Memories: Bashed with the Bible

Our Religious Education teacher Mr. Busby would hit kids over the head with his very big Bible for talking in class – Lee recalls some of the ‘individual methods of punishment’ at his school on the Crying All The Way to The Chip Shop blog.

Corporal punishment was banned in London schools in 1981 — and 1987 in the rest of the country — which was a bit late to be of any good to me as during my school life I was hit by several teachers with a variety of implements.

The Headmaster at my Secondary School didn’t go in for caning but some other teachers there had their own individual methods of physical punishment. Our RE teacher Mr. Busby would hit kids over the head with his very big Bible for talking in class (oh, the symbolism: a Religious Education teacher hitting you with the Word of God) and the music teacher Mr. Rogers used to throw blackboard erasers at misbehaving boys. He often bragged about his prowess at this, claiming he could bounce the eraser off a wall and hit you in the back of the head with it.

Rogers caned me on the back of the leg once too (for eating sweets in class, I think), but the cane broke and when the whole class laughed he got annoyed and made me stand in the corner facing the wall which, even in the 1970s, seemed like a ridiculously archaic kind of punishment.

Our PE [physical education] teachers were all bastards of course, not above kicking you if you were lagging behind in a cross country race, and there was one who was a particularly vigorous user of the slipper — one time I saw him take a run-up of about 10 feet before whacking a boy on the backside with his infamous white plimsoll. Turns out he was a bit too vigorous, after I left school I heard he’d been sued by the parents of a boy he hit so hard he made his arse bleed.

It all sounds very brutal and cruel now, like stories from the Dark Ages when kids were forced up chimneys, but it was just one of the (metaphorical) punches you rolled with at school back then and I don’t mean to make a big, woe-is-me deal out of it. It’s just the way it was, and for some kids being caned was often a badge of bad-boy honour — something to be proud of — and preferable to the alternative like detention.

No doubt schools shouldn’t be in the business of hitting children and some kids suffered from genuinely abusive teachers (like the PE variety with plimsolls).

I hate to use the dreaded phrase “it never did me any harm” (probably didn’t do me any good either) but if anything at school gave me psychological scars it was the everyday abuse doled out by other boys who decided they wanted to pick on me or humiliate me in some way, or the PE teachers who treated you like a useless worm if you weren’t sporty. I still hate those bastards.

Picture credit: Latsff

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