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 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 (pictured right) 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.
In 1954, Imperial expanded, opening a factory in Hull and at the same time announced a new desk machine, the Imperial 66. Henceforward, portables would be manufactured at the Hull factory while the original Leicester works would make the Imperial 66. A radically redesigned version of the Good Companion, renamed The Messenger was produced from 1963 to 1967, but Imperial then succumbed to cheaper overseas production costs and began to import machines from Japan. In the 1970s it was taken over by US electronics giant Litton Industries, which also swallowed up Royal Typewriters, and after a brief revival, the Imperial name disappeared completely.
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