typewriter

One of the exhibits was a typewriter, inspired by a couple of things that Graham Morgan told us.

…I remember I was the minute writer [of Awareness] and I had my rickety old typewriter. I’d tap away on it very, very, very badly with one finger

and talking about Margaret Temple, the first worker with the Patients Council at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

Yes, the very first memory… was of Margaret Temple sitting in her room, I can’t remember even what building it was… it was an office with a chair which might have been missing a leg. She either had a chair, no the chair had a leg, and the chair doubled as a table for her typewriter, or a seat for her. So if she was doing her typewriter and she’d be sitting on the floor typing it, it was a manual one, and if she wasn’t doing her typewriter she could sit on the chair.

These quotes brought me back to the days when everything was written by hand or on manual typewriters. The sound of keys being pressed very hard, the ping of the return, the copious use of tippex. A lot of the papers we have from those early days are not fully dated - 10 October was enough, but was it 1992 or 1995? A bit of detective work is needed to figure it out - who is mentioned, what were the issues?

The yellow keys on this typewriter remind of how much everyone smoked back then... but that's a post for another day.