Rituals of baring the bottom for beating

Lower uniform was removed layer by layer in the ritual preceding a public flogging at the great public [elite] schools during the Victorian era, and this practice achieved its purpose of both shocking the schoolboy onlookers and thoroughly embarrassing the victims. The ceremony was rarely done in private. – Alexander Davidson wrote in 1990.

At Eton College, for instance, the victim knelt down on the block with his trousers down, and two boys would hold up his shirt tails throughout execution, while the rest of the school was watching.

This denuding of pupils could of course backfire. One Etonian, about to be flogged, arranged for a picture of the Headmaster to be painted on his buttocks. The flogger, upon lifting his shirt, found himself as it were looking in a mirror. As the story goes, he erased all traces of the picture with the application of two birches.

The more elaborate the initial process of removing uniform, the more mystical was the aura which enveloped public school floggings. At Winchester, this ritual was more sophisticated than at Eton, and involved the victim kneeling while one boy unbuckled his braces, and another held up his shirt, exposing the small of his back.

In such floggings, and in corporal punishment of schoolchildren generally, it is the removal of underpants that embarrass them most. One self-styled old Etonian and expert on beating of this era argued: “Any interposition of underclothing materially interferes with the efficiency of the operation.”

On the other hand, a highly successful contemporary [in 1990] of a cane-selling business, Eric Huntingdon, argued: “We do not advocate the use of the cane on bare flesh. Pants afford the modesty a child is entitled to.”

Into the twentieth century, school beatings involving the baring of flesh became rarer.

A 1967 Home Office inquiry revealed that one Headmaster had been in the habit of pulling out boys’ shirts before caning their buttocks, a ritual which could not have been necessary.

 

Extracted from Blazers, Badges and Boaters, a Pictorial History of School Uniform, by Alexander Davidson (Scope, 1990). “Every book sold  benefits the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”

Picture credit: Sting Pictures

 

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