Memories: An Eton caning in 1977

 In this edited extract from his book Stiff Upper Lip (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017) journalist and author Alex Renton recalls his caning at Eton College (possibly the best-known of the English elite ‘public’ schools) in 1977.

Before breakfast, one sunny morning in the spring of 1977, I am summoned to the headmaster of Eton for a beating. It feels a bit like a trip to the dentist. Michael McCrum is a tall and dour man with a heavy black forelock: stern but reasonable. He and I have already discussed my offence – repeatedly being caught smoking – and the punishment: either I am to spend the rest of that term’s Saturday afternoons rebuilding a wall in his garden, or I am to have three strokes of the cane. The choice was not difficult.

My principal feeling as I walk in my tail-suit to the old building known as Upper House is mild embarrassment. There is a subsidiary worry: I’m waddling rather than walking through Eton’s streets. My friends insisted on my taking the house flag. We’d lowered it from its pole and folded it into a neat parcel for me to wear inside my Y-fronts as buttock armour. Hilarious and defiant though we all decided this was, I don’t relish McCrum spotting the bulge of it – as surely he will when I bend over. I do not want him to think I am a coward.

When I arrive in his classroom McCrum is waiting with one of the prefects of Pop, the school’s self-electing elite. Both of them are wearing white bow-ties, McCrum his academic gown. I am sent next door into the ancient Upper School to fetch the flogging block.

The flogging block, black with age, is in a corner under a table, like any ordinary piece of superfluous furniture. It is scarred with dead boys’ initials, carved in neat serifed script. The relic was immortalised by one of Eton’s more famous poets, Algernon Swinburne, today better known for his lifelong taste for flagellation.

The block is a mini-podium, two steps crudely carpentered of thick oak. It turns out to be light as an old lady with brittle bones. I carry it back into the headmaster’s classroom, brushing as rudely as I can past the boy from Pop, who knows me well. I’m telling him he is a pervert voyeur and a fascist goon, and he knows I think it. Not so long ago he would have been more than a witness to this ritual, acting as one of the two ‘holders-down’ necessary to stop boys wriggling away in fear or agony.

I study the cracked ebony gloss of the old wood, wondering if the varnish owes something to long-gone boys’ tears and their blood. I place the block down as instructed in front of the headmaster’s desk. I am asked to remove my coat and take up position. The headmaster is holding a piece of bamboo: it’s not long or thick, but it is the whippiness of the stick that counts, I know. I can’t see how whippy this one is. My last headmaster had favourite canes, and we used to name them. If a cane broke on a boy’s bottom, he was – so the legend went – excused the rest of the beating.

I place my knees on the first step of the block. I lean over the upper step, which is taller than the lower, to accommodate a teenager’s thighs. Thus my belly is on the step, my bottom in the air and my torso hanging down and forward, where I see a wooden rod, stale and sweat-stained, for me to grip. I wait. At this point all you can do is listen for the footsteps. The length of the run-up, seasoned flagellees know, is a pretty good indicator of how much it is likely to hurt.

When the headmaster first hits my bum with the bamboo I wonder if he’s just lining it up to get his eye in. But no, that’s it. The token tap is his best shot, no heavier than the sword the monarch lays upon a new knight’s shoulder, and the two that follow are no harder. There’s no sting and no need to have desecrated the house flag at all.

When I stand up I realise that Mr McCrum is considerably more embarrassed than I. His grave face seems to have drooped even further. I offer to shake hands. He declines that won’t be necessary. I waddle off (the flag still in place, unmentioned.)

Picture credit: Headmaster’s Room at Eton showing birches and flogging block. Taken from Floreat Etona, by Ralph Nevill.)

 

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