The cane supplier speaks

Posted by Traditional School Discipline January 13, 2021

The cane supplier speaks

School canes for sale – ‘as shown and demonstrated on BBC TV’ – the mind boggles! I wonder what show that was. Here’s a curiosity from the archives. It’s a supplier’s list of canes dating (I think) from the 1960s. The prices are in pre-decimal currency so it was sometime before 1971.

It lists three types of cane for sale: the small, the standard and the senior. The senior, ‘Approximately 28in long. Curved handle, made from stouter cane, but still lighter and shorter than the “old fashioned” cane. This cane will truly sting, and is recommended for those with older children to control.’ The cane cost 2/6d, which is 12½ pence.

We are told, ‘The canes we sell will sting enough to satisfy any parent or teacher.’ [The views of the boys are not solicited.]

The leaflet was reproduced in the book A Last Resort, edited by Peter Newell (Penguin, 1972). It was compiled by a group called STOPP who were trying to get corporal punishment banned in British schools.

It doesn’t say who the supplier was but in all likelihood it was a fellow called Eric Huntingdon. He was active in the seventies and eighties and had an outfit called the Bognor Cane Company. He made canes and supplied schools and parents from his ‘bazaar’ in Bognor Regis – in its day a popular seaside holiday resort.

He also produced a magazine advocating corporal punishment. He was an English eccentric, a bit like Eric Wildman (See here) who was active in the same line of business in the nineteen forties and fifties (what is it about people with the name Eric?)

He advertised his canes for sale in the National Union of Teachers’ journal, The Teacher. In 1981, anti-corporal punishment campaigners called for it to be banned.

Guardian, 21 April 1981

According to a report in The Sun, a British tabloid, ‘Tom Scott, STOPP’s education secretary, said, “This is a sordid trade. It is quite clear a lot of these canes are bought for sado-masochism and flagellation.”’

Huntingdon, then aged 53, said, ‘I’m not a sinister character – I am ashamed that some people use the cane for pleasure purposes. Most of my canes are bought by local authorities and schools. Some individual parents buy them for their children.’

It said Huntingdon’s firm sold 300 to 500 canes a week.