic socialist weekly, published an article by Ken Coates which was scathing about Litton’s tactics. It was a nasty business, with the fascist National Front having blamed striking Asian workers for the Litton decision.

Trouble was truly brewing when, on Friday, February 28, workers staged a sit-in and talked of forming a workers’ cooperative to continue typewriter production in Britain. Unions and employees envisaged a “workers' self-management of the new enterprises which will replace the old Litton empire”.

Litton “did everything possible to create pressures on the Hull workers to abandon their occupation of the plant. First, it threatened to withhold redundancy payments until it was given possession of the factory. Not unnaturally, this caused some distress, particularly among that section of the workers which had decided to accept dismissal. But then, to tighten the screw still further, the company announced that it would also withhold wages which were due, on the same basis.”

Imperial's Hull typewriter factory

The employees agreed “not to fall into Litton’s trap”, and some workers who had initially opposed the sit-in decided to join it. The Transport and General Workers’ Union commissioned universities in the area to carry out research on Litton’s financial position and its claims about the Imperial typewriter factories being unviable. However, the workers found these unsatisfactory. In particular, the workers demanded to know, “if the factories are to be viable, a distribution mechanism must be found which can market their product. At the moment, Litton thinks that it can pull out of producing machines in Britain, and yet retain the absolute right to market in the United Kingdom the typewriters which they manufacture abroad. Office and Electronic Machines (OEM), a British company, is presently expected to market Triumph-Adler machines, manufactured by Litton's German subsidiary.

“If the Urwick-Orr study had been a true social audit, it would have needed to consider and carefully weigh such things as the balance of payments implications of this assumption. Be that as it may, the union is now seeking to arouse public concern about this matter. One solution, it might be thought, could be to nationalise OEM. Short of that, possibly a government agency could be established to compete in the office equipment business. Perhaps the Stationery Office could expand its scope, or possibly a new agency could be created to cope with this field of work. Public enterprise and government purchases alone could provide a very serious basic market.

"Alternatively, OEM could be pressed, on balance of payments grounds, to agree to become the representatives of the new Hull-Leicester workers' enterprises. Whatever the solution which is finally agreed, however, it is clearly quite improper for a trans-national company to abandon its productive obligations to a country, and at the same time expect to exploit that country's markets unhampered in any way.”

“Of course, if workers' cooperatives do take over at Hull and Leicester, there will be large problems of adjustment. If one takes a middle-term view, of maybe 10 years or so, it is very likely that the demand for typewriters will decrease, if not fade away. Message-sending is by-passing the letter, and beyond the telex we can see even more audacious forms of electronic communication.

“The long-term future of a factory in the message-sending industry may well turn out to be in the [British] Post Office, meeting the demand for advanced message hardware in the late 1980s. An alternative possible evolution might be into the kinds of mechanical engineering which use sophisticated keyboards for blending paints, or in chemicals plastics and other industries.

“These are all matters which will need to be considered in due time, but the first priority is to maintain the skills and organised capacity of these two important groups of work people.”

The campaign in Hull was calling for the urgent donation of funds from the public.

Married To Style, and To His Typewriter

When Ernest Hemingway was coming to the end of his brief, seven-month career as an 18-year-old, $75-a-month cub reporter on The Kansas City Star, in April 1918, he wrote back home to his father Clarence, a doctor in Oak Park, Illinois, complaining that his Missouri evening newspaper job was one which would send most people batty.

Hemingway described the demands and pressures that, he said, would have driven lesser mortals around the twist:  “To take a story over the phone and get everything exact, see it all in your mind’s eye, rush over to a typewriter and write it a page at a time while 10 other typewriters are going and the boss [assistant city editor Clancy George ‘Pete’ Wellington]   is hollering at someone and a boy snatches the pages from your machine as fast as you write them.”

“Responsibility … thousands of dollars hinge on your statements, [which require] absolute truth and accuracy. A middle initial wrong may mean a libel suit. And always under a strain … Having to write a half-column story with every name, address and initial verified and remembering to use good style, perfect style in fact, and get all the facts and in the correct order, make it have snap and wallop and write it in 15 minutes, five sentences at a time to catch an edition as it goes to press.”

The next month, when Hemingway packed in his cadetship and left for New York, en route to Paris and to joining the Red Cross at Fossalta di Piave on the Italian front, he took with him more than mere memories of having shown such “grace under fire” in a Mid-West newspaper office. Apart from learning, fast, to get stories 100 per cent right (or risk being hollered at, or sacked, by Wellington), and writing them against a constantly updating deadline (far tighter than any online newspaper will ever face), a paragraph at a time while a copyboy stood poised at his shoulder, Hemingway had absorbed the Star’s renowned copy style sheet, the 110 rules that governed that paper’s prose.

In 1940, Hemingway told a Star reporter that Wellington had changed his verbose high school writing style into clear, provocative English. “On the Star, you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. That is useful to anyone. You were just as responsible for having learned [the style sheet] as after you've had the articles of war read to you …Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative. Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”

These rules provided the hallmarks of Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning fiction. The citation for the 1954 award read, in part,“for his mastery of the art of narrative ... and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”. His creative process was later outlined in A Moveable Feast. The prospective writer would do far worse than to read it again, all the while having The Kansas City Star’s style sheet and samples from The First 49 Stories close at hand.

Many of those first 49 stories date from Hemingway’s time in Italy, and from the early 1920s, when Hemingway returned to Europe as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He took with him a new wife, Hadley, and a Corona 3 typewriter Hadley had given him as a 22nd birthday present. Hemingway would subsequently divorce three times, before meeting Mary Welsh, the estranged wife of an Australian war correspondent, Noel Monks. But he remained married to his typewriters and, he would have us believe, to accuracy, to writing the absolute truth. With age and injuries his writing slowed and showed the strain, but his frustration with this was compounded by his continued ability to visualise stories in his mind’s eye. And he stayed forever loyal to the Star style sheet.

No matter how quickly online newspapers get breaking stories to their subscribers,  how well they serve their reading public, they will never nurture writers like Hemingway. There will be no grace under fire, nothing to guide their journalists like the Star style sheet. Indeed, there will be no writing in a perfect style, containing all the facts in correct order while retaining snap and wallop. And nobody to check  accuracy. Perhaps the best future generations can expect is that Anthony Burgess continues to prove prophetic about the way in which our society is degenerating, and someone might actually become quite skilled and readable in writing in Nadsat, a language of a type that is already broadly evident. It certainly won’t be in good English.

If I’m to be accused of sounding like a stuck record here, I’ll take it as a compliment. At least my column will be on record, published in a real, tangible, printed newspaper of record. The future appears to hold no place for such a thing.

*Royal portable typewriters used by Hemingway can be seen in his former homes at San Francisco de Paula, Havana, in Key West, Florida, and in Ketchum, Idaho. The same model Royal portable, donated to the Australian Typewriter Museum by Australian National University academic historian Bill Gammage (it belonged to his father), can be seen at From A to Z: Robert Messenger’s Typewriters, which opens at the Canberra Museum and Gallery in Civic Square on July 14.

Ronda

Real Typewriter Images: The Work of Rob Little

I try my best to photograph my typewriters in their best light. But when the Canberra Museum and Gallery took 12 of my typewriters to a professional photographer, Rob Little, the result was that my amateur work in this area was very cruelly exposed. Rob photographed the typewriters for publicity and promotion material for the exhibition, which opens at the museum in a fortnight.
If copying any of these images, I would ask that you credit the owner and especially the photographer, Rob Little RLDI. Thank you ...

Blick 5 typewheel

Mignon typeshuttle

Miles Franklin's Corona 3