From dip pens to cartridges: history of fountain pens in English schools

For generations of English schoolchildren, learning to write meant eventually getting ink on your fingers.

The fountain pen came fairly late to that story. Victorian pupils usually wrote with slates or steel-nib dip pens. Fountain pens came later. Even then, classroom inkwells stuck around for decades.

Their real school heyday came much later, particularly during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

There was no morning when every school in England threw its fountain pens away and handed out Biros. Some schools changed early. Others carried on using fountain pens well into the 1980s.

1870s to 1900: slates, dip pens and inkwells

The Elementary Education Act of 1870 led to a huge expansion of elementary schooling in England. Compulsory attendance for children aged five to ten followed in 1880.

For younger children, writing often started on a slate. It was cheap, reusable and forgiving. Make a mess, wipe it clean and start again. Reading Museum records that schoolchildren were still commonly using slates towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Paper came later.

Once pupils moved on to proper handwriting practice, the standard tool was generally a wooden penholder with a replaceable steel nib. Dip it into the inkwell, write a few words, dip again.

Anyone who has used one knows why old school exercise books were accompanied by blotting paper. Fresh ink smears very easily.

Those little circular holes found in Victorian and Edwardian school desks were inkwell holders. Ink monitors could be given the job of filling them from a larger bottle before lessons began.

The system was cheap. A wooden holder could last for years and a worn or damaged nib cost very little to replace.

Britain was also sitting on an enormous supply of steel nibs. Birmingham had become the centre of the trade during the nineteenth century, at one point producing a huge proportion of the world’s steel pens.

The classic Victorian school pen, then, was a dip pen.

The basic kit was simple. Beginners used a slate and slate pencil. Older pupils moved on to a wooden penholder, steel nib, ink and blotting paper.

1900s to 1930s: the fountain pen appears

By the early twentieth century, fountain pens were certainly available in Britain.

Museum collections contain early Waterman, Swan, Onoto and other pens from this period. They offered one enormous advantage over the dip pen: the ink travelled around inside the pen.

No more dipping the nib every few words.

Early fountain pens could still be awkward things. Filling systems included eyedroppers, button mechanisms and rubber sacs. They were more expensive than a wooden holder with a penny nib too.

That mattered in schools.

Buying one fountain pen for yourself was one thing. Equipping classrooms full of children was another, particularly when the existing dip-pen system already worked and schools had desks fitted with inkwells.

So the two technologies overlapped for years.

A businessman might carry a fountain pen in his pocket. His children could still be using steel-nib dip pens at school.

Some older pupils did start using fountain pens, especially where families supplied their own writing equipment, but the dip pen was nowhere near finished.

1930s and 1940s: a very slow changeover

By the 1930s, fountain pens were ordinary consumer products rather than novelties. Cheap models existed alongside more expensive Parkers, Swans and other better-quality pens.

Schools still had a lot invested in the old system.

Desks had inkwells. Ink was bought in bottles. Teachers knew how to teach handwriting with a nib, and children were already expected to write with liquid ink.

Moving to fountain pens therefore required surprisingly little change to the actual handwriting lesson. The pupil still used a nib and still had to control the flow of ink. The main difference was that the ink reservoir now travelled around inside the pen.

Adoption varied enormously.

Some children encountered fountain pens before the Second World War. Others continued using dip pens afterwards.

This is where personal memories of British schooling can become confusing. Two people of roughly the same age can remember completely different classroom equipment, and both may be right.

1950s: fountain pens become ordinary school equipment

By the 1950s the fountain pen had become a familiar part of school life.

Hampshire County Council’s historic school collection dates one representative school fountain pen to roughly the 1950s to 1970s. Its material on schools of the period describes children beginning with pencils and progressing to fountain pens towards the end of primary school.

Old desks with recessed inkwells were still around during the 1950s and 1960s.

The inkwell had gained a new job.

Children no longer had to dip the pen every few words. They used the inkwell to refill the fountain pen instead. Then they wrote until the reservoir ran dry.

One common design was the lever filler.

Inside the barrel sat a rubber sac. Pulling up the small lever on the side of the pen squeezed the sac. With the nib submerged in ink, releasing the lever allowed the sac to expand and suck ink into the pen.

It worked perfectly well, although filling one without getting ink somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be was a useful childhood skill in its own right.

Blue and blue-black ink were common choices. The pens themselves were generally inexpensive working objects rather than treasured luxury pens.

1960s: cartridges make everything easier

Then came the cartridge.

This removed most of the faffing about with bottles, levers and rubber sacs. Unscrew the pen, push in a sealed plastic cartridge and screw it back together.

For a schoolchild, that was much easier.

For a teacher faced with a room full of children and liquid ink, it must have had obvious attractions too.

Hampshire’s school collection records the move from rubber-bladder pens to pens using pre-filled cartridges, and by the 1960s cartridge fountain pens were becoming a familiar sight.

The Parker 45, launched in 1960, is a good example. It was relatively inexpensive by Parker standards and could use cartridges. Student versions followed.

Platignum became another familiar name in Britain. Its cheap cartridge pens were aimed squarely at the mass market and became strongly associated with school use during the 1960s and 1970s.

Neither was an official “school pen”. England never had one universal model handed out across the education system.

You used whatever your school required, recommended or happened to sell.

So why didn’t the Biro wipe them out immediately?

Ballpoint pens were already being made in England during the 1940s. The Science Museum collection includes an English Biro made by the Miles Martin Pen Company in Reading between 1945 and 1948.

Yet fountain pens carried on.

Part of the reason was simply habit. Schools already taught children to write with nibs and liquid ink. Teachers knew the system, handwriting exercises had grown up around it and fountain pens produced the sort of flowing joined writing schools expected.

Early ballpoints also had a fairly poor reputation. Cheap ones could blob, skip and require more pressure than a fountain pen.

The cartridge fountain pen bought the old nib-writing tradition some extra time. Schools could keep teaching familiar handwriting without relying on open bottles of ink every few minutes.

For a while, fountain pens and ballpoints simply lived alongside each other.

Late 1960s and 1970s: the alternatives pile up

By the end of the 1960s the fountain pen was getting crowded.

Ballpoints were becoming cheaper and better. Fibre-tip pens arrived in Britain during the 1960s, gaining widespread popularity towards the end of the decade.

Cartridge fountain pens were still common, though, so a 1970s classroom could contain several generations of pen technology at the same time.

One child might be using a fountain pen. Another had a Biro. Someone else had a fibre-tip handwriting pen. At the back of the room there could still be old desks with holes for inkwells that nobody used anymore.

This messy overlap is why memories differ so much.

There is no sensible single date for “the end of the fountain pen in schools”.

1970s and 1980s: the fountain pen loses its grip

During the 1970s and 1980s, the fountain pen gradually stopped being the automatic next step after pencil.

Convenience was against it.

A ballpoint could be thrown into a pencil case and forgotten about until it ran out. There was no cartridge to replace, no nib to bend and very little chance of opening your school bag to discover that half a bottle’s worth of blue ink had escaped into it.

Fibre-tip handwriting pens and later rollerballs offered other options.

Classroom furniture changed as well. New desks no longer needed inkwells, and the physical remains of the old ink-based classroom slowly disappeared.

Schools did not all change together.

Some continued insisting on fountain pens for handwriting. Others allowed ballpoints. A child moving schools could easily discover that the pen considered perfectly acceptable in one classroom was forbidden in another.

That continued into the 1980s.

Were fountain pens officially banned or discontinued?

No national discontinuation date has been found.

English schools did not receive a government instruction telling them to stop using fountain pens on a particular date. Their disappearance as the everyday school pen happened school by school.

Modern curriculum wording is much less interested in the mechanism inside the pen.

The national curriculum talks about using a “pencil, pen” and choosing an appropriate writing implement. Current Department for Education handwriting guidance concentrates on handwriting itself and recommends pencil and paper during the early stages.

Whether the ink comes from a cartridge, a ballpoint refill or something else is largely beside the point.

Fountain pens were never abolished. Schools simply stopped treating them as the obvious pen every child would eventually use.

How long did the school fountain-pen era last?

Fountain pens were being used by some English pupils before the Second World War, but their clearest period as an everyday school writing tool runs from roughly the 1950s through the 1970s.

Allow for earlier adopters and stubborn holdouts and you get something like 30 to 40 years when the fountain pen could reasonably be called a mainstream English school pen.

Ink itself had a much longer run.

Victorian children dipping steel nibs into desk inkwells and 1970s children snapping cartridges into plastic fountain pens were separated by a century, but they were still working with the same basic idea: a metal nib putting liquid ink onto paper.

The fountain pen arrived near the end of that classroom tradition.

Then somebody handed the kids a Biro 🙂