Roger Blackmore and the death of Imperial Typewriters

The old Leicester firm of Imperial Typewriters has cropped up on Liberal England before. I came across its impressive old factory in 2013 and last year I went to an exhibition about the 1974 strike that helped bring about its demise.

Click on the still to the right and you will be taken to the Media Archive for Central England site and an ATV report from 1975 about redundancies and attempts to keep the factory open.

That still shows the leader of the action group formed to try to save the factory. Unexpectedly, he turns out to be a young Roger Blackmore, who was to become Liberal Democrat leader of the city council from 2003 to 2004 and again from 2005 to 2007.

Roger was also a parliamentary candidate several times and in 1983 fought Jeremy Thorpe's old seat of North Devon for the Liberal Party.

As to Imperial, the whole typewriter industry was soon to be swept away by technological advance.