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 her life in Hastings on the English south coast.

So it's not really 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.