CRAIG BROWN: Test your letters knowledge Part 1… Dear all, is this the end of gutter maggot insults?

The heroic founder of the Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society, Dinah Johnson, fears that the Royal Mail’s proposal to reduce delivery days to two or three a week will spell the end of the letter.

‘This is how you get to the death of letter-writing. I didn’t think when I set up the society that there would be a scenario where the service is threatened, but it is.’

So just how well do you know your letters?

1. In which year did the number of emails sent overtake the number of letters posted?

a) 1995

b) 2000

c) 2010

d) 2015

2. ‘Not a very attractive creature . . . I can’t say I really ever enjoy going out for the evening with him’. In a letter to her sister, who wrote this about her future husband?

a) Elizabeth Taylor on Richard Burton

b) Princess Diana on Prince Charles

c) Margaret Thatcher on Denis Thatcher

d) Princess Margaret on Tony Armstrong-Jones

3. Which Irish singer once wrote a letter to Piers Morgan calling him ‘a crawling slimy little gutter maggot’?

a) Bono

b) Bob Geldof

c) Shane MacGowan

d) Sinead O’Connor

4. A novelist once wrote a letter to a magazine called The Author complaining that her books were no longer published. The magazine failed to publish it. Who was the novelist?

a) Barbara Comyns

b) Barbara Pym

c) Barbara Taylor Bradford

d) Barbara Cartland

The Royal Mail has proposal reducing its delivery days to two or three a week meaning fewer letters landing on the doormat (Stock image)

Dinah Johnson said that she didn’t expect when she founded the Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society that the postage system would be under threat

5. ‘I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noel Coward’. Who wrote this in a letter to a friend in 1949?

a) Earl Mountbatten of Burma

b) The Queen Mother

c) John Osborne

d) Noel Coward

6. Who once wrote to her sister complaining: ‘I drank too much wine last night’, adding that this was the only way to account for ‘the shaking of my hand today’?

a) Jane Austen

b) Tracey Emin

c) Janis Joplin

d) Princess Margaret

The letter writing appreciation society founder said: ”his is how you get to the death of letter-writing.’ amid concerns for the future of postage deliveries

7. In her letters, Left-wing Jessica Mitford could be very damning of others. Pair the description with the target.

a) ‘A super-pig in all ways’

b) ‘The most horrible, vulgar and beastly person I know’

c) ‘Ghastly’

d) ‘To know him was to loathe him’

i) President Lyndon B. Johnson

ii) Tony Blair

iii) Her first mother-in-law

iv) Teddy Kennedy

8. Which poet wrote in a letter ‘I found another dead badger the other day — skin no good, but I’m getting its teeth for my rosary’?

a) Gerard Manley Hopkins

b) Ted Hughes

c) R.S. Thomas

d) John Cooper Clarke

9. After his father wrote saying that he would shoot his boyfriend on sight, who replied with the telegram: ‘What a funny little man you are’?

a) Gore Vidal

b) Kenneth Williams

c) David Bowie

d) Lord Alfred Douglas

10. In 1657, French philosopher Blaise Pascal ended a letter to a friend with an apology. ‘I have made this longer than usual because . . .’ How did it end?

a) ‘I deplore any wastage of paper’

b) ‘For reasons I know not why, my handwriting has grown larger’

c) ‘I have time to kill’

d) ‘I have not had time to make it shorter’

Answers: 1a; 2c; 3d; 4b; 5d; 6a; 7aiv, biii, cii, di; 8b; 9d; 10d.