When I was at school, one of the things I did in (rare) dull moments was to practise my signature. As a teenager, I tried all kinds of floral swirls and cryptic variations of my initials.  I quietly admired the signatures of famous people. (Kurt Vonnegut’s was my favourite: part-signature, part self-portrait). In the end, I got tired of pretending to be someone else and just wrote my name in my own handwriting.

Each year, our School Prefects – or Praepostors as we call them – sign their names in the Praepostor book. The most recent volume has signatures going all the way back to 1913. Their chief responsibilities are to ‘set the tone of the School’ and look after the younger pupils. Leafing through the book, we can see the handwriting of generations of Salopian leaders. And indeed 12 Headmasters.

On the pages for Michaelmas 1955 and Lent 1956, if we look closely, we can see the names of three of the four founders of the long-running satirical magazine ‘Private Eye‘, who were each pupils at Shrewsbury.

Can you spot the hand-writing of Richard Ingrams, Paul Foot and Willy Rushton?

Handwritten letter-writing is not so much of a thing these days. Email, vlogs, texts and all manner of digital communications prevail – and wonderful ideas and messages can be shared in these ways (as well as the less good stuff).

I’m all in favour of communication in all forms. However, there is something a bit special about a hand-written letter. Perhaps even more so nowadays because of its rarity. If we really want to convey something special, we write it down by hand – because hand-writing is a powerfully personal thing.

As Lewis Carroll observed: “The proper definition of a man [or woman] is an animal that writes letters“.

Still true?

INSERT HANDWRITTEN SIGNATURE ^^^ 🙂