10 ~ Print and Manuscript and Ball and Stick

If you think back to how you were taught handwriting, it almost certainly followed a path where, like me, you looked forward to being allowed to do ‘joined-up writing’, or cursive, as we should call it. You were taught to write with single letters at the beginning – capitals and lower case. Then, when that had been thoroughly mastered, you were introduced to the joys of joining your letters together. This is the process recorded by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle in their immortal masterpiece How to Be Topp. Molesworth, the schoolboy hero, says:

New bugs often canot write xcept this way:

However miss pringle soon lick them into shape. She get out her gat and sa: You may look like a lot of new-born babes in yore first grey shorts but it won’t wash with me. I am going to hav it MY way. O.K. let’s go. All the gifts of sno-drops, aples sweets and ginger biskits do not alter her iron purpose. Before long a new bug can do in his copy-book

And finally

He is now in the same spot as the rest of us he have to write home on Sunda.1

Despite Molesworth’s cynical eye, a very good system is outlined here, introducing children to processes of writing one after the other, and advancing at a steady pace. It seems almost incredible that it was not until the twentieth century that it occurred to anyone that beginning writers might start by outlining individual letters – to print the letters. When the radical change occurred, in the way of such things, it quickly spawned a fundamentalist movement that proposed to change handwriting forever, universally.

One of the most familiar and beautiful printing fonts ever created is the sans serif font made for the London Underground during the First World War. Edward Johnston, who taught Eric Gill, was commissioned by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London to create a typeface. Johnston Sans was in use by 1916. Instantly recognizable, it belongs to that rare historical moment when simplification and the shedding of the inessential led, not to anonymity, but to a richer and more resonant character. The early twentieth century was full of such moments, from Hemingway’s stripped-back prose to the house by Walter Gropius in Vienna that the Emperor complained ‘had no eyebrows’. It’s very pleasing that the same person who was responsible for the sans serif Underground font, decades earlier, was at the beginning of the movement that would introduce the idea of writing individual letters without joins.

Edward Johnston was a remarkable man, a calligrapher and designer who thought things through from the beginning. When he was asked, in 1906, to suggest im-provements to the London educational system of teaching children to write, he replied promptly that he could not approve of any of it. Like Vere Foster, he noted that ‘children were being set the hopeless task of copying with pens, on paper, letterforms made and partially evolved by gravers on copper plates.’2 At the same time, he was setting out in his Writing, Illuminating and Lettering what he called ‘the structural or essential forms of the three main types of letters’ – square capitals, round capitals, and small letters, clearly set out as not being joined together. This sense of the single letter, formed from circle and line and nothing else, as lying at the basis of handwriting would have a dramatic effect on the discipline.

Other figures at the time were starting to suggest, heretically, that the sort of handwriting that linked every letter together was quite unnecessary. Johnston’s pupil Graily Hewitt called the insistence on a connecting stroke ‘a fetish’. By 1916, the educational establishment was starting to reconsider, and a meeting of the Child Study Society explored the possibilities of teaching print script.

The simplicity of a ‘print script’ recommended itself to beginning writers. The nineteenth century had thought in terms of ovals, curls and other natural forms – very sound philosophically, but extremely difficult for a five-year-old with limited motor skills to master. It had required long hours of drills, push-pulls and overlapping ovals before any kind of writing skill could be acquired. On the other hand, children could step readily into a world where every letter was made out of combinations of straight lines and circles, or parts of circles. (Because of this simple combination, the new print scripts were often termed ‘ball and stick’ writing.) There was no requirement to link letters together, something which every teacher knew was a great strain on the beginning writer.

It seems obvious to us, raised as we were, that the print script should be used as a preliminary to writing in a cursive style. Indeed, the early proponents of script understood quite well that print was quicker to write in the early stages, but after the age of nine or so, a cursive hand was swifter. Nevertheless, not everybody thought that the now familiar sequence of print to cursive was a desirable one. This was an age of revolutions, in education as much as in anything else. In Decline and Fall Evelyn Waugh’s Paul Potts writes to his unfortunate friend Pennyfeather, teaching in a terrible boarding school in 1928:

There is a most interesting article in the Educational Review on the new methods that are being tried at the Innesborough High School to induce coordination of the senses. They put small objects into the children’s mouths and make them draw the shapes in red chalk. Have you tried this with your boys? I must say I envy you your opportunities. Are your colleagues enlightened?3

He is probably thinking of such people as Maria Montessori, who first introduced children to letterforms made out of sandpaper, encouraging them to touch them in order to grow familiar with them. Waugh may, too, have heard of Marion Richardson’s practice of getting children to draw with their eyes closed.

In handwriting reform relating to print letters, there quickly emerged a fundamentalist and a moderate wing. The fundamentalist position was that cursive was a corrupt and unnecessary skill, and all through adult life, it should not be necessary to do anything other than print letters. A slightly softer version of this position was that letters should be joined ‘where natural’ – an idea of Graily Hewitt, who had set out the natural ligatures, such as ‘am’, ‘an’, ‘di’, ‘ci’, ‘em’, ‘hi’, and so on, almost all of which joined at the bottom of the letter.

For moderates, the education in print letters was a useful beginning point, and the learner could progress from there to a cursive, or semi-joined-up writing. The cursives that emerged from the print school were markedly different from the sloping, looping style that we saw in Vere Foster and A.N. Palmer, and show the influence of thinking about individual letters in isolation, in terms of circles and lines.

The range of possibilities was set out in a 1923 Board of Education report, which described the views of the pro-print school, and what they said were the advantages of their position. ‘The need for two alphabets would disappear … they would be more readily learned than the ordinary cursive forms, and would be written by young children with greater ease and accuracy … [it] could at a later stage be developed without difficulty either into an ordinary running hand or formal script such as is usually taught in art schools.’

All this seems obviously true, and the idea spread rapidly. The experts disagreed with each other, and sometimes seem somewhat cranky in their devotion to the new style. An A.G. Grenfell has been unearthed, arguing pugnaciously in 1924 for a sort of sloping print script: ‘This simple, legible hand … is steadily replacing Cursive in many English Schools throughout the world … [this book] deals seriatim with the conventional arguments against Script by appealing to actual experience gained by five years trial.’ Rosemary Sassoon remarks that ‘it is clear from his copybooks that Grenfell meant there to be no progression to a joined hand.’4

But for the most part, you can almost see, as print teaching in the early stages spreads, a joyous change of perspective, from the teacher’s convenience to the child’s advantage. From Spencer onwards, the teaching of handwriting in class was all to do with subjecting the child to the teacher’s will, and forcing him to do what must be achieved, at whatever cost. You just look at the print letters which began to circulate from the 1920s onwards, and see how attractive they are to the child, and how much easier to achieve. At this time, education began to be thought of, for the first time, from the perspective of the child, who was not necessarily merely an inconvenience to the supervising adult. Probably nowhere was this shift in perspective so clearly shown as in the move to a beginning handwriting where the letters are simple, clear, easy to make and easy to read. The fundamentalists, who believed like A.G. Grenfell that cursive should be done away with altogether, or like a Professor Shelley of the same period that ‘connecting strokes tend to make words similar, whereas to distinguish one word from another we require diverse elements’,5 meaning print letters, were never going to succeed in making every adult write exclusively in print throughout their life. There are adults who do go on writing in print; they always have a rather rebellious, art-school air about them. But most of us move on to more-or-less cursive writing when we’re about seven or eight, and carry on linking most of our letters up for the rest of our lives. When we are learning our manuscript letters, we look forward, as I did, to the day when we’re allowed to do ‘joined-up writing’: it possesses a marvellous prestige for most beginning writers. Print prepares us beautifully for the task of writing in an adult way, and some people will always find it enough for their needs. But handwriting, for many of us, has an element of glamour which the lovely simplicity of the ball-and-stick kindergarten letters can’t fulfil on its own. That explains, perhaps, why as some people were moving towards a hand that could be written by pencil out of circular lines and simple verticals, others were bent on reviving a handwriting style which depended for its full effect on the use, not even of a nib, but on ‘the shaded forms of the square-cut quill.’6 That’ll show the proles.