Greyfriars Herald special flogging edition 7. Fifty floggings a term

Posted by Traditional School Discipline July 06, 2021

Greyfriars Herald special flogging edition 7. Fifty floggings a term

The question has often been asked: Who holds the record at Greyfriars for having been flogged the most times? With becoming modesty, I place my hand on my chest and bow. I am the record holder. – So says Harold Skinner in the final extract from the Greyfriars Herald special flogging edition: read online or download free-of-charge here.

Fifty floggings a term

By Harold Skinner

The question has often been asked: Who holds the record at Greyfriars for having been flogged the most times?

With becoming modesty, I place my hand on my chest and bow.

I am the record holder.

Billy Bunter runs me very close, I admit. But even Bunter, wayward lad though he is, has not received the number of floggings that I have.

In one term alone I was flogged fifty times, and if that does not constitute a record I shall be glad to hear from the fellow who can beat it!

Were all these floggings deserved? Well, I must confess that the great majority of them were.

You see, I am by way of being a practical joker, and practical jokers are constantly being sent to the scaffold, as it were.

One of the worst floggings I ever received was a after I had prevailed upon Alonzo Todd – who was a new boy at the time – to go and eat the Head’s dinner. Alonzo meekly obeyed; but unfortunately for me, the Head got to know that I had put the silly duffer up to it, and I received a fearful flogging.

In my record of “previous convictions” you will find offences such as these:

Breaking bounds

Erecting booby-traps

Turning the fire-hose on Mr. Quelch

Roof-climbing

Playing pranks on Gosling

Drawing caricatures on the blackboard

Cribbing

Sneaking

Sending bogus telegrams.

I should not like to try to count the number of strokes with the birch that I have received. It must run into four figures!

You would think I was hardened to floggings by this time, wouldn’t you? And yet each flogging is an acutely painful as the preceding one.

I have tried plenty of dodges with a view to ensuring painless floggings, and some of them have been successful. But the Head is wise to all my little schemes now, and he always makes Gosling search me, to see if I have got a cushion concealed under my coat!

But, I must hurry up and finish this article. Trotter, the page, has just looked in to say that I am wanted by the Head. I suppose he has found out that I dressed up in his gown and mortar-board yesterday.

Woe is me! Another public flogging is in prospect, and my knees are knocking together with fright.

Verily, the path of the practical joker is not strewn with roses!