Memories: ‘Thanks for the canings 50 years ago’

 

THE stranger at the front door held out a bottle of whisky to retired village schoolmaster Leonard Fletcher.

Mr. Fletcher, 82, looked hard at the face and tried to place it. Then the stranger spoke.

“Thanks,” he said. “This bottle is my appreciation for the canings you gave me 50 years ago.

“Much of my success in the world I owe to the discipline you imposed on me.”

Yesterday [22 December 1969] Mr. Fletcher of Windsor Crescent, Kinver, Worcs. said: “It was a fairytale Christmas experience.

“The stranger was Walter Clare, a boy at my school forty-nine years ago. I hadn’t seen him for over forty years.”

Mr. Clare now owns his own factory at Tamworth, Staffs, where he makes car silencers.

Grand

Mr. Fletcher went on: “I know I had a bit of a reputation for my discipline. I was head of the village school here at Kinver for 38 years.

“Mr. Clare told me he had lived for years in Canada, and seen quite a bit of the world, but had always remembered my discipline.”

Mr. Clare, 55, said at his home in Reindoor Road, Tamworth, last night: “He was a grand man my headmaster, I used to get caned every day, and if one went by when I didn’t I felt there was something wrong.

“It is a pity there are not more like him with the power to do what he did to us. That’s what is needed.”

As published in The Daily Mirror 23 December 1969.

Picture credit: Unknown.

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