Excessive Dislike of Extraneous Noise | Article

After a long dalliance with the idea, I recently bought myself an antique typewriter on Ebay – a 1935 Remington Model 1. The purchase was somewhere between a harmless indulgence (my perspective) and a desperate reach for a threadbare writing stereotype (also my perspective). I will admit to daydreams of tinkering with the type mechanism, of slowly bringing the antique machinery to life, of clacking out short stories and articles a la Hemingway, freed from the tyrannical leash of internet-enabled smartphone or laptop.

The Remington duly arrived, all black and silver keys, pockmarked chrome, and decayed rubber – a true relic of pre-war administration. My nascent dreams of amateur tinkering were however soon under threat from a formidable supporting literature discussing carriage returns, ribbon spools, and platen knobs. I began to understand that this was a precision instrument, built in an era where precision, craftsmanship, and longevity mattered; it was not long before I concluded that the Remington Model 1 was far beyond my technical nous.

The all-too-recently scorned internet came to my rescue with the contact details of a typewriter restorer in Ayr. After an SOS phone call I was on my way to the gentleman’s house, my pride dented and with Remington in hand. As he was politely examining my no-doubt amateurish attempts to clean the carriage return (mineral spirits) and to loosen a gummed-up set of type slugs (a wooden toothpick), the man told me a remarkable story about my recently acquired machine.

American-made Remington ‘noiseless’ typewriters – so called because of the reduced sound made by the type slugs hitting the ribbon – had come to prominence in Britain in the early 1940s in a rather strange manner. At the zenith of the Battle of Britain, when the Nazis were just twenty short miles away across the Channel, Winston Churchill and his government ensconced themselves within the Cabinet War Rooms in subterranean Whitehall. The cabinet did not go alone. Rather, hundreds of women and men descended beneath London’s streets to plan, to strategize, and yes, to type.

Going ‘downstairs’, as it was known, was an intimidating experience. The underground complex was guarded by marines and compartmentalised to preserve secrecy. Shifts for civilian typists, the large majority of whom were women, were up to twenty-four hours long, with on-site bunk beds for those working around the clock. There was an atmosphere of watchfulness, with those taking too long on their breaks questioned and passes being scrutinised with almost obsessive diligence. There were of course lighter moments, with Churchill installing a makeshift cinema in the complex. He would visit this cinema late at night, pyjama-clad and with cigar in hand, obliging fellow subterranean inhabitants to attend alongside him. Such was the all-encompassing nature of work in the war rooms, portable sun lamps were taken down into the complex, with staff asked to stand in front of them wearing nothing but their underwear and eye goggles in order to counteract the effects of a lack of sunlight. The building’s importance to the war effort is illustrated by Churchill having made four of his famous speeches from his underground bedroom, inspiring and coaxing the inhabitants of war-weary cities to further resistance and more concerted efforts.

What must it have been like in those cramped, smoke-filled rooms, knowing that the Nazis were watching hundreds of miles of vulnerable Kentish coast and honing Operation Sealion, the plan for an amphibious invasion of Britain? For one thing, it was noisy. In an era of telegraphs, shrilling telephones, and with no such thing as personal computers, hundreds of typists battering away at their keys must have contributed to an unearthly level of noise. Churchill – not always the most patient of men – ordered scores of Remingtons in an effort to mute the tumult and to give himself relative quietness to consider decisions that would shape the lives of millions. As the months of 1940 wore on and the threat to Britain’s southern coast receded, it is tempting to think that the Remington ‘noiseless’ Model 1 played a small but important role in the war effort.

Of course, I have no idea as to whether my own Remington – model number P101815 – went anywhere near London, let alone the Cabinet War Rooms (although there is an online resource dedicated to mapping the history of antique typewriters, my own machine is not referenced). My Model 1 is as likely to have been battering out prescriptions in a rural GP surgery or eviscerating poorly-behaved schoolchildren in end-of-term reports as it is to have contributed to the war, but I found that I didn’t much care either way. The joy of writing on such a machine is that it has any sort of history at all. After all, what better technology could there be upon which to write creatively, than one which itself has a kind of constructive ambiguity, an inbuilt liminal space for stories? Who knows what promises, entreaties, lies, or pleas have inched up from underneath that type ribbon?

Of course, the rejoinder to any misty-eyed reminiscence of yesteryear typing lies in the hassle of a mistake ruining an otherwise-perfect page, of the unwieldiness of typewriters, of jammed slugs and broken tabulator keys. My Hewlett Packard laptop certainly does not have any of these issues, but neither is there any room for creative conjecture around its plastic façade – it was assembled at the Hewlett Packard factory, tested, packaged, and sent to my home address. End of story. My Remington carries with it a long and tantalisingly veiled history – an obscurity of narrative which must surely appeal to any writer.

Oddly, the Model 1’s unwieldiness is of benefit to creative writing. Whilst beautiful to look at, the keys are not as ergonomically smooth as those found on a modern keyboard. Typing is slower, more cumbersome, and requires more effort; indeed, I find my hands ache after a prolonged writing session. This has the effect of allowing one’s internal monologue to run ahead of one’s hands – the typist is rarely short of words to put on the paper, and as a result writing is less staccato and more fluid. I found myself lost in the process of writing in a way that the stop-start nature of typing on a keyboard does not usually allow for. To name but a few, Hemingway, Woolf, and Plath all soundtracked their storytelling with the slower thud of the keys of Royal Quiet De Luxes, Portable Underwoods, and Hermes 3000s respectively; all three produced worlds of startling immersive quality.

I will return to the flexibility of the laptop, of course – indeed, I have already been forced into such a step for the final draft of this article. The world of writing and publishing has moved on and rendered inky slugs, dried-out ribbon, and questionable formatting obsolete. Just occasionally though, I shall return to my Remington for first drafts and for untethered creativity. After all, although laptops would have catered to Churchill’s ‘excessive dislike of extraneous noise’, what we gain in functionality we undoubtedly lose in stories written upon already-storied machines, of tales just out of reach across the waves. My typewriter has allowed me to dream, a luxury which was never so important as when bombs fell from the skies and a small country on the edge of a continent stood alone with nothing but a ragged coastline to protect it.

***With thanks to the website of the Imperial War Museum (www.iwm.org.uk)***

*Thanks for reading, folks. Image courtesy of Seth Anderson. My recent short stories include ‘The Young Man from Number Twenty-Seven‘ and ‘Sense of Community‘.

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Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, and Shooter magazine. He is a doctoral student at the University of Dundee, a lucky husband, and a proud father. He blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.