Stranger than fiction: the fives bat

 Do people still play Fives? In its day it was a popular game with posh boys at their elite boarding schools (public schools). It’s a bit like squash and is a ball game played with hands or bat in a court with two, three or four walls.

It is the bat that interest us. It was a large, heavy wooden object that had a secondary use as a punishment paddle. It probably wouldn’t have looked out of place in an American school.

The fives bat appears often in schoolboy fiction during the early decades of the twentieth century. Whereas prefects used the cane to beat junior boys, the junior boys themselves used the fives bat on bullies to extract revenge for crimes committed.

The Magnet 1931 (issue no 1204)

The Magnet 1935 (issue no 1443)

 The fives bat was much in use in real life. Radley College, Oxfordshire, England, in its official archives records, ‘Beatings by prefects were allowed into the 1930s. These were administered not by a cane but by a fives bat. The names of the victims and the number of strokes were written on the blade of the bat. The bat itself was ritually broken when the prefect left the school so that no other could use it. Only two Radley prefect’s fives bats are known to exist and one is in the college archives. There are 21 names recorded on the College’s fives bat. All arrived at the school between 1890 and 1892:

Here are the names and the number of whacks each boy received:

Heron. 3, 2, 2, 4

Sparrow. 2, 3, 2, 3

Woodward. 2, 3, 1

Cotter minor. 1

Batty. 3

Stigand. 4, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1

Corbet. 1

Jeffreys. 3

Rawlins. 3

Knight. 2

Holland. 2, 3

Sealy. 1

Fisher. 2

Claughton. 3, 2, 3

Gethin major. 2

Huntley. 1

Twist. 1

Byng minor. 1

Child. 1

Sich minor. 1

Thouron minor. 1

Richard Adams, the writer, in his autobiography The Day Gone By (Penguin, 1991), recalls public spankings with the fives bat at his school, Horris Hill. On one occasion three senior boys who had left school grounds without permission were given five whacks with the fives bat. ‘One thing about this that I have never forgotten,’ he writes, ‘Mr Morris’s place at prayers was at the back of the big classroom where we assembled. During the pause while the culprits were taking down their trousers and Mr Stow had gone out of the room to get the fives bat, the silence was broken by the sound of Mr Morris shambling up the length of the room. He drew out a bench and placed it exactly at a right angle to the desk over which the three boys would have to bend. On this he sat down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, with the air of a connoisseur who was not going to miss anything.’

 

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