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
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