Memories: Prefect ran down the room wielding cane

The pain was severe but just bearable to start with but left one with trembling legs and severe pain and bruising in stripes from one side of one’s buttocks to the other. – Robert Bodenham, recalls his time at St Bees School, Cumbria, England, in the 1940s, on the St Beghian Society website.

Misdemeanours were often punished by being beaten with a whippy cane administered by a strong young prefect. Occasionally four strokes but more usually six. The victim was bent over a chair in the prefects’ study with only the thin short trousers as protection. The administrator of the beating would retire to the end of the room and then run down the room and lay on the cane with full force. The pain was severe but just bearable to start with but left one with trembling legs and severe pain and bruising in stripes from one side of one’s buttocks to the other. The skin could easily be broken and the bruising took weeks to disappear.

Naturally one would try not to show any distress as that would brand one a coward but it was distressing, especially as one was told to attend the prefects’ room 24 hours after the sentence had been given, so the anticipation was as bad as the beating. After the beating one would return to one’s day room holding back the tears and then drop one’s pants to show with pride the developing stripes on the buttocks.

I was given six once. I had been taken short after I had gone to bed one night and was caught coming back from the loo and was out of bed. Boys were seldom beaten by the housemaster and even less often by the headmaster; things had to be extremely serious for that to happen. Shades of Dickens and Dotheboys Hall!

The dominant, more ‘senior’ boys in each day room used to control their juniors by unofficial methods of bullying. If a senior boy noticed a younger or junior boy watching him across the room he would pass his hand across his face and this was known as a message to ‘turn it off’. If the junior didn’t respond quickly or if the junior did anything else to which the slightly senior boy objected, the junior boy could be summoned to appear in the changing room in the basement at some convenient time where there would be gathered a collection of the other boys who would administer a ‘Rooting’. This entailed bending the boy over the edge of a bath and then the others would queue up to kick his bottom.

It was understood that only the flat of the shoe would be used but the odd sadist would use his toe which was dangerous. Everybody endured rootings during their first year. The threat was really worse than the actual experience but certainly I found this perpetual pressure from the slightly older dominant boys in the first year spoilt my introduction to the school and in a way poisoned my feelings for St Bees later on.

Picture credit: The Magnet

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