15 ~ Witness

‘At junior school, we learnt what we used to call copperplate. We had a copybook. There was a line, and we copied underneath it, in unison, as a class. That’s the sort of style I wrote, though it got worse and worse as time went on. To be honest, nothing was fun at my junior school. It was a very miserable school, with a very miserable head teacher, dressed like old Queen Victoria with an old black dress on. Quite apart from the fact that I was bullied from day one.

‘The copperplate didn’t seem old-fashioned – it seemed normal. Because my parents wrote the same way. My uncle Arthur, who lived with us, he had really good handwriting. My mother’s handwriting was quite legible, though it wasn’t as formal as Arthur’s. Arthur worked as a coffee-roaster at the Co-op, so he didn’t need such nice handwriting, and then later on, when he got a clerking job there, he still wrote in the same fashion, always very clear.

‘I never practised my handwriting. When I went to grammar school, it just deteriorated. And of course, towards the end of my school days, biros came in.* It wasn’t so important to write well, to get a job, as you’d think – I don’t think so. So long as you could write legibly. I was working at the [Midland] Bank, and my handwriting got disgusting, and I decided to write italic. It was illegible. I don’t know why I learnt it. I think I must have seen examples of it, or something – perhaps I saw somebody that had got nice handwriting. Actually, I think it was one of my girlfriends now I come to think of it. I bought an italic fountain pen, and a book by Gowrie – Gowrie?* I was a clerk in the Midland Bank, late fifties, early sixties. I’d devote ten minutes a day, when things were quiet, to practising a letter, one at a time. I got to be quite good at it.

‘I still didn’t use it all the time. I used it when I’d got time to do it. I had to be writing things in a hurry, and you couldn’t be writing with that, I can tell you. It’s not a fast hand. I had to write all the names of the banks that we were going to be sending money to, abroad, and I’d have to decide which banks to send the money to, it was – in the case of America, it was a lot. I had to do something like six hundred or seven hundred of those a day. So you had to get a move on because they had to be done after that by the typists, the machine operators, well before the end of the day. They were dependent on me to turn the work out very quickly and very accurately. The machines were too difficult for us to operate ourselves. In those days, too, it was for you to make the decisions, who would get the business. You learnt all the names and the telegraphic addresses off by heart, from Australia to Spitzbergen. You got to be very good at geography.

‘I did it all in my scrappy – well, you couldn’t call it copperplate any more – it was just a scribble. There were shortened forms of banks’ names, such as Amsterdam, it would be Amrabank. I used my italic only if I wanted to do some nice writing. And also – well, people used to come and ask me to do bits of stuff. And then every year, the Midland Bank had its art exhibition, and they sent out very posh invitations to all the magnates in the City of London, like the head of the Stock Exchange. Me and another fellow would sit down for a couple of days and write invitations to Sir This and Lord This. And we would write their names in the space – the rest was gold-edged and printed. We didn’t get paid extra, it was part of the job. I used to be able to do all of them without spoiling any. Five or six hundred invites. And I used italic if I wanted to write a private letter, because then I’d have time to do it. I didn’t have a typewriter.

‘Italic looks nicer when you’re finished, and it’s always legible. It’s nice to receive a letter like that, when somebody’s taken the effort. If it was a letter I had to do in a hurry, I wouldn’t bother. I don’t really join up my letters, not really – it’s a sort of painted style. I used to join up some letters. I can’t remember – I don’t use it so much now. I’m not too sure about joining up letters. I try to get my letters as square as possible, especially the lower-case ones – they’ve got to be square. When you do an a, you just go along the top, down to the bottom, then almost diagonally, up, then down, so it ends up square. That’s the style I picked up from the book. My friend Dennis, who used to do the invitations with me, he had a more round style, slightly more florid. It was a sort of combination of copperplate and italic. It had a few more flounces. Dennis Coote, he was a very good painter, he died about five years ago. He made a card for you when you went to Oxford, do you remember? His handwriting slanted, I used to try to make mine upright. Everyone’s got a different …

‘My favourite letter? The one I like making with a pen? I quite enjoy making a D, a capital D. It’s got a nice outline to it. I don’t like A very much. Don’t like E too much.’

Interviewer: ‘Do you make those Greek E’s? You know, people call them Greek E’s, but they’re not – you know what I mean.’

‘No. Never. Horrible. I used to like y and z, because you can go zh-zh-zh-zh-zh, with the capitals.’

R.J.H., retired bank official, 78