Boys who refused to bend

Posted by Traditional School Discipline February 03, 2021

Boys who refused to bend

Whispering Bob Harris, the veteran British broadcaster, still probably best known for presenting The Old Grey Whistle Test, refused to bend over and touch his toes for a headmaster’s caning when he was a sixth-form boy back in the early 1960s. He tells this story in his autobiography Still Whispering After All These Years (Michael O’Mara Books, 2015).

In the summer holiday between sixth-form and my final year at Trinity High School [aged seventeen], I was spotted by one of my teachers drinking a half of lemonade shandy at the bar of a local pub. The pub was on the outskirts of Northampton at Weston Favell, where I used to cycle to hang out with some local friends and go swimming in the lock near the mill house. I returned to school in September to find myself on report and summoned to the headmaster’s office, where I found him red-faced in anger and brandishing his cane.

“Bend over, Harris,” is all he said. With all efforts of explanation summarily dismissed and in the knowledge that were this to happen I would be the first sixth-former in the school’s history to get the cane, a sense of personal dignity and righteous indignation dictated my response. I turned tail, walked out of his office, cycled home, packed my saddle-bags with all the school books I could find, went back duped them on his desk and left.

He also told the anecdote on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs in February 2014.

He doesn’t say what his fellow pupils thought of it all. Some might have thought it cowardly not to take a caning. You were supposed to take your beatings like a man! As we saw earlier Tony Blair was seventeen and Peter Duryea, eighteen when they bent over for a headmaster’s caning.

Another refusenik who had his moment of fame was eighteen-year-old Andrew Dundas who wouldn’t take six-of-the-best after a school play he took part in veered out of control.

The Daily Express, a rightward leaning moralistic British newspaper, reported in July 1962 that the “freckled-faced” boy had been ad-libbing in an end-of-term revue. He was ordered to present himself to the headmaster – called Mr Grundy! – for a caning.

He refused to bend to the rod. The Express reported “‘Not for myself,’ he explained last night. ‘I've been caned before. But I thought it would be letting the school dramatic society down.’

‘Andrew explained that one sketch featured the Sheriff of Nottingham and his serjeant-at-arms.

‘“The serjeant called the sheriff Sir Jack,’ went on Andrew. ‘This brought a lot of hissing and hoots of laughter. You see, the whole school refers to Mr. Grundy as Jack.”

Andrew said, “Two of us were in trouble earlier, when we staged a sort of trailer of the revue. The producer, Roger Saunders, was called in for a caning on Thursday. I didn't get called until next morning.”

Andrew was “asked to leave” school. Grey-haired Mr. Grundy himself had nothing to say.

The Daily Express used to have a great liking for these schoolboy caning stories. In November 1960 it reported on fourteen-year-old David Butler who refused to be caned by a headmaster with the wonderfully appropriate name of Mr. Bottoms.

David had been accused of talking in class at his school in Harlow, Essex.

The Express reported that his mother had kept David off school “because he is in for a caning when he gets there”. David Butler had earlier refused to write out 60 times by way of punishment, “I must not speak when silence is requested.” He had enough. “I have been caned eight times already,” said David, “by the deputy head and by the headmaster – but I still don’t see why I should do the lines.”

Later that same month the Daily Mail carried an update reporting that after being caned three times for allegedly talking in history class, he’d been suspended for a week. “I may have muttered to myself as I read something to the blackboard, I did not talk,” said David. “The teacher said that if I did not write the lines I would be caned. The first day I went to school without the lines I received two strokes. The next day it went up to three. Then I was ordered before Mr. Bottoms, the headmaster. I told him I wouldn’t tell a lie to save a caning. So I got three more strokes from him. I have nothing against corporal punishment at school – I had the cane about a year ago and had no complaint – but I think it is terribly unfair to punish me for something I did not do.”

“Suspension is the headmaster’s supreme punishment,” countered Mr Sidney Bottoms. “In the circumstances there was nothing else I could do. There are two issues – the original crime of talking when silence is ordered and the supplementary crime of defiance of authority. I feel completely justified in the actions of myself and my staff. There is no doubt in my mind that David did talk in class, and he was flouting discipline by refusing to accept the punishment. He was free to complain to either the master or myself at the time the imposition was handed out, but he did not do so. Of course, when he comes back to school next Monday he will start afresh and there will be no mention by the staff of this incident.”

And David’s fellow pupils, what did they think of it all? They collected 950 signatures for a petition in support of their headmaster!

Even in the world of fiction stroppy schoolboys refuse to be cowered. Even the ferocious Mr Quelch in the Billy Bunter stories in The Magnet sometimes meets his match.