The Missing Artifact

Is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Typewriter Hiding in a Leith Attic?

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Charlie Ellis

For lovers of literature, the desire to touch, see, or even use the tools of a writing hero runs deep. We’re irresistibly drawn to the physical objects – the pens, notebooks, and desks – that connect a writer’s mind to the printed page. This fascination – perhaps a form of fetishisation– carries the tantalising hope that some creative magic might transfer through these objects into our own hands.

Until the 1990s, this material connection was embodied by the typewriter. Today’s biographers grapple with inaccessible hard drives, but for mid-20th-century writers, archives are rich with tangible, typewritten, artifacts. Many writers have been closely identified with a favourite typewriter; they’ve often stayed loyal to them for many decades. Not only are many machines aesthetically attractive, but most typewriters are robust. They were built to last and had to survive in difficult circumstances. For example, many survived when taken into conflict zones by war correspondents, often withstanding grenade attacks and similar hazards.

The Typewriter Revolution exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland (in 2021) related the story of Compton MacKenzie and his Imperial machine (used to compose Whisky Galore), which was passed on to the pioneering Scottish-American ethnomusicologist, photographer, folklorist, Margaret Fay Shaw. Compare this to the inbuilt obsolescence of most modern machines. Most typewriters outlive their owners. Yet one of the most famous typewriters of all – the machine George Orwell used to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four – has mysteriously vanished. And an intriguing thread of the story leads straight to Leith in Edinburgh.

The Machine That Witnessed 1984

The typewriter’s first iconic setting was the Isle of Jura, where a gravely ill Orwell, suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, ‘bashed out’ much of the novel’s final draft at the remote farmhouse Barnhill. The identification of the typewriter model comes from a photograph taken of Orwell at his desk in Barnhill. Though the words on the case are blurred, two visible words on the right-hand side – the upper slightly shorter than the lower – reveal the model as the Home Portable. Most likely, it was a Remington Home Portable, a compact machine produced in the mid-1930s.

Orwell wrote in a letter dated 15 November 1948: “I am just on the grisly job of typing out my novel. I can’t type much because it tires me too much to sit up at table…” The effort was monumental, and the typewriter was the essential witness to his final, towering vision.

This sense of urgency was recently echoed in Edinburgh through artist Hans K. Clausen and his installation, The Winston Smith Library of Victory and Truth, briefly housed at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, an arts centre in Leith. The installation features the same model of Remington, allowing visitors to experience the tactile, forward-driving nature of manual typing; you must “simply plough on,” unlike the easy revisions afforded by a computer screen. For Clausen, whose artistic work explores the “meaning we bestow on objects,” the rediscovery of the actual machine would be a fitting conclusion.

The Leith Connection and the Counter-Culture

It was during Clausen’s talk about his installation that the most tantalising local rumour surfaced: the actual Remington used for Nineteen Eighty-Four supposedly passed through Edinburgh’s counter-cultural scene before being lost in a pub… in Leith, once a separate town, now Edinburgh’s ‘coolest’ suburb.

Research by Darcy Moore sheds light on Orwell’s typewriter’s tragic trajectory after his death. The chain of possession, well told by Jan Herman, began when Sonia Orwell, Orwell’s widow, reportedly gave the typewriter in the 1960s to Jim Haynes, a notable Edinburgh-based publisher and cultural impresario. Haynes worked as an editor for the underground newspaper International Times. As detailed in Haynes’ book Thanks for Coming, he knew Sonia Orwell well, renting a flat from her for several months. Intriguingly, there’s a photo in the book of a typewriter that resembles the one Orwell used on Jura. Haynes reportedly used the machine as a centrepiece for a shop-window display, in his path-breaking bookshop on Charles Street, promoting Nineteen Eighty-Four and other Orwell titles.

The story continues that Haynes, deeply involved in the counter-culture movement, loaned the typewriter to Tom McGrath, a prominent Scottish poet, playwright and the first editor of IT. Sadly, this lineage ends in misfortune: Haynes suspects McGrath, struggling with heroin addiction (which he, two years later, managed to kick), ultimately sold the historic typewriter somewhere in Scotland to fund his habit, leading to the artifact’s mysterious disappearance.

Other sources specify a final local rumour: that McGrath sold the typewriter in a Leith pub before his death. Haynes himself confirmed that McGrath moved to Glasgow and later Edinburgh, and although Haynes often asked about the machine, McGrath “laughed and said he did not know what I was talking about.”

A Cultural Lost Treasure

The connection is stark: the machine that once documented Orwell’s warnings about authoritarianism ended up fuelling a counter-cultural movement, only to vanish amid struggles with addiction. That the final disappearance is rumoured to have occurred in Leith lends this story a potent local charge.

Beyond its literary mystique, the missing Remington is a fragment of cultural history – linking Jura, London, Edinburgh, and Leith. Finding it would not only restore a major artifact to Orwell’s legacy but reclaim a tangible piece of Scotland’s cultural story – an object that helped shape a warning that remains painfully relevant today. The possibility that this significant piece of 20th-century political and literary history is tucked away in a Leith attic or basement continues to fascinate, turning a local rumour into a major cultural mystery. Can it be tracked down?

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Note: The author wishes to thank Hans K. Clausen for his assistance with this article. A version of this piece previously appeared in The Leither magazine.

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Photographs courtesy of Hans K. Clausen.

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Charlie Ellis is a researcher, writer and EFL teacher based in Edinburgh. He writes on culture, politics, specialty coffee, sport, and education.