A machine that may be out of style... but is still just my type

It was Friday, November 16, 2012, and, at noon in the Brother factory at Wrexham, Edward Bryan, 40, finished assembling the machine. When he began working there in 1989, there were 30 people on this production line. Now there was but him and an assistant.

Carefully, now, he boxed up his latest product, before rather an audience. the managing director, Craig McCubbin, made a wistful speech. then Rachel Boon of London’s Science Museum was presented with the last typewriter, an electronic Brother CM-1000, that will ever be made in Britain.

I have not used a typewriter since 1990. Yet, more than 30 years later, it is still an extraordinarily durable trope – emblematic of authorship, agency, adventure.

Evelyn Waugh sends reporter William Boot off to roiling Ishmaelia with his trusty portable. Ernest Hemingway, in our imagination, hammers out A Farewell to Arms on his robust black Royal.

Even today, steepled-fingers art documentaries like to show an Amis, a tóibín or a Rankin with a typewriter in the background, and it was on a venerable machine that Elmore Leonard pounded his famous 10 Rules of Writing. (‘Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”… he admonished gravely.’)

Who were the final clientele for the fast-collapsing market in the machines remains rather a mystery. Many older people still prefer a typewriter.

there are even whispers that, in secret government bunkers, assorted functionaries communicate only by typewritten missives, secure against all spying devices of, say, Putin, as they brace the nation for some coming apocalypse.

ANd typewriters fell so suddenly. When I launched myself in journalism, at the defenceless BBC Highland in Inverness in November 1988, I do not think there was a computer in the building.

We smoked like bonfires, fuelled ourselves on bleak filter coffee, assembled our reports with reel-to-reel tape which we edited with chinagraph pencils and one-sided razor blades, and typed everything in triplicate (on sandwiches of three sheets of paper with intervening sheets of carbon paper) on the sort of stately, manual Adler typewriters that doubtless grace the Cabinet War Rooms.

the Adler was the robust equivalent of the Suffolk Punch lawnmower or an Aga. By golly, it was British. It took considerable physical effort to punch out one’s deathless prose. And they made such a racket. One went home with chipped fingernails, well sprinkled in dried tipp-Ex, often inky from changing the ribbon.

One fraught Friday in May 1989, as the Free Presbyterian Church kicked out the Lord High Chancellor and then wistfully split, I had to write three articles, each as different as possible, for three papers, on much the same themes about him and them and on one of those appalling machines. My fingers vibrated for days.

there was also a dread, irrevocable sense about anything done on a typewriter. there was no mouse to wriggle about. No neat little tricks to change the font, enlarge the type, transpose entire paragraphs or delete utter waffle.

You had to pull one lever to roll the paper through for the next line; press a big key on the left to type a capital letter or the less frequent punctuation marks. A little bell pinged when you had reached the end of a line and had to hit CARRIAGE REtURN. And that, my children, was it.

What went down, then, was what went out. And many journalists became so good at this sort of steely perfection that when, after Frederick Forsyth famously holed himself up to type the day of the Jackal in just 35 days, I can well believe his claim it needed no redrafting or the least change.

Anyway, one of those editors liked me so much that I was summoned to the very palace of a morning paper.

there was something odd about the vast newsroom. Yes there was smoke in abundance, the same ghastly coffee, the same grey faces above illjudged shirts (the organ was, at the time, infamous for its conviviality) and the ripe, booming language.

But I was there for nearly half an hour before I realised I could not hear a single typewriter. Just big, beige computers everywhere. And, a year or two after that, you never saw a typewriter anywhere. they were, practically overnight, as obsolete as cuneiform.

Yet many still hold typewriters – especially the great typewriters: a Royal, a Remington, an Olivetti – in deep affection.

there are even bloggers who, ah, blog merely by posting photographs of their latest typed thoughts, in real time and on real paper.

Since July 24 the National Museum of Scotland has boasted an exhibition, the typewriter Revolution. An entire gallery is filled with the grinning machines, including the mothership 1876 Sholes and Glidden – the first to feature the QWERtY keyboard, engineered to keep the keys for the most commonly used letters apart – and the typewriter on which Compton Mackenzie rapped out Whisky Galore.

THE typewriter ‘will, in course of time, do for the ink bottle and the pen, what the sewing machine has done for the needle,’ John J. deas sententiously declared in 1884. A century later, of course, Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar did for it.

But the typewriter’s century was consequential. It changed the way we worked. the way we are governed. It opened up huge new job opportunities for women. It became central to their battle for the vote, to political organisation and, indeed, to the rise of such success stories as the daily Mail.

And there are some very famous typewriter collectors.

In August, tom Hodges, who runs the gloriously named typewronger Books in Edinburgh and is the last typewriter engineer in all Scotland, shyly wrote to tom Hanks when he learned of his interest in the steam-punk technology.

the actor owns 120 typewriters and once had hundreds more. And to Mr Hodges’s joy, tom Hanks’s reply plumped on his doormat. typed, of course, signed, and with some endearing x’d out mistakes.

‘tom Hodges, you are my hero… And now, you battle the giants to sell the best of books,’ gushed Forrest Gump himself, ‘and keep typewriters alive.

‘I’m at it on the Smith Corona Sterling, make [sic], surely, around the time of your granddad’s Remington Noiseless… When I am next in Edinburgh, I’ll seek out the lot of you.’

‘It was a proper type-written letter with mistakes x’d out,’ enthused Mr Hodges. ‘typewriter mechanics hate tipp-ex because it gets in the mechanics so it was great to see he had x’d out his mistakes.’

He laments the ‘culture of perfection’ since the advent of word processing and he owns more than 100 machines.

‘I love playing with the mechanisms,’ he said, ‘but for me it is the sound and the sensation of hitting the keys of a typewriter that is magical.’