The Missing Ink

by Philip Hensher

  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.

  11 ~ ‘Une Question de Writing’

  All through the 1980s and 1990s, as English handwriting lessons slid further and further down the agenda, teachers were despatched to France to observe how things were done there. They invariably returned with a gleam of shock in their eye. The French were doing things as they had always done them, with great concentration and an attention to detail. The handwriting of a French person who went to school in the 1990s was probably very similar to the handwriting produced by someone who was educated forty or fifty years before. A French grandmother, interviewed for a documentary on the subject in the twenty-first century, says carefully that ‘the teacher wrote on the board and we copied it down, and we had lined notebooks, and we did our writing according to the lines . . .’ The film cuts to the same scene in a French classroom today. Nothing, apparently, has changed. Her grandchildren are being taught in exactly the same way.

  One group of researchers, sent off to northern France in the late 1990s* to examine this question, showed that handwriting was a much higher priority for French infant-school teachers. It was, moreover, taught as a skill connected to any number of other skills; to movement and dance, physical education, creativity, and, naturally, this being France, ‘the teaching of handwriting in France was closely associated with the French view that it is important for individuals to acquire this skill if they are to access learning and communication as a part of being a French citizen.’ A good deal of time was spent on ‘fine and gross motor skills’ before writing was embarked upon.

  The handwriting of a French woman who went to school in the 1990s.

  In many ways, some of this seems to chime in with Marion Richardson’s ideas, proposed to English educators in the 1930s, which we will come to. A film about the modern-day teaching of handwriting in a school in Lyons confirms some of this view.1 The teacher stands at the board, drawing a lower-case letter t, defined by a three-line stave – the horizontal lines of the stave define where the top and bottom of the letter fall, and where the cross-bar of the t should go.

  With letters that go both above and below the line, a stave with as many as six lines is called for. It is explained by the headteacher of this school, Jean de la Fontaine primary school in Lyons, that ‘the learning of writing is something that really begins in year One [at the age of five]. But before this learning stage starts, it’s important for children to do graphisme exercises.’ These graphisme exercises include the practice of gesture in the infant school. The large fluid movements of dance, taught to the youngest children, moves gradually into the fluid movement of writing.2 * Cursive hands are t
aught from the start – a teacher observes mildly that ‘it can be a bit early for some of the pupils.’ If handwriting comes from a wide variety of disciplines, it also feeds into many more. One headteacher says that ‘Handwriting is an activity which is cross-disciplinary – it spills over into all the different subjects taught at school.’

  French education has the reputation of being extremely rigid. The standard joke is that if it’s quarter past ten on a Tuesday morning, the department of Education in Paris can be assured that every 11-year-old from Marseille to Martinique is learning exactly the same fact about the principal products of Poitou-Aquitaine in the fourteenth century. But films of French schools make the learning of handwriting look enormous fun, and in many ways very much like the ideas of Marion Richardson, seventy or eighty years ago. Like her, these teachers concentrate on the physical gesture, and like to turn exercises with the pen into drawing shapes, playing with patterns. Here, they draw sheep with large loops and circles, and add some grass – ‘Doing the grass with zig-zags helps us with our m’s,’ a child says. They are encouraged to add some colour to their work – Marion Richardson, returning a child’s point of view to education in the 1930s, had said tolerantly that ‘it will of course add to the children’s pleasure in writing these copies if they use coloured ink as well as black.’ Here, you can see how right she was. And there seems to be as much pleasure taken in the disciplined practice of handwriting skills as in the free play of the pen over the paper. A pupil says, trying to explain how he forms a letter, that ‘Some letters need three spaces, some only two, and some need five – we start in the middle then go up and down and then a kind of loop.’ He is having fun. And his headteacher is in no doubt about the importance of balancing freedom with discipline, and the end result. ‘To write is to communicate,’ he says. ‘It’s forging relations with other people through writing.’ The civic duty to be able to write so that your neighbours can read it has never, it seems, gone away in France, and almost everyone who has examined the French model of handwriting teaching has been initially alarmed by the apparent martinet-like quality, and then impressed by the beautiful results it achieves, and the ability of French children to move on and use handwriting as a tool, rather than experiencing it as a blockage.

  If very little has changed in French handwriting practice in fifty or more years, the German model has been altered, and altered again, by political considerations. The last of the black-letter prints, the Sütterlinschrift, had been introduced into Prussian schools in 1924 and by 1930 in the majority of German schools. You need special training to read German scripts, or Fraktur, as the Germans called it, and many aspects of it now strike us as completely insane. The e and n are only differentiated because, in one case, the second hook is connected at the top, while with the other, the second hook is connected at the bottom; the u and the nn are differentiated only by the degree of curve which the line above it has* and the s takes two forms, according to where it comes, and if a word has two s’s in the middle of it, then one form might follow another. Alles klar? The main recommendation of the Fraktur script is that it is, apparently, quite easy to write, minimizing strokes and not asking the pen to push against the paper or form loops in the way that other styles of writing do. On the other hand, it’s extremely difficult to read.

  The Sütterlin script was only formally abandoned in 1941, in favour of the sort of universal Western writing then in use in the rest of Europe. The more universal style is referred to as Antiqua, or Latin script. Some historians of handwriting assert that Hitler abandoned the teaching of Sütterlin’s black-letter script in schools because he believed it had associations with corruption and Jewish influence. This seems unlikely in the extreme. Black-letter had deeply Germanic associations. Moreover, Sütterlin himself was not Jewish, and, since he died only in 1917, it seems probable that people alive in 1941 would have known something about him. In this case, the reform seems likely to have taken place because historical tendency was against the preservation of Fraktur, and because the Third Reich wanted a form of writing which was more like the writing of the rest of the modern Western world.

  Fraktur is something between a unique script, like the Cyrillic alphabet, and a style of handwriting, like italic or law-hand. Long before the abandonment of the Sütterlin script in German schools, individuals were choosing to write German in Latin hands. A small glimpse of a transitional moment, around 1930, will show how painful the transition could be. In 1930, the State Library in Berlin brought together an exhibition of ‘139 Manuscripts of Living German Authors’: the manuscripts were sold to benefit the German equivalent of the Society of Authors. One hundred and seventeen authors were represented. Of these, twelve used the typewriter, which of course wrote exclusively in the Latin script. Of the others, forty-seven used the German, or Fraktur script; forty-two used the Latin, or Antiqua script; and twenty-one used a sort of mixed script. The authors who used a more-or-less Fraktur script included Kafka’s friend Max Brod, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Arthur Schnitzler. The users of the Antiqua tended to be, but were not exclusively, of a younger generation; Gerhard von Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Felix Salten (of Bambi fame), Stefan Zweig. Klaus Mann used an intermediate style; very modern people like Döblin and Feuchtwanger used the typewriter. At this point, printed books divided pretty equally between black-letter and Latin type – in 1927, 27,794 books were published in Germany, dividing 56 per cent and 44 per cent in favour of the older style.

  Sütterlin script from a child’s workbook, 1929.

  The commentator Paul Pope, from whom I take these interesting facts, writing in 1931, is in no doubt that the war between German and Latin scripts in Germany had a direct connection with ideas of modernity and political progress. ‘One champion of the Antiqua asserts that “the [First] World War would have been avoided if the Germans had only introduced the use of the Antiqua in time.” The Fraktur protagonists [sic] on the other hand are prone to overemphasize mystic relationships and völkische considerations which are often purely imaginary.’3 The emphasis on Germanic purity in the Fraktur script, certainly made by growing nationalist movements in 1931, would hardly have been likely to have made so dramatic a volte-face by 1941 as to declare it a Jewish style. The purity of the writing style, rather, must have come to seem a real disadvantage to wider communication even to people so made as the Nazis. Moreover, when people who were writing in the Sütterlin script came to a foreign word, it was the convention to break out from the black-letter script and write the word in Latin letters, either as an acknowledgement of the limits of German script, or perhaps because even readers of German script could not be relied upon to understand an unfamiliar word in the impenetrable style. The result was a situation, as Paul Pope points out, where every German had to learn eight separate alphabets – lower-case and upper-case versions of handwritten and printed German and Latin scripts. There can have seemed no point in maintaining a style of writing which not everyone chose to use, which hardly anyone not trained in German handwriting could read or write, and which was in any case not suitable for every purpose. Hitler’s ministries decided to phase out Sütterlin in order to communicate more clearly with the subject peoples, I dare say, not because Sütterlin was a script perpetrated by the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, the disabled, or any of the other people they so took against.

  Here and there, pockets of expertise in Sütterlin survive or revive themselves for professional reasons. My friend Chris Clark, the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, learnt not only to read but to write Sütterlin while writing his magisterial history of Prussia. He told me some interesting things about what it feels like to write in this impenetrable script:

  The pain of Sütterlin is in the reading, because so many of the letters look nearly alike. But this is actually an easier script to write than to read, especially if you are using a quill or a fountain pen. The letters are configured in such a way as to minimize any movements that push the point of the nib back against t
he grain of the paper. The a is open at the top; so is the ‘c’, which can be distinguished from the ‘i’ only by the little horizontal curl above it. The ‘u’ and the ‘n’ are likewise distinguished only by a little curl or dipping line (above the ‘u’). And so on. If you’re right-handed, the pen simply moves up and down in little sharp oscillations like the needle of a seismograph. Of course everyone was right-handed at the time, because left-handedness wasn’t allowed.

  Naturally, the Nazi decision to drop black-letter and impose Latin styles in German schools could not be allowed to stand entirely unamended. Almost everything, after the war, was tainted by Third Reich associations. Nor could the new countries of West and East Germany return to the unreadably antique Sütterlin script. Even if roughly the same decision was reached in the end, it had to be reached independently, and for quite different reasons. In 1953, the Model Latin Script was released by the Iserlohn Writing Circle* and on 4 November 1953 decreed for instruction in every school in West Germany. It was followed in 1972 by a slightly simplified version. Not to be outdone, the Democratic Republic in the East produced its own Schulausgangsschrift (Model School Script) from 1968. They are rather similar: the principal difference seems to be that the DDR script stresses the upstroke which begins each letter from the baseline. Both are much more looped than English scripts of the period, and closest to the Montessori script, which was a rounded, non-cursive style. When the two Germanies united, a unified script soon followed, the 1993 Simplified Model Script.

  The idea of a national script, to unite children in a sense of nationhood, was used for good or ill in Germany in its various incarnations – the Wilhelmine state, the Third Reich, the different political ideals represented by West and East Germanies, and finally, the reunified Germany. Only in very recent years have the voices that ask whether it is worth teaching handwriting at all have been gaining much of a hearing.* In 2011, the state of Hamburg unilaterally introduced a simplified alphabet called Grundschrift which, like the print alphabets of the 1920s, aims to maintain the same writing style from initial literacy to graduation. Proponents of the change argued that it would allow children to develop their own handwriting in freedom; opponents said that ‘the legibility will not improve, but rather noticeably worsen, because each pupil will join up the letters however they fancy. The speed of writing will also decrease.’4