Dad in his office

It occurred to me that old photos depice people, landmarks, or artefacts of interest which might not be familiar to present-day readers. So I'm starting a series of annotated photographs. As usual, click on the photo for a full sized version.

B: My dad was the company secretary of the Silvertop Taxi Company. He was responsible for the day-to-day management of the business on behalf of the directors, and a lot of the work involved keeping ledgers and accounts. You can also see that he had two telephone lines. I seem to remember the phone number went from 4 digits to 5 digits as the population of Kuala Lumpur grew.

His steel desk, like many of the time, had a glass top. There's a map of Kuala Lumpur under it near the telephone, but I can't make out what's under it closer to him.

E: A cheque embosser. This is a machine that prints the amount of the cheque in numbers and words so that it is difficult to alter without detection. I recall it even had black and red ribbons. It's sitting on top of drawers containing different types (letterhead, colour, weight?) of paper, and maybe also carbon paper. Definitely not A4 but the old foolscap size.

T: My dad was a fan of the Hermes typewriters and had at least a couple of machines, one with san-serif (Helvetica?) type, which was different from the usual serif type. I think what's on the floor is the hard cover. Or maybe the body is half out of the cover.

I've been asked about the date of the photo. There is a calendar behind my dad but it's impossible to make out the year, except to note that there are two consecutive months of 31 and 30 days and the first day was a Sunday.

Another shot in the previous roll of film advertised an event happening on Sunday 19th December. 19th December fell on Sunday in 1965 and 1971. A shot later in the same roll shows me aged around 10. So the photo was probably taken in May or June 1966.