The vanishing world of handwritten letters

London: Those who write letters and send them by post are a dying breed. I was fortunate to have served as a newspaper columnist and received a great many. Often eloquent, sometimes humorous, their breadth and depth of experience was wonderful. With the exception of letters that were racist or completely mad, I tried to answer every one of them. If a reader took the trouble to write to me, it was the least I could do to send him or her a personal reply.

There was the occasional correspondent from London, but most lived in the country or in provincial towns or cities. Most were Conservatives. They included vicars and solicitors, art collectors and surveyors, teachers, doctors, military men, a former staff superintendent in the House of Lords (very knowledgeable), office workers and small business owners, university lecturers and engineers (what an immensely rational breed, engineers: they offered clear and very simple solutions, often with bullet points, to knotty problems).

A manufacturer of rivets sent me a comic novel he’d written about working for the EU (and very amusing it was); another man sent me a book based on journal entries and letters between his grandparents, father and uncles, during the Second World War: it was a beautiful, understated record of quiet courage, duty and service.

Cricket fans were well-represented, and a delightful bunch they are. A woman whose uncle had been at Eton with Test Match Special’s Brian Johnston had enjoyed his company at countless weekends with the family: “As well as making us all laugh so much, he was incredibly kind.”

Another reader helped me solve the mystery of Abdul Kardar’s whereabouts in the Oxford long vacation of 1947. He disclosed that the future Pakistan cricket captain played for Hawarden Cricket Club, enclosing a few photocopied pages of a history of the club (written by the reader’s father).

Smokers and drinkers were also well-represented and any piece touching on either of these pastimes would inspire a batch of letters. A retired colonel, aged 91, told me that he “was brought up to smoke and indeed trained to see it as a social attribute. Many things could have been more traumatic during our war if we had not been able to smoke.” He suggested that post-traumatic stress might be less common nowadays if smoking was still encouraged.

Another nonagenarian wrote from Zimbabwe to say that, by his reckoning, he had smoked some 950,000 cigarettes and had enjoyed each and every one of them immensely. (However, a lieutenant colonel compared me to “a left-winger whingeing about his human rights” when I deplored the ban on smoking in pubs.)
Many of my correspondents were men and women who had lived for years in the outposts of empire: Palestine, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Zimbabwe. Their often extensive knowledge of these places was suffused with love and respect for the people and cultures they had known and experienced.

A vicar (whose daughter was producing Euripides’ Trojan Women with Syrian refugees in Jordan) sent me a copy of an astute and knowledgeable letter he had written to William Hague after a sabbatical studying minorities in Assad’s Syria. He’d received no reply. What a pity that special advisers and lobbyists have the ear of ministers, while such as he do not.

A handful of my correspondents were famous: I was once thrilled to receive a letter from Geoffrey Boycott (it was very rude) and entered into a long and enjoyable exchange with the thriller writer Freddie Forsyth, who holds no-nonsense political opinions. There were more than a few genuine eccentrics amongst my letter-writers, and widely varying views were expressed, often strongly.

But all shared a fundamental decency, and a moral centre the loss of which, in contemporary politics and business, they greatly lamented. A man who had qualified as a chartered accountant in the 1960s wrote, “At that time, everybody was obliged to act in Good Faith, with the exception of Lloyds of London which was obliged to act with the Utmost Good Faith.”

The expenses scandal, the phone-hacking scandal, a whole series of banking scandals all inspired stacks of letters. I don’t think MPs ever fully understood the indignation inspired by the expenses scandal, nor the shocked incomprehension when they protested that they had done nothing wrong.

Along with outrage was bewilderment. One man wrote, “For the past few years, I’ve been thinking that the country I was brought up in had been an illusion.” He felt special horror at the series of assaults on the British justice system that began under Tony Blair and continues to this day. He said that his father (“a man of rudimentary education”) enlisted two months before war was declared on Germany because he was appalled to hear that people were being imprisoned without trial: “Of course much worse was going on that we didn’t know about, but it was this simple fact that assured him he was fighting on the right side.”

Another correspondent remarked that, “Until recently Chiefs of Staff were military heads of the Services. Now every twerp of a minister seems to have an equally twerpish Chief of Staff. What staffs are they chief of? The typing pool?”

A piece I wrote opposing a state funeral for Lady Thatcher inspired a number of letters, not one in favour. Many of them deplored her divisiveness, the laying waste of industry and communities, the encouragement of individualism and greed. Perhaps the most eloquent of these correspondents wrote, “It is very depressing that the Cameron government should be prepared to imperil the conventional political neutrality of the Crown in this way. Furthermore, as you say, what about Attlee? There is a grainy old black-and-white film of a party political broadcast made by Attlee in (I think) 1951. He is asked why members of the middle class should vote Labour. He simply answers ‘because it is the right thing to do’. I am not a socialist, but that nobility of spirit brought tears to my eyes.”
I can’t help comparing these handwritten letters to the comments that readers now place at the bottom of online articles. Raucous, angry and semi-literate, the prevailing tone of a great deal of the online conversation is essentially barbarous.

By contrast, a common thread ran through so many of the letters I received: a lament for the loss of the ideals of public service, duty, modesty, and that “grudging altruism” Orwell identified as British decency. If the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these admirable people absorb even a small portion of their character and wit, the future might be brighter than we think.

By arrangement with the Spectator