The lighter side ...

Those who imagine that there has never been a lighter side to school corporal punishment are wrong, according to one-time writer and broadcaster, Arthur Marshall.

Marshall, best-known as a panellist on the BBC TV game show Call My Bluff in the 1980s, was for many years a schoolmaster at the elite boarding school Oundle. In 1983, he wrote Whimpering in the Rhododendrons (Fontana, 1983) a collection of other peoples’ memories from prep school (where children aged eight to thirteen attended, often as boarders).

He tells this tale, ‘In the common room one morning the headmaster reported an occasion when corporal punishment meted out by him had been “hardly as dreadful as it ought to be”. He had found it necessary to correct, with the aid of a slipper, a tendency by one dormitory to become nosily conversational before the first gong. Finding the proceedings somewhat lengthy and pausing to take stock and rest his arm he had discovered that each victim had rejoined the queue and was coming around again for further correction.’

Douglas Sutherland in his book The English Gentleman’s Child (Debrett’s, 1979) makes a similar point about children not being distressed by corporal punishment. He writes about “the average public school” by which he means the elite fee-paying boarding school.

“At the average public school, not only can an offender be caned by a master, but also by those among his schoolfellows who have risen to the eminence of prefects. On the whole, to be caned by a master not only holds greater prestige but is much more likely to be less painful. This is because some masters are so old and decrepit that they are scarcely able to raise a decent weal, whilst others are so myopic that half their strokes miss the mark altogether, and skid harmlessly up the victim’s back. To be beaten by the Captain of Games is a very different matter.

“Whoever administers the punishment, however, the result is a matter of the greatest interest to fellow members of the victim’s dormitory. The view the effect of a caning with the same critical interest displayed by art critics on the first day of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Wildly delivered strokes are greeted with hoots of derision, whilst six strokes delivered with such precision as to be inseparable (extremely painful) are greeted with undisguised admiration if not actual applause.

“As for the victim, far from feeling degraded, he enjoys the admiration of his fellows in much the same way as if he had scored a try for the First Fifteen.”


Traditional School Discipline

Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com

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