Signatures are funny things. Many that I've seen clearly begin as the name of the writer, but appear to take on a degree of impatience half-way through and tail off into an illegible squiggle. I can still picture, after nearly 40 years, of that of one of my former bosses: I wouldn't know exactly where to begin if I were to try to recreate it now, but I can see that essentially it was built of his three initials MJR. Just considering those two examples illustrate the essential quality of a signature. While every one is slightly different, the general shape of each example of the same person's signature is sufficiently constant to ensure that it was his or her own hand that crafted it.
My father wrote very little. Not given at all to things artistic, there were no flourishes to his signature. It was written slowly and painstakingly, and I would suggest that when I watched that process in the 1960s the result was very little different from the broad copperplate that he was taught at school before the First World War. His father's hand was very similar, but slightly neater and with a marginally greater slope from the vertical. As a farm bailiff, he would have had more occasion to write things than my father. For the most part, the extent of dad's writing would be the words 'Full week' that preceded his signature on his weekly time-sheet.
One regular item of handwriting that has, in large measure, disappeared from modern life is the writing of a cheque. It was in the early eighteenth century when the printed cheque form first appeared and a further hundred years or more before they were imprinted with the customer's name and stitched into books of 50 or more with counterfoils. The cheque is, of course, a descendant of the Letter of Credit that had been part of business for centuries before and is, in effect, a written instruction from the account holder (the drawer) to the bank to pass funds to a certain party (the payee) when the instruction is presented to the drawer's bank.
The oldest handwritten cheque still believed to be in existence dates from 1659 and reads, "Mr Morris & Mr Clayton (these were the bankers) I pray pay the bearer hereof Mr Delboe or order Fower hundred poundes, I say £400:-:-, for yours Nicholas Vanacker. London the 16th of February, 1659".
The advent of the printed cheque eliminated all the standard wording and required the user simply to insert the payee's name, the amount in words and figures and the date, before adding his signature to authorise the payment to be made. The amount of actual writing was therefore considerably reduced, in addition to ensuring that it was formally correct. Some readers will remember the television adaptation, if not the written original of, A P Herbert's 'misleading case' of the Negotiable Cow, when the mischevous taxpayer Mr Albert Haddock wrote his cheque on the side of a cow and presented it to the Collector of Taxes. The story explored the legitimacy of a handwritten cheque in the twentieth century.
I recently discovered a short video describing letters that used to be part of our alphabet, but that have long since disappeared. My three favourites are the two different characters that represented the hard and soft sounds of 'th', eth and thorn respectively, and the one that is most familiar to readers today, the long 's' that resembles an 'f' without the crossing. There were, I learn, definite rules when the long 's' would be used and when the short letter that we're familiar with today should take its place.
Writing is certainly much easier these days. Whether it is more legible the less we use it, I leave my reader to decide.
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