Headmaster publicly caned every boy in the school. It took two days.

A headmaster who caned every boy in the school publicly because one would not own up to a misdemeanour was fondly recalled more than 60 years after the event by a letter writer to the Yorkshire Post in November 1954. It provoked a response to the question: is it right to flog the innocent ...

Sir – When my husband, the late Dr. J. J. W. Campbell of Castleford, was a boy at Epsom College in the [eighteen] seventies, Dr. West, the famous headmaster, caned every boy in the school publicly because one would not own up.

But, he did not give them just a light tap on the hand. They had to “bend down to the lowest bar of that chair” and got six of the best in the proper place. He caned half the school on one day and the rest the next day.

Nobody wrote to the papers about it, and no parent uttered a protest, but it made an impression that lasted 60 years.

That the cane was once used too often we may all agree, but that it is now used so seldom we may all come to regret. It is a pity that fear of prosecution today is preventing many teachers from dealing properly with the tough gangsters of their generation.

Children are not all “dear little things.” They can be little beasts, and one evilly disposed child can make the schoolroom a Hell for the teacher. If your valuable space permitted, I could give many examples which would open the eyes of those parents who will not believe that their children are naughty at school or deserving of the slightest punishment.

MRS. E. H. CAMPBELL, Formerly mistress of Castleford Grammar School

(Reader’s letter published in the Yorkshire Post, 23 November 1954.)

This response was published in the Yorkshire Post, 29 November 1954

Sir – Although I agree in principle with Mrs. E. H. Campbell that naughty children today tend to escape the physical punishment which should be meted out to them in their own interests I cannot see that there is any justification for mass physical punishment at schools.

To cane all the children in a class because of one offender is both unjust and illogical. In adult life it would be manifestly tyrannical to send a shopful of assistants to prison because one of them had been pilfering and remained undetected.

If punishment in schools is to be used as an example it should be by a public flogging of a proven guilty miscreant. In that way justice is seen to be done.

By punishing a number of innocent children, the opposite effect is produced. The children are mentally (if not openly) banded together against a tyranny of the teacher. The impression on their young minds is vivid and potentially dangerous in that it undermines their belief in justice and authority in general – and in schoolteachers in particular.

No reasonable parent can object to his child being punished at school for a misdemeanour, but equally no reasonable parent will agree to his child being flogged for having behaved himself – or in fact for not being a sneak.

All parents (having had their own schoolday experiences) realise fully that teachers who use mass punishment are either weak-willed or sometimes even sadistic.

The cane can be the most effective punishment – or the symbol of the bully’s tyranny.

JOHN DAVIS, Chapel Allerton.

Picture credit: Unknown.

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