Police in front of Imperial Typewriter in Evington, Leicester during a protest march in 1974
The Imperial Typewriter Company was a British manufacturer of typewriters based in Leicester, England.
The company was founded by Hidalgo Moya, an American-Spanish engineer who lived in England. After first building the Moya typewriter, he set up the Imperial Typewriter Company in Leicester in 1911 with local businessmen John Gordon Chattaway, William Arthur Evans[1] and Joseph Wallis Goddard.[2] It stopped manufacturing typewriters when electric models and then word processors and personal computers became popular, causing typewriter sales to fall.
The company was acquired by Litton Industries in 1966, and gradually introduced Royal Typewriter Company models largely assembled from parts shipped from Hartford, Connecticut, United States. In May 1974, Asian workers at the Imperial Typewriter Company in Leicester went on strike over unequal bonus payments and discrimination in promotion. The shop stewards committee and Transport & General Workers Union branch refused their support, but the strikers stayed on strike for almost 14 weeks. The manufacture of typewriters ceased at Leicester and Hull in 1975.[3]
