Whose typewriter is this?

 

At Lake View House, we have a collection of Henry Handel Richardson memorabilia, books with dedications by her, an old school book with her notes, a copy of the poems of Lord Byron won as a prize for English at the Presbyterian Ladies College, a pair of her sunglasses, in truth, not that much to memorialize someone, but as, like a lot of Australian writers, musicians and artists of the time, she buggered off to Europe at the first opportunity, and apart for a short visit in 1912, never came back, spending the last part of life in Hastings on the English south coast.

So it's not surprising that we don't have a lot in the way of artefacts to memorialize her.

It's said that the desk in the study of Lake View is her writing desk, and displayed on it is a typewriter, an Imperial 55,  made in Leicester by the Imperial Typewriter company.

Now one might be tempted to assume that it's Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter, except it can't be.

Firstly, when I was working through the various editions of her books we hold, I checked them against both the State Library of Victoria and the National Library of Australia, and discovered by pure happenstance that the State Library holds Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter, gifted by Clive Probyn, a well-known Henry Handel Richardson scholar, in 2009.

The State Library also holds a postcard showing HHR's typewriter.

Now, I havn't seen either the typewriter or the postcard, but let's assume for a moment that they match and that the provenance of both items has been checked.

This would tend to suggest that the typewriter at Lake View was not hers.

However, it might be that she bought it as a second typewriter for use by her personal assistant during her last years when she was dying of cancer.

Now when I was documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy, I chased down the date of the dispensary typewriter to 1924, in part by using the Typewriter Database.

Well, this particular typewriter is s/n 288219

I apologize for the crappy photograph - while the serial number is easy enough to read with the aid of a dentist's mirror it's hidden underneath the platen mechanism and almost impossible to photograph with a normal camera or phone - one of these little endoscope style cameras would probably be the solution - but trust me it's 288219.

So plugging that number into the typewriter database, what do we find?

machines with serial numbers between 284000 and 305929 were built in 1948, two years after HHR's death, making it rather unlikely it was owned by HHR itself - I don't have any provenance documentation, but the earlier 1970s insurance documents, while they mention the writing desk do not mention the typewriter, suggesting that perhaps it was acquired later.

 It could be that the typewriter was purchased and belonged to HHR's long term personal assistant and secretary Olga Roncoroni with whom she had an enduring and close relationship, and who acted as HHR's executrix after her death.

Olga herself died in 1982 and it is possible that some of the memorabilia that we hold came via her estate.

Finding Fanny Elizabeth Bull

 Over on one of my other blogs I've recounted the story of Fanny Elizabeth Bull, a young governess, who was assaulted - let's be honest, was subject to an attempted rape, in a second class compartment of  a South Eastern Railway train in August 1885.

Like all such accounts, quite horrific.

However the case is unusual as it went to prosecution - at the time the only way for a woman to bring a case of violent assault to court was to initiate a private prosecution, and most didn't, for fear of the damage to their reputations.

Fanny unusually, and with the support of the railway company did, and her assailant, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to three months hard labour.

Finding information about the case was quite easy, fortunately as Fanny was most definitely Fanny Elizabeth her name was quite easy to search for on both Welsh Newspapers online and on the Gale Newsvault via the State Library of Victoria.

And knowing both her name and the name of her assailant, it was really easy to find the outcome of the case on the Old Bailey's website.

And then I thought I might try and put a little bit of flesh on the bones, and find Fanny's age, and confirm her employment.

This turned out to be harder than it should be.

The assault took place in 1885, and she was said to live in Brixton, which then as now was part of the Borough of Lambeth and she had joined the train at Eltham, travelling towards New Cross.

(Just to add to the fun the station she joined the train at is now Mottingham, and not the current Eltham station, which opened some twenty years later - at the time Fanny joined the train, the station was officially Eltham for Mottingham, and universally and confusingly called Eltham).

The newspaper reports describe her as a young governess who lived at home, suggesting she was unmarried, and taking a guess I put her between 20 and 25.

And then I hit a problem.

The England and Wales censuses for 1881 and 1891 are behind a paywall, and you need an account with one of the family history behemoths - which I don't have anymore.

I did manage to find the basics by using FindmyPast without signing up for a subscription, but I couldn't view the actual census documents - which was a problem as neither the 1881 or 1891 census listed her profession, and there were other Fanny Elizabeth Bulls living in London at the time who were roughly the right age and working as housemaids and domestic servants.

Was it an incomplete transcription or was the information simply not there?

And then I had an idea - our library has a subscription to Ancestry, so not knowing anything about how the setup worked, I emailed them asking about access.

Well, they did have a subscription, but you needed to go to the library to use it - it's only a ten minute walk away - the benefits of living in a small town - so I asked them to reserve me a timeslot on one of the public computers.

This turned out to be a really good thing to do - when I got there, there were no patrons, only Anna and Julie the duty librarians, and as a bonus, Julie runs the local family history group.

So I got some individual tuition on using Ancestry, and in around fifteen minutes confirmed that her occupation was not listed on the 1881 or 1891 census form, but she was listed in 1911 as being a Head mistress at the moderately prestigious Trevelyan School in Haywards Heath. In fact I probably spent more time talking to Anna and Julie than I did researching.

I was also able to confirm that Fanny Elizabeth was born in 1861 in Mortlake, and died 1916.

As far as I've been able to find out, she never married.

I'm pleased to see that she seems to have succeeded in life, despite her traumatic experience.

A tide of obsolescent machines

 According to the ABC, the end of Windows 10 as a supported operating system, means that recycling facilities are going to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of older machines incapable for running Windows 11.

I don't think so.

While there might be a migration in the corporate world to Windows 11, I think we won't see that happen with home users - after all if your machine still works, why replace it?

Money's tight, and home users don't really care about support - there are still Windows 7 machines out there happily emailing and surfing away.

People will only migrate when they find that they can't do something on their old machine, or it dies on them.

As to linux?

Nah, while undoubtedly it's the case that you can put Linux on an old machine and the standard apps will let you do just about everything your old windows machine would, there's still a perception that Linux is (a) difficult (b) requires severe halitosis and poor personal hygiene to use - in fact to use ubuntu or one of the other standard distributions you need nothing more in the way of skills that your average user already has.

There's also the problem that no matter how easy it is to use Linux, getting it onto a machine is complicated - you have to download an image, use something like Rufus or Etcher to make a bootable USB, then boot the machine from the USB, etc etc.

While it's easy it's not the most user friendly process, and can even trip people who know what they're doing - like a bootable ISO or dd image?

So, while I expect the recyclers to be selling off a lot of ex corporate Windows 10 hardware, I don't expect home users to join the upgrade rush, nor do I expect a sudden uptick in the number of home linux users ...

Batteries!

 When I set up my second hand Canon Powershot, I of course checked it, set the date and time and did some test shots.

What I didn't do was power it on and off and see if it held the date and time information. My bad.

So, it was a bit of a surprise when I came to use it and found the clock needed to be reset again. Actually it needed to be reset every damn time I turned it on - it turns out that the configuration memory has a little button battery to power it and this needs to be replaced every so often.

Now with an old camera, indeed an old anything, manufacturers do have a tendency to remove the documentation from their websites, invariably leading to some frantic googling of enthusiast sites.

Not so Canon - the documentation on replacing the time and date battery was online, and not only was it clear, the procedure was straightforward, just a matter of getting the correct battery from ebay, pulling out the old one, and hey presto - we were in business...