Alfred John Fairbank CBE (12 July 1895 – 14 March 1982) was a British calligrapher, palaeographer and author on handwriting.[1][2]
Fairbank was a founding member of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators in 1921, and later became its honourable secretary.[3] He was involved in the foundation of the Society for Italic Handwriting in 1952; his work and 1932 textbook A Handwriting Manual were influential on the italic script handwriting taught in British schools.[4][5] His portrait was painted by Anna Hornby.[6][7] For Penguin Books he wrote A Book of Scripts, on writing systems used throughout the world.[8]
Fairbank was a civil servant who spent his professional career working at the Admiralty in London and Bath; he retired to Hove on the south coast and lectured at what is now the University of Brighton after his retirement.[9][10][11][12] Fragments from medieval manuscripts collected by Alfred Fairbank are located at the Cadbury Research Library of the University of Birmingham.[13]
Early life
Alfred John Fairbank was born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, on 12 July 1895, to his father of the same name; Alfred John Fairbank and his mother Emma Fairbank, née Greetham, he married his cousin Elsie Kneeshaw in 1919.[14] They had a daughter Milfred Nolly Fairbank in 1922 in Bromley Kent but she died in the same year. They then had a son John Richard Fairbank in 1924. [15][16]
Fairbank studied at the Central School of Art and Design where in 1920 he attended evening classes in lettering and illuminating under Graily Hewitt,[17] who in turn had been taught at the same institute by Edward Johnston, Fairbank would later describe himself as a 'disciple' of Johnston.[18] Johnston and his student Hewitt were the preeminent revivalists of calligraphy at the turn of the century and clearly influenced Fairbank.
Career
Principal professional career:
Despite being an Admiralty civil servant for the majority of his career, Fairbank prodigiously created acclaimed artistic works of calligraphy and scholarly works of palaeography as catalogued below.
Italic handwriting
Fairbank's greatest achievement was the revival of a general hand-writing style known as Italic Script which was invented in renaissance Rome and used extensively by the Vatican bureaucracy.[20] The style was described by writings from the era by Arrighi in his 1522 pamphlet La Operina, where he described a sub-style which became known as Chancery Hand, then shortly afterwards in 1538 by Palatino in his treatise on calligraphy, Libro nuovo d'imparare a scrivere. Examples of other master scribes from the era were: - Bartolmeo San Vito, Antonio Tophio[21] & Bartolomeo Fonzio.[22]
Fairbanks studied this style in his Palaeographical scholarly work and practiced it through his calligraphy, he realised the significant improvements this style had on previous hand-writing scripts and indeed on modern scripts in terms such as clarity, beauty and speed of writing. So he began to strongly advocate for its revival, but unlike the mainly artistic revival work of his mentors Johnston and Hewitt, Fairbank proposed that the hand was universally taught at schools.[23]
To this end, Fairbank produced educational works which were used in schools, A Handwriting Manual (1932)[24] and the Beacon Writing Books (1959), written in conjunction with educationists.
Typography
In 1928, Fairbank designed an upright italic typeface for Monotype.[25] Monotype chose to incorporate this within their Bembo family of typefaces despite the fact Fairbank had designed a very unique typeface out of kilter with the general Bembo ethos, this irritated Fairbank, who thought it should have been an independent design.[26] When Monotype digitised in 2004, they rectified this and recognised the uniqueness of Fairbank's work by both expanding and improving the typeface and marketing as Fairbank.[27][28][29] Fairbank's original 1928 typeface was limited to the composition caster in metal type, only available in 4 sizes: 10, 12, 13 and 16pt (for large composition), the typeface was named "Bembo Condensed Italic", Monotype series 294.[citation needed]
Fairbank made clear why he was a calligrapher first and why he created so little typography:
I believe in the importance of the unique work, of things made for particular purposes. I claim the superiority of actual script over reproduced copies, on the same grounds as one believes in the painting more than in its reproduction, or the playing of an orchestra rather than the gramophone record. The reproduced work is expedient, although valuable for its service and essential for commerce. Handwriting is not done for reproduction, unless it is expedient, and it is not often that.[30]
New alphabets
English orthography is phonetically irregular, causing difficulty for children to learn to read; the mid-20th century was an unusual time when several attempts were made to address this issue, and in each case the proponents for change turned to Fairbank for the necessary calligraphy.
- In 1930, Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, asked Fairbank to design a new letter and afterwards they spoke about another more ambitious project for a new phonetic alphabet based on Roman type but this was ended by Bridges' death a short time later.[31]
- In 1953, Fairbank successfully produced the calligraphic design for Sir James Pitman's new initial teaching alphabet. The remit for the alphabet was challenging, in that the cursive handwriting of the new alphabet had to be designed first then the typeface designed to mirror match so children saw exactly the same in both hand-written cursive form and printed form. This was an ideal challenge for Fairbank whose works on italic hand-writing had put him in good stead for hand-writing design and the large-scale studies which followed the implementation of the initial teaching alphabet proved how children's writing substantially improved when they used the initial teaching alphabet.[32] The Monotype Corporation transliterated Fairbank's calligraphy onto a new version of their Ehrhardt typeface.[33]
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