Imperial Good Companion (1932)
Imperial The Good Companion Model 1
First Year of production: 1932
Company: The Imperial Typewriter Co., Leicester, England
Serial No. CG 746 (Good working order)
Complete with tool kit for cleaning and original instruction manual.
The Imperial Typewriters Good Companion typewriter series was named after British writer and playwright and Imperial user J.B. Priestley's play of the same name.
It was an extremely popular British-made typewriter series made between 1932 and the 1960s.
Mechanically the Imperial Good Companion portable typewriter changed very little between the first model of 1932 and the Model 6 of 1961. The model 7 was the last model of the Good Companion typewriter series. In 1963, a radically redesigned version of the Good Companion, renamed The Messenger was introduced.
A little history:
In 1928, Britain's Imperial Typewriters began to collaborate with German manufacturer Torpedo. Both companies had introduced interchangeability in their desk machines and both saw great potential in the market for portable machines.
The first fruit of this collaboration was the Regent machine which eventually Imperial bought the rights to entirely and re-christened 'The Good Companion' with the permission of novelist J.B.Priestley whose story of the same name had recently been published and had become a best seller.
The first model off the production line in 1932 was presented to Priestley by Imperial thus providing some useful launch publicity - and a useful marketing boost. A literate public was receptive to the implicit message; "Buy a Good Companion and you too can write novels and plays like Priestley" and the machine was as successful in Britain as the Remington Portable was the US.
The company also gained the 'By Royal Appointment' insignia when a machine was sold to Buckingham Palace and thus gained a valuable PR coup as Britain's most prestigious and most visible typewriter manufacturer. A typewriter good enough for His Majesty King George V, was good enough for anyone.
Imperial continued to produce The Good Companion through seven different design evolutions until 1963 -- making it one of the longest-lived portable marques and comparable to the Corona 3 in longevity.
The Good Companion proved to be a solid, reliable and attractive machine. It owes little to Imperial's early portable designs but is a combination of the Remington 5 with its deeply curved type basket and boxy shape, and the German-designed Diamant which it strongly resembles.
The machine proved highly successful and is today one of the commonest machines found in British flea markets - though finding one in mint condition is not so easy.