THE fountain pen, complete with leaky nibs, bursting cartridges and indelibly stained shirts, is making a compulsory comeback in a last-ditch attempt to save the nation’s handwriting.

The spread of vowel-free text messages among the young and the rise of grammarless e-mails across all age ranges is leaving children, university students and even teachers unable to write legibly by hand.

But now a leading independent school has ordered pupils aged nine and over to write only with fountain pens.

Bryan Lewis, the headmaster of The Mary Erskine & Stewart’s Melville Junior School in Edinburgh, believes that his pupils’ educational attainment and sense of self-worth will all benefit.

“All teachers who join our junior school are taught a handwriting style by my colleagues and they, in turn, teach all our children the same style,” Mr Lewis said. “They are helped by our insistence that children from primary 5 onwards write in fountain pen.

“Learning to write in fountain pen not only results in beautiful presentation but also has the not-insignificant bonus of developing children’s selfesteem.”

Mr Lewis’s policy is likely to be well-received by those in authority. Tony Blair is a fountain-pen user and has been known to give heavyweight Churchill pens as gifts.

The Prime Minister, who was educated in the Scottish private school system, writes all his speeches in longhand with a favourite fountain pen before passing them to his secretaries to be typed.

At Mr Blair’s end of the market, fountain pen sales are reportedly booming. Purveyors of expensive jewellery such as Bulgari and Chopard are starting to produce luxury pens.

It is widely accepted that the use of the fountain pen, necessarily slower and more deliberate than the ballpoint or rollerpen, produces more elegant handwriting. Those who write for a living tend to profess affection for the fountain pen.

In Eighteenth, the poet, Kate Bingham, praised the “low-tech simplicity” of the instrument and recalled the excitement of watching “the tip of a new pen touch its first white sheet, the hand behind solemn and quivering, unsure whether to doodle or draw or let the nib try for itself, licking the page in thirsty blue-black stripes”.

John Banville, the Booker prize-winning Irish author, also prefers to use a fountain pen. He has been reported as saying that “a fountain pen is about the right speed. A machine goes too fast. It goes faster than I can think.”

But the fall of the fountain pen from common usage was once widely welcomed because of its association with ruined school uniforms, messy pages and classroom squabbles.

In the days when fountain pens were widespread, was there ever a pupil whose school blazer did not have a giant inky map all over the lining or a blue puddle in the top pocket? The fountain pen was also a favourite weapon of the naughty schoolboy. The nib could be used to jab other pupils and some models, especially those which filled from bottles by pistons or levers, were ideal for squirting ink. The more primitive dip-in types also made crude darts. But the favourite of every schoolboy was the ink pellet — the blotting-paper-and-ink device detested by every teacher.

Mr Lewis is adamant that the return of pen and ink will have positive results for his pupils. The demise of the fountain pen and handwriting went hand-in-hand, he argues, with the rise of “progressive” teaching methods. He added: “Modern teaching methods overwhelmed the curriculum in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They proved to be no more than an excuse for the lowering of standards of basic literacy and numeracy under the guise of freedom of expression. From that time generations of children were no longer taught to write properly. They couldn’t recognise the importance of spelling, to read with expression and understanding, and to master numbers.

“In many cases the pupils of that era are now today’s teachers. They can hardly be expected to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills when they went through childhood either unaware of, or indifferent to, rules of grammar and spelling.”

The Scottish Qualifications Authority has lamented that the standard of handwriting on some exam papers was so poor that its markers could not read them.

A spokesman for the Campaign for Real Education said: “Good spelling, handwriting, grammar and punctuation make for confident use of language and smooth communication.”

TROUBLE WITH A TOUCH OF CLASS

Fountain pens can be turned into lethal schoolboy weapons because of their nibs. However, ballpoints can be turned into peashooters

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• The bright side of this winter rain
• Story behind the picture: Snow Leopard, 2008
• Times Charity Appeal: The Place2Be