Headmaster gives his canes nicknames
Corporal punishment was abolished in English schools in 1999. It had been outlawed in state-run schools in 1986 but its use had continued to be permitted in private and ‘faith’ schools.
Journalist
John Walsh wrote this for The Independent at the time of final abolition:
Britain was
the last country in Europe to outlaw school-sanctioned whacking, and one of the
last in the world. That’s why caning has been dubbed by nose-tapping,
suspicious Continentals “the English vice”. And, for a society fixated by the
psychology of moral growth, and politically correct treatment of children, we
have a peculiar history of savagery masquerading as virtue.
Caning was
enshrined in British law in 1860, when one Chief Justice Cockburn ruled that: “By
the law of England, a [parent]... may for the purpose of correcting what is
evil in the child, inflict moderate and reasonable corporal punishment.” But in
schools it had been recognised for centuries as a normal, indeed essential,
cornerstone of discipline.
The
comically apoplectic fictional cane wielders – Mr Quelch in the Billy Bunter stories, Teacher in The Bash
Street Kids of The Beano comic, Will Hay in Good Morning Boys, Jimmy
Edwards’ whiskery headmaster in the Fifties comedy Whack-o! – are figures of fun essentially
unchanged from the appalling Wackford Squeers in Dotheboys Hall, who is
thrashed by a furious Nicholas Nickleby (how we cheered) the eponymous hero of
Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel.
Picture
credit: Bash Street Kids, The Beano
Squeers is
himself a relation of Mr Thwackum, the brutish, hypocritical chaplain from Henry
Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), using the much-uttered bromide voiced by Samuel
Butler in Hudibras (1663): “Then spare the rod and spoil the child”.
If the
school floggers of the British imagination were mostly secular figures with a
dubious relish for tight trousers, buttocks, weals, and the different levels of
whippiness in the different types of wood (a friend recalls his former
headmaster’s habit of giving his canes nicknames, and saying “I'm going to give
you six of Beelzebub tonight, Davies...” while drawing the slender rod
meaningfully through his cruel fingers), the Church can always be relied on to
play its part too.
Flogging
children has always been an important part of muscular Christianity. In my
Catholic school, the Jesuit fathers’ most preferred implement of chastisement
was a ferula, a whalebone encased in leather – the “pandybat” Stephen Dedalus
fears in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist. They hit you on the
hand rather than the bum, and it tended to stun you for a few minutes, rather
than hurt terribly; the real pain and torture lay in the waiting for your
appointment with sudden death, the paraphernalia of giving your name, the date
you were “sentenced” and the number of “strokes” you required, for all the
world as if you were claiming a prize.
The surreal
element of walking up to an adult clergyman and inviting him to hit you several
times did not escape our baffled notice.
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