Memories: Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry, the writer, comedian, actor, director, philosopher, documentary maker, campaigner and all-round smarty-pants doesn’t know if the canings he got at school did him any harm or any good. And he got plenty of them.

He writes in Moab Is My Washpot (Hutchinson, 1997), one of his (many) volumes of memoires, that he was a wicked child at his prep school in the 1960s. An English prep school takes boys aged eight to thirteen and they usually board.

Fry writes that the headmaster, ‘kept a collection of whippy bamboo canes behind the shutters of his study and they were used with great regularity, most especially during the feared Health Week, a time when he made it plain that his arms and shoulders craved exercise and would look for the slenderest excuses to find it. During Health Week an infraction of the rules that would usually have resulted in lines or detention would be upgraded to the whack. A crime ordinarily punishable by three strokes would be dealt with by six and so on.’

The deputy headmaster was in control when the headmaster was ill or away. He ‘treated boys’ arses ... to the most ferocious cuts of the cane. Instead of the straightforward thwack, his speciality was the bacon-slicer, a vertical downwards slash requiring far less effort and inflicting infinitely more pain than the conventional horizontal swat.’

Fry says he was beaten many times as his rose ‘from infancy to boyhood from naughtiness to wickedness’.

He tells of a different deputy headmaster who, ‘beat me many times, always with gentle sorrow ... “Oh God it’s you again ...” he would bark when he arrived at his study to find me waiting outside the door, the approved station for those who had been sent for a thrashing. “And what is it this time?”’

Fry muses, ‘There was pleasure in going straight to the school lavs after a beating, pulling down one’s shorts and pants and flushing the loo, to the accompaniment of a great hissing sigh – like Tom sitting himself in a bucket of water after Jerry has set light to his tail.’

He goes on, ‘There was too the talismanic pride of showing one’s stripes in the dormitory, like a Prussian Junker displaying his duelling scars.’

‘Wow, that one bit ..’

‘Nice grouping.’

Then Fry gets a little philosophical, ‘Did it do me any harm being beaten? Did it do me any good? I really don’t know. Autre temps, autres moeurs – it is now considered barbaric, sadistic, harmful, disgraceful, perverted and unpardonable. As far as I was concerned it had at least the virtue of being over quickly, unlike detention, lines or the wearisome cleaning and sweeping errands that stood as lesser penalties. Often, in fact, one was given a choice of punishments and I always chose the cane.’

In his adult life, Fry played cane-wielding headmasters in at least two films. He wrote a short film broadcast by Sky TV in 2010 called Bunce (on YouTube here) based on his prep school experiences. The young star of the film is called Fry. Stephen Fry plays the headmaster who at one point canes a boy playing his younger self (go take that one you your analyst).

He also played Dr Arnold the headmaster of Rugby School in Tom Brown’s Schooldays in a 2005 film. Interesting, he canes Tom Brown across the seat of his trousers (on YouTube here). It must have

been modern sensibilities that stopped him birching the boy across the bared buttocks as I believe the original story required.

Picture credits: Bunce, Sky TV

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