London Letter: Threats to the art of the handwritten Christmas greeting

The death of the handwritten message is threatening the spirit of Christmas, says Rev Paul Bayes, the recently appointed Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, who has been busy since his installation visiting parishes throughout his sprawling diocese.

He will be busier again this week and next, as he sits down to write 60 Christmas cards a day, each with a personal note in fountain-pen ink, not just the banal, generic “Happy Christmas!” greeting of so many.

Emails, social media and text-messaging are corroding the Christmas spirit, says Bayes, and the personal touch is being replaced by something more distant and less personal. Often, he says, people manage only to stay in touch by Christmas cards: “That is a start. It is better than nothing at all. If [it] ensures we do not lose touch with people completely, that is good.”

Last year the Royal Mail found that 72 per cent of British people would prefer to see a Christmas card drop through their letterbox from someone they knew than receive any electronic greeting, no matter how sophisticated.

The episcopal encouragement is, perhaps, timely, as research shows that the number of Christmas cards sent in Britain has fallen dramatically in the past few years, from 1.4 billion in 2008 to below one billion last year.

Postage costs

The 40 per cent drop, according to the Greeting Card Association’s 2014 greeting card market report, is due, however, not just to the impact of the internet, but also to sharp rises in postage costs.

Royal Mail’s own research indicates that those who cling to the habit of posting cards are sending more of them, from an average of 15 each in 2011 to 17 last year. However, price rises from the now privately owned Royal Mail have not helped, especially since it is warning that the days of a standard price for all letters across the UK is nearing an end.

The company was floated on the Stock Exchange last October at £3.30 a share. By January, the price had shot up to £6.15, leading to charges that the British government had botched the sale and been sold a pup by financial advisers.

Today, its shares are listed at £4.20, which still gives investors a 30 per cent paper profit despite a drift back in the face of the threat posed by Amazon and private postal firms.

Royal Mail’s chief executive, Moya Greene, has warned MPs that postal deliveries in some of the UK’s most rural districts are under threat because competitors are taking lucrative urban business. Because of its obligation to provide universal service, Royal Mail has to deliver across the UK six days a week. This obligation lasts until 2021, but Greene says the company cannot wait that long.

“If you allow cherry-picking in the urban areas, it siphons off a lot of revenue,” she told a House of Commons committee. “It makes the universal service unfinanceable and uneconomic.”

Business secretary Vince Cable accused Greene of “scaremongering”, saying that Westminster had no intention of ending universal service.

Growing competition

However, competition is growing. Whistl, formerly known as TNT Post, has been delivering to homes and businesses in London and Manchester for two years, but relies on Royal Mail to deliver its rural mail. A fee is paid for delivery, say companies such as Whistl, but Greene insists that universal service costs Royal Mail £7.2 billion a year, which has to be subsidised by other parts of the business.

However, these problems will not be resolved by Christmas, so perhaps Rev Paul Bayes’s call will encourage demand.

The world’s first Christmas card was designed in 1843 by John Calcott Horsley at his Orestone Manor home in Devon. It showed three generations of a family raising a toast to the sender, along with images of charitable giving to the poor.

Today, Orestone Manor is a hotel. Its owners, Neil and Catherine D’Allen, are giving away packs of cards to customers, while more are being sold online, with all profits going to Cancer Research UK.

Few, though, will match the personal touch of the Bishop of Liverpool, who is determined to deliver many of his cards by hand. “It’s about one-to-one connection and, pastorally, the gold standard for connection is hand-delivering a card.”