Introducing the whacker

The headmaster and his deputy may use a cane, but other members of the staff are only permitted to use a ‘whacker’; for the uninitiated, a whacker is a piece of wood used to belabour boys’ backsides.

A teacher, so the story goes, turns these pieces of wood on a lathe. A typical whacker is a round-edged piece of wood about two feet long and with grooves carved at one end as a handle. Certainly many of the teachers possess these and they can be found in odd corners of the various classroom – at the side of the teacher’s desk, on the window sill, over the blackboard, in the store room.

Some whackers are shared between two or three teachers, so that, when a teacher decides a particular boy or class need subduing, he sends for the whacker from a colleague. Sharing a whacker has the advantage of scaring the boys without actually having to use it; to send a boy out of the class to fetch a whacker has a salutary effect on the boy and the whole class, so that when he returns with the whacker in his hand, both the boy and his classmates may be sufficiently awed to make further action unnecessary.

 

Extracted from Middle School, by John Partridge (Gollancz, 1966)

Picture credit: Unknown

 

Traditional School Discipline

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