Eccentric schoolmaster’s raffle: win a toffee or a tanning

He spent twenty minutes or so, continuing to direct the French lessons, while a young lad would be spread out across his knees, receiving playful strokes from a strap every now and then. – One of the many eccentricities displayed by schoolmasters recounted by Gerva D’Olbert in his book Chastisement Across The Ages (The Fortune Press, 1956).

Eccentricities alike in methods of, and in the reasons for, chastising pupils are legion. First we may mention one gay young schoolmaster, who never beat for reasons of justice or punishment, being far too good-matured and slack. Instead, he preferred such procedures as a good, exciting raffle or drawing of lots; he even refined this into producing an expectancy of pleasure as well as of pain.

Thus he conducted two simultaneous raffles, in both of which every member of the class was in honour bound to participate: the first raffle was for sweets, the second for the cane. Sometimes he would conduct each raffle three or four times in a single hour, and often the same lad would win successively the tanning and the toffee.

At times, too, the master would confuse the two gambles, so that a boy who had already been announced as the winner of the sweets would be obliged to relinquish them and submit to the rod; the reverse case, however, was never known to occur. This same usher practised still more bizarre methods of chastisement. Some of these were mild, as when he spent twenty minutes or so, continuing to direct the French lessons, while a young lad would be spread out across his knees, receiving playful strokes from a strap every now and then.

One term he invented the system of beating the whole class in alphabetical order, getting through the lot just as the term ended. sometimes he would excuse one of the more weakly or sickly looking lads forcing another to take his place; as often the sickly pupils were the most intellectual, the substitute would cajole, or even compel him to give assistance with translations or sums: thus a kind of equilibrium was established between the mental and the corporal forms of exertion.

In fact, the master who arranged these diversions was never resting in his attempts to improve or elaborate his methods; and eventually he was removed from his teaching post, and made director of games, where his athletic prowess and his genuine interest in boy-psychology combine to fit him ideally for his tasks.

Another habit of this gentleman was to rub his hands over his own trousers, to test his fingers by his nose, and then to strike an unoffending lad, with the hand so salted, upon the cheek. Pulling a boy’s skin just above the Adam’s Apple and bending his head low so as to rub his nose in the exercise-book, was another genial practice of this great usher; if the exercise had contained many errors, which the master would have corrected in unblotted ink, this would mean that the boy's nose would emerge spotted with ink. And while the neck was being held and the nose thus rubbed, the boy’s head and cheeks would be remorselessly smacked, either with the usher’s hand or with a hard ruler. Truly the usher himself seems to have been a hard ruler.

His ingenuity in devising corporal punishments for small and large offences, in large or small degree, was well-nigh inexhaustible. He would frequently kick a boy on his posterior around the classroom, while the other pupils shivered in expectant dread. This he would do, moreover, with an air of bravado, smacking the boy’s cheeks or head as in the previous punishments, and glancing with sinister gaiety at the rest of the class, with the remark: “I wear specially sharp shoes for this.” On another occasion, while preparing to cane a youngster severely for some inexcusable impertinence, he turned to the class, and remarked in a stentorian stage whisper: “This is my substitute for golf.”

At other times he would chastise the boys on their bare legs. So great, in fact, was his passion for sound discipline, that he never took prayers without a rod or ruler ready by his side: this he would use on the slightest provocation, even interrupting the Lord’s Prayer itself, to rush and chastise an errant embryo atheist who had been caught talking during the sacred ten minutes. On one occasion, perhaps, his wrath was especially justified, as the lad in question was performing a somewhat indecent act.

Another opportunity for the rod to set indecency to rights occurred during a session of the lowest Arithmetic class, from which always exuded a pandemonium of cries, pleas, and cries. The headmaster, who took this class, had occasion once to quit the room for a few minutes, during which one of the better-built of the lads, prompted by obscene talk, rose and displayed his naked buttocks to his classmates. Unfortunately for him, he displayed them in the direction of the door, and of the master who that very moment was opening it to return to his studies.

Obviously he took advantage of his first duty, which was to belabour the boy in his exposed condition with such force that blood flowed and the culprit was taken home in a taxi.

 

Picture credit: Unknown

For more extracts from Chastisement Across The Ages, click here

 

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