The Silver Boxy: A Charming Remington Model 5 Portable. Is it a Rebuild?

This metallic silver-grey Remington Model 5 (Boxy) portable typewriter is temporarily in my care. The owner is keen to sell it and I am giving it a home for few weeks, just to have some more time to admire its many charms. I haven't seen a pre-war Remington portable painted this way before - either in colour or paint texture. Its serial number is V712499, meaning it was probably made in 1938 or as late as 1939. But given its very distinctive paintwork and the larger decal on the paper plate (similar in size to the Noiseless 8, the 9 and the Model 1), plus the absence of decals on the back plate which attaches to the case base, I am wondering whether it is in fact a Chartres rebuild. That is, a Boxy rebuilt in Remington's Sydney assembly plant, perhaps even after the war. The guide from on the top of the paper plate is also missing, but everything else looks to be in almost new condition and the nickle coating positively sparkles.

I have to admit that when this machine first emerged from its case this morning, I had immediate visions of some sort of Remington-Imperial hybrid, given the connections between Remington and Torpedo and Torpedo and Imperial. At first glance I was taken by the paintwork (I have a rebuilt Imperial Good Companion painted in a similar way), the size of the paper plate decal and the size and angle of the carriage return lever, as well as the solid top plate. I do have an Australian-assembled Remington Model 5 Boxy (see images below), but because of the stark colour difference, the similarities didn't at first strike me. The serial number, however, was a dead giveaway to this being a Boxy.

 My black "Australian-built" Remington Model 5 Boxy:

Meanwhile, I am continuing to work on a Bijou 5 portable brought down here (in very bad shape) from Sydney on Saturday by its young Thai owner. I was surprised to find that it too was sold by Chartres. I was well aware Chartres imported the Bijou folding to compete with the Corona 3 in the early years of World War I, but hadn't realised they were still importing them long after Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes declared Remington an "enemy" organisation in 1915. Obviously Hughes' mistake did not deter Chartres from continuing to do business with a German manufacturer, albeit through Remington.

Half-Typewriter, Half-Journalist: Myles na gCopaleen's 'Mollycule Theory' - The 'Prolonged Carnal Intercussion' of Typing Stories

As authentic print newspaper journalists ride off into the sunset - and there's now a posse of them on the distant horizon of every Western town - they inevitably do so pining for the "good old days": their earliest experiences in the trade, of dimly-lit, smoke-filled newsrooms, butt-scarred desks and the cacophony of typewriters. Are they still fully-formed human beings? Or have the years of pounding typewriters made them half-typewriter, half-journalist? And in turn, have their old typewriters, left behind, become half-human?

This notion is based on the "Mollycule Theory", concerning the "interchanging of molecules", originally put forward by the great Irish writer Flann O'Brien (above, 1911-66, real name Brian O'Nolan, or Brian Ó Nualláin, aka Myles na gCopaleen) in two of his books, The Third Policeman and The Dalkley Archive. 

O'Brien's characters believed in "a process of prolonged carnal intercussion" from riding bicycles. This bestowed intelligence and humanity to the instrument and a placid nonsentience to the user. "If you hit a rock hard enough and often enough with an iron hammer, some mollycules of the rock will go into the hammer and contrariwise likewise," wrote O'Brien. Why not substitute keytop for rock and finger for hammer? (I'm fixing a Bijou 5 portable as I post, and the keytops started out being as rigid as rocks, leaving my aching fingers feeling like they'd been used as hammers.)

O'Brien wrote in The Third Policeman, “The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles ... when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”

In The Dalkey Archive, O'Brien adds that an already “monstrous exchange of tissue for metal” takes on a note of treason [at least for the republican Irish] because most of the bicycles in question were manufactured in Birmingham or Coventry. The same could be said, of course, for many of the typewriters used in Ireland in O'Brien's day (manufactured in West Bromwich outside Birmingham, Nottingham or Leicester).

Given the way typewriters were ridden (especially when pounded on shakey trestles, such as the one O'Brien himself made to type his novels) molecular transference would similarly have taken place between typewriters and writers and newspaper journalists.

Typewriters, too, develop human traits. For that I can safely vouch. As O'Brien might well have said, " ... you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout typewriters that partake serenely of the humanity." O'Brien wrote of a Michael Gilhaney, "an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the operation of the Mollycule Theory. Would it astonish you ominously to hear that he is in danger of being a bicycle?" Having myself taken typewriters "up and down the pertimious hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter", I know what he meant. 

"[It] is a very serious defalcation and an abstruse exacerbation ... but I’ll tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small molecules of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable various other routes too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. Do you follow me intelligently? ... They are as lively as 20 punky leprechauns doing a jig on the top of a flat tombstone."

But, then, as O'Brien pointed out: "Mollycules is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra but you would want to take it by degrees with rulers and cosines and familiar other instruments and then at the wind-up not believe what you had proved at all. If that happened you would have to go back to over it till you got a place where you could believe your own facts and figures as exactly delineated from Hall and Knight’s Algebra and then go on again from that particular place till you had the whole pancake properly believed and not have bits of it half-believed or a doubt in your head hearting you like when you lose the stud of your shirt in the middle of your bed."

Driving Miss Ely

Come on, granddad, we have to take the pink Remington with us.

As the Tour de France bikes whished through her paternal grandmother's home from home in Beaumes de Venise, in Vaucluse at the foot of the southern slope of the Dentelles de Montmirail, my extra duties in driving Miss Ely began to wind down. Ely's gran watched the riders pass by at the pointy end of Stage 12, from Montpellier to Mont Ventoux on Bastille Day, before leaving for panicked Nice and then heading back to Canberra. For the past five weeks I've stepped into the breach with additional grandchild-minding duties, as we each do our bit to try and help Emily and Danny raise baby Ely without relying on enormously expensive day-care facilities. That aside, they're doing a brilliant job as young, hard-working parents.

Granddad, the Typatune needs some ribbon.

So little Ely and I have been seeing a lot more of each other, and seeing a lot more of Canberra, as we've proudly toured about the place each week of this chilly mid-winter. It's been an absolute joy, of course.

Hands like Tangora!

Typewriter Talk LVII

The typewriter museum may be closed down but the typewriter talks go on unabated. Another 2½-hour typewriter presentation took place this morning at Melba (named in honour of Dame Nellie) in Canberra. This was the 57th since the first at the National Library of Australia for the Literary Festival in 2007. They include two in Melbourne (I Am Typewriter Festival, 2011) and one each in Sydney (Australasian Forensic Document Examiners Conference, 2013) and Hobart (The Collectors, 2008). So that's more than nine years now of carting carloads of typewriters around the country - in this latest case just 25!

We had a lot of laughs while discussing some of the funnier aspects of typewriter history. But the most amusing incident was when I got a gentleman in the front row to demonstrate the tautness of the mainspring on an Imperial 50 demountable and the drawband suddenly snapped in two in his hands. That's a first!

This time I was even able to sneak in a brief peek at typewriter art and typewriter erotica:

The first such talk, at the National Library in 2007.

Jasper Writes The Times' Advance Obituary

When I did my cadet journalist training, more than half a century ago, I was told that when a newspaper went from broadsheet to tabloid, it was taking its last step before oblivion. The example offered back then was the London Sun, not long previously taken over by Rupert Murdoch, and in its case this proved not to be true. However, with the Canberra Times, which goes tabloid tomorrow, the change quite clearly represents that brief pause before its inevitable leap off the cliff. One of this newspaper's less informed columnists, Ian Warden, wrote, "Like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Alice In Wonderland your Canberra Times keeps changing size and shape, while, like darling Alice, staying the same delightful character we admire and love." As is usually true of Warden, the opposite applies: The Times has come to be widely despised in this city - as a Monday to Friday circulation which has dropped from the mid-50,000s to under 18,000 since my time there would make abundantly obvious to even Blind Freddy, let alone Blind Ian. (The Saturday circulation has gone from the high 70,000s to 25,000. Meanwhile, this blog passed 2.4 million pages views this morning.) The Times as become a distinctly unappealing product, full of literals, exceedingly bad writing and utterly uninteresting content. As the last of its fully trained and experienced journalists prepare to leave the newspaper in the coming months, its days are patently numbered.
How ironic that among the people asked to write "farewell to the broadsheet" pieces for the Times yesterday was none other than our fellow Canberra Typospherian Jasper Lindell. The Times' belated wisdom in this reflects the poor managerial judgement which has brought the newspaper to its knees. A year or so ago the Times was so blinkered to Jasper's very apparent potential that it didn't even bother to reply to his request for an internship - this was while he was visiting Typospherian Georg Sommeregger in Switzerland. Another, far superior Fairfax daily, The Sydney Morning Herald, saw in Jasper what the Canberra Times hadn't bothered to even look for, and our young friend blossomed as a budding journalist with the opportunity he was given in The Big Smoke. With that experience under his belt, Jasper has been able to break the mould, as it were, for the last broadsheet edition of the Times and contribute to it something that is well written, thoughtful and readable. Here it is:

Breaking the broadsheet habit

By Jasper Lindell

It's November 1998, I'm barely seven months old. I'm propped up in bed with mum as the Saturday Canberra Times is spread around, the pages as big as bed sheets.

The photograph reveals the densely packed columns of classified advertising. I'm distracted by the lurid colours of the catalogues.

It's a picture of the past – a place where, from now, they do things really differently.

I should be too young to give a toss about the passing of the broadsheet era, but for some reason the sound, the bend in the centre fold, the way the expansive columns of justified type sit starkly on the fibrous sheets is still the way I want to read a newspaper.

The advancement of any origami skills I can lay claim to rests solely in my ability, refined over a number of years, reading the broadsheet Times on buses. The new compact edition will be easier to manage on a northbound 300 service, but the self satisfaction from turning the newsprint acreages into readable allotments without driving whoever was sitting next to you raving mad will be sorely missed.

Not that this is the first time Canberra has had to experience the shock of its newspaper shrinking (in size, but not in scope). It was a tabloid during the `50s and `60s, before returning to the grand broadsheet to take on The Australian when it set up shop down the road on Mort Street, Braddon.

Those days, along with the Olivetti typewriters that documented them, are gone. They were over well before I was born. But the broadsheet tradition persisted.

On Saturday mornings, the Hatches, Matches & Dispatches would be perused and the highlights read over breakfast. The big wad of paper would be split into sections and kept us enthralled. I graduated from comics to the front section and world news, while Panorama was reserved first for mum, and dad scanned whatever he found interesting that week.

Then the iPad arrived and no longer could the sections be divvied up. At first I was enthusiastic about this digital future, but then I realised that Saturday mornings couldn't be spent harmoniously, absorbed in words miraculously printed overnight and distributed by morning. Now they were spent with a frustrated itching to get our hands on the digital version.

So my seemingly incurable broadsheet habit had to go underground – and into the week.

I would linger wherever I could acquire a broadsheet Canberra Times. The school library was done with their copy for the day? Certainly, I'll look after it. This cafe was about to chuck theirs out? I'll make sure it goes to a good home. And, even with these tricks, I can say that, as a year 12 student, my biggest expenditure throughout high school has been on newspapers.

Do I have any regrets about sinking cash into a product that has a shorter shelf life than a carton of milk and the resale value of a used cotton bud? None at all. It's a small price to pay to hold your city and the world in your hands every day.

Perhaps I mourn prematurely. The presses won't fall silent. The stock of newsprint hasn't been pulped. The ink hasn't evaporated. There will still be front pages to hold and sections to peruse.

But there won't be the chance to drive people mad on an overcrowded bus when the fine art of broadsheet origami is foiled by a misbehaving fold in the world news page. There'll just be the odd looks afforded a young man such as myself clinging to his reimagined Times: "You know you can read that on your phone, right?"

No, it's just not the same.

Jasper Lindell is a Canberra year 12 student

Why a Typewriter Connection Helps in Olympic Games Golf

Outdoor sport? Covering the US Masters golf tournament at the Augusta National in 1990.

With the British Open golf championship about to begin at Royal Troon - a testing links course which boasts holes called Gyaws, The Fox and Tel-el-Kebir, nestled in one of my favourite parts of the world, Ayrshire in Scotland - it's opportune to tee off our 2016 Olympic Games coverage. 

Golf returns to the Olympic Games, at the Campo Olímpico de Golfe in Rio de Janeiro in the middle of next month. It was last an Olympic sport at the 1904 St Louis Games. Sadly, it seems that with 16 of the world's leading 100 male professional golfers deciding to stay away from Rio, in the main because of fears of contracting the Zika virus, this year's Olympic tournament will be almost as unrepresentative of the sport internationally as the St Louis event was. Among those missing from Rio will be six of the Top 10, including Australian world No 1 Jason Day and No 8 Adam Scott, and Americans Dustin Johnson and Jordan Spieth. Irishman Rory McIlroy is also out. That leaves Bubba Watson to lead the way - with Briton Justin Rose not far behind.

But if I were a betting man - which thank the Lord I'm not, sir - I'd be looking for someone with a connection to typewriters. That's because at the last Olympic Games golf championship, in 1904, two St Louis amateurs with close ties to the typewriter industry were to the fore. They were Stuart Grosvenor Stickney (above, 1877-1932) and his younger brother William Arthur Stickney (1879-1944), cousins of the famous Manhattan typewriter patent attorney (and alleged typewriter inventor), Burnham Coos Stickney (1864-1937). I say "alleged" because Coos Stickney had a cosy arrangement - if would-be typewriter inventors didn't pay up for his services, Stickney would simply claim the inventions for himself. And as an attorney, he did pretty well from"typewriter inventing" - 85 typewriter patents, no less, between 1896 and 1915 alone. And yet not one single Stickney typewriter was ever made!

At the 1904 St Louis Olympics, the Stickney brothers (Arthur left, Stuart right) each picked up silver medals in the team's event, representing the Trans Mississippi Golf Association. The individual winner was the seasoned Canadian George Seymour Lyon (below, 1858-1938). Lyon was a former cricketer who used a "coal-heaver's swing" - his style was said to be akin to "using a scythe to cut wheat". Lyon hit a golf ball the same way he attacked a cricket ball, such as when he scored a Canadian record 238 runs in a club match in 1894.

Lyon's win in St Louis wasn't all that memorable, even for Canadians. When he died in 1938, the Winnipeg Tribune said he'd won a "tournament described as the 'Olympic championship' (its quotation marks, not mine) held in conjunction with the St Louis World Fair." All very accurate, but the Tribune clearly didn't think it was Lyon's greatest sporting achievement. Lyon set out to defend his gold medal at the 1908 London Olympics, but no-one else wanted to compete, so the medal was offered to him by default. He refused to accept it.

I have to admit I have never considered South America a golfing continent, although two of the most memorable stories of my sports writing career came from there. The first was the World Cup in Buenos Aires in mid-November 1970, when Australians David Graham, then just 24, and Bruce Devlin won the event by a massive nine strokes. The Australian total of 544, 31 under par, was a record, beating the 548 set by Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in Japan in 1966. Graham's individual 72-hole total was 270, a whopping 18 under par, beating Sam Snead's record of 272. A fortnight earlier I had covered the Dunlop International at Royal Canberra when Devlin again provided some unforgettable moments - though he, San Diego's Bill Brask, and Lee Trevino, were all beaten off in the end by Gary Player. My other great South American golf yarn came from an Argentinian tyro, Río Cuarto lawyer Horacio Carbonetti, who brought the daunting Muirfield links course to its knees on the morning of the second round at the 1980 British Open with a tournament leading (albeit briefly) course record 63. My Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter was singing in the Scottish breeze that day!

The Sad Saga of Billy Shaw

Billy Shaw's British War Medal and Mercantile Marine Medal were sent to Dunollie in New Zealand in September 1922, almost five years after he had been killed. Image from the National Archives, Kew, England.

Billy Shaw, a "gentlemanly, studious little fellow" from the mining hamlet of Dunollie outside Greymouth, was surely one of the youngest New Zealanders, if not THE youngest, to be killed in an act of war. Billy was 11 days shy of his 16th birthday when, without warning, a torpedo from the German U-boat UB40 exploded into the cadet sleeping compartment on the port side of the stern of the SS Aparima, at 10 minutes to one on the morning of Monday, November 19, 1917. The Aparima was crawling at 11 knots six miles south-west from Anvil Point off Swanage in Dorset, headed from London for coaling at Barry in south-west Wales before a scheduled crossing of the Atlantic to New York. She sunk within eight minutes and 56 lives were lost - Billy Shaw was one of 16 New Zealanders killed, a quarter of them with close West Coast connections. The wreck now lies 45 yards deep on the bottom of the English Channel, listing to starboard. 

What the Aparima looks like now. At far right is the stern where the cadets slept, and where the UB40's torpedo struck.

I wonder if Billy's name appears on any war memorial, other than the Merchant Navy Memorial at Tower Hill in London? Another cadet, Billy Williams, is commemorated at the Clevedon War Memorial in Auckland, and Australian victims are remembered on the Australian Merchant Navy Seamen’s Memorial in Canberra. But what of Billy Shaw?

Billy Shaw left Grey District High School in December 1914 and went to work as a clerk for the Union Steam Ship Company's Greymouth agents, Nancarrow, on Mackay Street. From there he was encouraged to take up an officer training cadetship aboard the Aparima, the USS's training ship since 1913.  “It was my boy’s first trip," his Dunollie coalminer father, also Bill Shaw, later said in a claim to the New Zealand Seaman’s Compensation Fund. "His kit cost £60, but that is nothing as the losing of my boy, so young and bright.” The Grey River Argus added that Billy was "a good musician".

The Aparima leaves Wellington for Egypt, October 1915.

Requisitioned by the British Admiralty for general cargo carrying in mid-February 1917, the Aparima had returned to Auckland from Plymouth to pick up a supply of wool for uniforms for soldiers serving on the Western Front. At the same time, 30 new cadets, including Billy Shaw, joined the crew to start their four-year apprenticeships. One day out from London, Captain James Gerald Stokely Doorly (1880-1956) was hurled across the chartroom as the UB40's torpedo smashed into his ship. Second Officer George McDonald shouted “Torpedo sir! Aft, there the stern’s blown off sir!” Doorly’s first reaction was, “Oh Lord - the poor boys”. Within a minute Doorly felt the stern sinking - 17 of the cadets sleeping there were either killed outright by the explosion or drowned as a result of it. Captain Doorly told the Sydney Daily Telegraph in May 1918:

In fact, the UB40 went on with its evil hunt, but was scuttled in Ostende when the German army retreated from Belgium on October 5, 1918.

The UB40, above, and below what remains of the Aparima's one gun.

Of the 17 cadets killed, 13 were young New Zealanders, the remaining four Australians. The cadets who perished ranged in age from 15 to 20. They were:

BANNANTYNE, Walter James, Waikouaiti, 16

BARGROVE, Geoffrey Robert, Christchurch, 16

CHALMERS, Geoffrey Walter, Tasmania, 15

HOARE, Donovan O'Bryan, Christchurch, 18

McDONALD, Colin Boyd,  Dunedin, 18

McKENZIE, Ian Kenneth, Auckland, 20

MARSHALL, Robert Joseph, Westport, 19

MARSHALL,  Adam Houliston, Kaitangata, 17

MASSEY, Leon Joseph, Gisborne, 18

NEWTON, Sydney Allison, Melbourne, 17

PROUDFOOT, John Frederick, Christchurch, 16

RAMSAY, Alex McKinley, Dunedin, 18 

SHAW, William, Dunollie, 15

SMITH, John Gordon, Warepa, 19

STACEY, Aubrey Beckingham Neale, Melbourne, 19

TOWNSEND, Philip Mervyn Maunsell, Victoria, 16

WILLIAMS, William Harry, Auckland, 20

Robert Marshall's headstone at Orowaiti Cemetery in Westport. Below, Colin McDonald's headstone in Dunedin mentions "Imperial service".

Otago Daily Times, December 10, 1917

One cadet, Thomas Evans Bevan from Manukau, had a miraculous escape. “I was asleep,” he said, “and something hurled me out of my bunk into the sea, I thought. But in a moment I knew I was still in what was left of our cabin, because as I swirled round and round in water I bumped against bunks and bulkhead. My head was under water all the time, but I didn’t become unconscious. Then I felt the deck overhead pressing me down, and the water dragging me up. All of a sudden I was sucked up that 10-foot ventilator in the centre of our cabin deckhead, and shot clean out of the cowl. I landed on something hard. It seems a wonderful thing, but it was on that raft; it must have slid off the boat deck and hit against the ventilator just as the stern began to sink. I lost my clothes coming up through the narrow shaft - they were stripped off me. After the ship went down under me I managed to unscrew the brass cap of the provision tank, grabbed a signal light, and set it off.”

The Aparima was a twin-screw, schooner-rigged Union Steamship Company of New Zealand shelter deck merchant vessel, which had been chartered by the New Zealand Government as a troopship to take reinforcements to Egypt, starting in August 1915. By 1917 it was considered too slow for this task and after arriving at Plymouth with the 22nd Reinforcements First New Zealand Expeditionary Force and 14th Reinforcements Maori Contingent, it was requisitioned by the Admiralty. It was then defensively armed with one 4.7 inch quick firing gun. mounted on the stern. 

Billy Shaw was one of four young men with West Coast ties to die as a result of the sinking of the Aparima. The others were chief wireless operator Robert Perrett Taipo Millington, who was born in Greymouth in 1891, Robert Joseph Marshall, a 19-year-old cadet from Waimangaroa, inland from Westport, and the ship's chief engineer Tom Rogerson from East Gore, who had been a coal mine engineer on the West Coast. 

One of these two wireless officers photographed on the Aparima is Greymouth-born Robert Millington, probably the man on the right. The other is Australian Alton Frederick Vipan, who was a year older than Millington.

News of the UB40 attack on the Aparima reached the Grey River Argus on November 23 in a Press Association story from Wellington which listed the names of those saved and which, in doing so, indicated Billy Shaw had perished. Billy's parents, Bill senior (1871-1951) and his wife Kate (1874-1964), were officially notified of Billy's death by his aunt, Frances Harriett James of Greymouth, who received a cable from Union Steam Company of New Zealand general manager, David Alexander Aiken in Dunedin. The bodies of Billy, Robert Millington, Robert Marshall and Tom Rogerson, along with those of all but one of the Aparima's 56 victims, were never found, but all crew members are commemorated at the Merchant Navy Memorial at Tower Hill. 

Billy Shaw was born on November 30, 1901, at Hale, a village in Trafford, now part of Greater Manchester, England, where his father was a journeyman baker from Earlestown on Merseyside. His family moved to New Zealand and settled on the West Coast when he was eight. Bill Shaw senior first worked as a coalminer at Stockton outside Westport while Kate set up the family home at  38 MacDougall Avenue, Dunollie, beside the State Colliery town of Runanga. It seems a little ironic that if Billy had survived the torpedo explosion and had been picked by the Norwegian steamer, the Selun, he would have been taken to his mother's hometown, St Helens. The couple had an elder son, Alf (1896-1934), who was born in Golborne, Wigan, and was a grocer in Dunollie. He enlisted in 1916. William and Kate continued to live in Dunollie into the 1950s.

Bill Shaw senior's headstone in Greymouth.

Billy Shaw didn't sign up to serve with a military unit, and I grasp that "killed in action" is a casualty classification generally used to describe the deaths of combatants. Nevertheless, Billy died as a result of a hostile attack by an enemy force, and in 1917 the English Channel was surely one theatre of war as much as any other. I'm not sufficiently schooled on military matters to mount on argument on this, but I take as true of attitudes of the time the sentiments expressed by New Zealand newspapers, which listed victims of the Aparima's sinking as among "the fallen". The New Zealand Free Lance, on what would have been Billy's 16th birthday, November 30, said, "We offer our heartfelt sympathies to the parents and relatives of the lost men and youths [from the Aparima]. They died just as much for Britain and for Britain's cause, the sacred cause of Liberty, Truth, and Justice, as if they had been bombed in the trenches or had fallen victims to the deadly machine guns whilst crossing No Man's Land [on the Western Front]."

The Otago Daily Times headed a death notice for another cadet as being "For the Empire's Cause" and the Christchurch Press listed the death of 16-year-old cadet John Proudfoot under the heading "Roll of Honour". The Free Lance ended its tribute by saying "New Zealand mourns them, but is proud of them, and will hold them in treasured memory". This has not proved to be entirely true, as the victims from the sinking of the Aparima have been largely forgotten in war histories.
As one grieving mother said in a claim to the New Zealand Seaman’s Compensation Fund, after the loss of yet another teenage cadet, "The steamer [the Aparima] was entirely under military control and the boys were on active service." Another bereaved mother added, "I may also state that [my son's] death has quite unnerved me - the awfulness of it is too dreadful.” 

Amazingly, for this cowardly act of killing 17 young boys while they slept in their bunks, UB40 commander Kapitänleutnant Hans Howaldt (1888-1970) was awarded the Orden Pour le Mérite (the "Blue Max", right), Prussia's highest military award, "for repeated and continual gallantry in action". Gallantry!? In all, Howaldt sank 65 ships and took thousands of innocent lives.

During the Russo-Japanese War, the Aparima had been fired upon by a warship. Once bitten, twice shy, the Union Steam Ship Company had offered concerned parents the chance to remove their sons from the ship once it was know it would be sailing into war zones in World War I. Fourteen did so, but other cadets continued to sail on troop and cargo runs to Britain and the United States.

I am unable to find a list of New Zealand's youngest war dead. However, it is known that at least one 13-year-old and four 15-year-olds served in World War I - none of them were killed in action. Another boy called Shaw, Leslie Raymond Shaw, born in Napier on January 17, 1901, was 13 when he enlisted in England and 14 and three months when he landed at Gallipoli. Frederick James Ewart enlisted as a drummer boy with the Auckland Infantry Battalion on September 7, 1914, aged 15 years and 10 months, and also reached Gallipoli. James Dunlop of Christchurch was 15 years and five months old when he signed up on June 1, 1916. He served on the Western Front. Sydney George Stanfield of Dannevirke was 15 years five months old when he joined the 9th Hawke's Bay Company, 1st Wellington Infantry Brigade. Alfred James Hutchins was 15 years and eight months old when he enlisted with the 14th Reinforcements on January 16, 1916.
Chief wireless officer on the Aparima, Robert Perrett Taipo Millington, was the son of English-born general practitioner and surgeon John Perrett Millington (1863-1925). Dr Millington established his practice in Greymouth in 1890, went bankrupt in 1893 and moved to live with his father Joseph in Picton, then returned to Greymouth in 1898. He finally settled in Auckland in 1912. The Millingtons had moved to New Zealand to join in-law Robert Sparke Perrett, a storekeeper at Nobles who had landed at Nelson in 1856.

Before World War I, Robert Millington worked in the cinema industry in Wellington. He was a nephew of movie pioneers Edward Joseph Righton (right, 1872-1942) and Henry John Hayward (1865-1945), who were brothers-in-law, as were Hayward and Dr Millington. Hayward was born at Wolverhampton, the son of a professor of music and former court violinist to King William IV. Among Henry's achievements was to bring the typewriter-inventing Maskelynes to New Zealand and Australia (as magicians). 
West Coasters certainly dominated the illustrated pages of the Auckland Weekly News at the end of November and early December 1917, with images of members of the Aparima crew as well as one of Blackball coalminer Samuel Frickleton (1891-1971) being presented with his Victoria Cross by King George V in Glasgow. Frickleton was awarded the VC for real gallantry in the face of the enemy, for his actions in the Battle of Messines. "He set, throughout, a great example of heroism." The same cannot be said of Herr Howaldt. But what of little Billy Shaw, who was brave enough, at age 15, to leave a peaceful village in far off New Zealand and sail right into a war zone, and who paid the ultimate price?