Of course, Bril was the workhorse.
Oh boy, this brought back memories. Turquoise Blue + Chelpark was nirvana level experience for me. Whoever (mostly teachers) noticed that shade of blue would get immediately confused. Is it blue? Is it Green? It would lead to a good discussion!
Chelpark Turquoise and Bril Royal blue were my favorites too. They both looked brilliant on paper!
Buy'd a Namiki some time ago and i love it, especially the japanese ink's and pens.
When I was at school I learned to write with a nibbed pen and I always had ink on my fingers (and often on my clothes much to my mother's chagrin); in fact during the early years we weren't allowed to use ballpoint pens at all!
I can only guess the reason for this is that ballpoint pens don't provide the correct kind of tactile feedback that's necessary for good writing. Anyway, it seems it's so for me, I think the reason is that they offer little resistance, and what there is of it is uniform, and with too little variation, thus one needs to better control the pen's movement but fails. On the other hand, fountain pens have a solid tactile resistance that seems to change dynamically as one changes direction when forming characters. (The fact that ballpoint pens were banned at school seems to indicate that others must have the same problem as me. I'd be glad to hear from anyone who's had similar experiences.)
Perhaps this is why I also find that my writing is much more legible when I write with a pencil. For normal day-to-day use, note taking and such I usually use propelling clutch pencils with 0.5 or 0.7mm leads (I've many scattered everywhere).
I am sorry I never learned to write those cursive scripts to which you refer. Whenever I see old historical handwritten documents I never cease to be amazed at the excellent standard of the handwriting, and it's often in this cursive style. Furthermore, from my observation, the older the document then generally the higher the handwriting standard is. In fact, the quality of handwriting in old documents, especially official ones, seems to be almost universally of a high standard (it seems that then clarity was more highly esteemed than it is now.).
It is a shame that nowadays we no longer pay much attention to the standard of our handwriting and that so few recognize or appreciate the fact. I've always believed that humankind loses something significant when a skill that's still useful— or that can be appreciated just for its aesthetic reasons alone—is lost.