Poet Tennyson caned so severely he couldn’t hold a knife and fork for a week

“A public school boy would think very small beer of himself if he couldn’t stand a thrashing,” says this letter writer to a national newspaper in 1934. He is, he claims, motivated in writing as “a protest against the miserable rotten sentimentality of the present day”.

WHEN I was a boy, and a naughty one, I was birched. My father and the great poet, Alfred Tennyson, were educated at the same school, and once Tennyson was so severely caned that he could not hold a knife and fork in his hand for a whole week afterwards.

Boys, even today [1934], I believe, are “swished” at Eton and Harrow and “tunded” at Winchester, and they are all the better for it.

A public school boy would think very small beer of himself if he couldn’t stand a thrashing.

This letter is a protest against the miserable rotten sentimentality of the present day.

RAYMOND BLATHWAYT. Bromley.

As published in the Daily Mirror, 20 August 1934.

Picture credit: Unknown.

 

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