Scrawl right now with decline of handwriting

Charles Darwin used to give particularly long crosses to his ts, and his notebooks had explanatory doodles.

Then we have Robert Clive, Clive of India, with lots of long strokes, and leaning to the right, which is pretty common, actually.

The common factor? Shropshire teachers. These were all sons of Shropshire who will have been drilled in their handwriting at school, and forced to practise and perfect.

Not forgetting A E Housman, not a Shropshire lad himself but famous for his A Shropshire Lad collection of poems. How does a distinguished scholar write? Rather neatly.

In their day, spanning the 18th to the 20th centuries, handwriting was important – really important, as it was the principal means of distant communication.

Handwriting tells you something about the writer in a way that the uniform dull hand of type does not (apart from whether they can spell and know their grammar).

As we look at the amendments and crossings out of the Great War poet Wilfred Owen, who revisited his drafts and touched them up at different moments, we get an insight into the evolution of his thoughts and his exploration of different words and phrases.

And as we admire flamboyant handwriting full of flourishes, we can imagine the writer and rightly or wrongly get an impression of their character – possibly rightly, as handwriting is such a strong connection with the writer that it can be analysed by experts to give evidence in court.

Robert Clive will have used a quill pen. The steel-point pen took off in the Victorian era.

Many older Salopians will still remember wooden desks and inkwells, although the inkwells may have given way to direct filling from the bottle.

The decline of handwriting has gone hand in hand with the decline of the pen, the proper nib pen, that is, rather than the cheap and ubiquitous ballpoints in which all strokes are the same.

Handwriting was something to be admired.

I remember my history teacher, Mr Thompson, telling my late classmate Ben Carswell, who had beautiful handwriting: "If you write like that in the exams, you will pass anyway."

I'm not sure if he was proven right.