Boy beaten for ‘playing around with a comic,’ headmaster taken to court
In 1920 William Lucas, the headmaster of Southchurch Hall School, Essex, was summoned for an alleged assault upon a ten-year-old boy named Herbert West. The boy’s parents brought the court case against the teacher, not because he administered the caning, but because they felt he went too far with the thrashing. Emma Palmer reports for the Southend Echo newspaper.
A 1839
illustration of a classroom caning: Original source unknown.
The boy’s mother Cissie
Rhoda West, aged 42, of Chinchilla Road Southchurch, brought the case after she
noticed painful marks on her son’s legs.
The mother then took her
son to a police constable who also saw the marks.
The court heard how the boy
had been seen by Mr Lucas “playing around with a comic” with another pupil
while in school.
The headmaster took West
upstairs to his office and “struck him four times on the legs and elsewhere”.
Each of the blows left a mark for days and the cane used in the punishment was
described as “a thick one”.
PC Chapman, the constable
who the mother had called, told the court in his opinion the blows were
inflamed and the boy seemed to be suffering from shock. He admitted that he
personally considered the punishment far too excessive.
Lucas, in defence, said he
had been headmaster at the school for three-and-a-half years but had held the
power to inflict corporal punishment for the past 15 years – and had never had
a complaint like this. “A child usually tells half the truth and hides the
other half,” he said in his defence.
After a lot of debate and
hearing statements from witnesses, the court found that the headmaster had not
used excessive punishment and the mother’s charges against him were thrown out.
The acquittal did not go down well with the boy’s father, a seaman, who yelled
at the bench: “Then your Worship I shall punish him as he punished my boy!”
He called the headmaster a
vicious man and promised to mete out his own justice. The chairman of the bench
replied to the angry father: “Very well we will make a note of this” and Mr
Lucas was led out of the court under the protection of police officers.
This was by no means the
only excessive corporal punishment case to make the news in south Essex.
In fact a decade earlier,
in the winter of 1910, an even more unpleasant case had come to light.
Cornelius Valentine Barker,
the school master of Pitsea, found himself in the dock to answer charges of
assaulting 11-year-old pupil John Arnold, from Thundersley.
The case reached the
Rochford Petty Sessions Court and was again brought by the victim’s parents.
The allegation came about after the boy returned to school after having lunch
at home ten minutes late one day.
Arnold lived a
mile-and-half away from the school and had to walk to and from classes every
day – as well as walking home for lunch.
On this occasion it was
raining, making him late for afternoon lessons.
He was told to stay back
after school for detention, but as he was feeling poorly he went straight home.
The next day when he got to
school Barker gave him four “handers”. The court heard how the boy screamed
that he was going to tell his father,
Barker “took him across his
knee and severely caned him on the buttocks”. “He fell to the floor and was
again beaten in this position.” Barker told the boy: “If you let anyone outside
hear the noise I will give you some more.”
Arnold ran home and told
his parents. He was in so much pain he couldn’t sleep and a doctor was
eventually called.
Fellow pupil Reggie Hopwood
gave evidence and described how he saw “the master give Arnold a good thrashing
while he held him on his knee”.
Dr Cosmo Grant, from
Thundersley, who had attended to the boy after the beating also gave his
opinion: “To cause wheals of such extent and character considerable force must
have been used, considerably more force than should have been used,” he
admitted.
The court determined Barker
had used excessive force and fined him £1 as well as ordering him to pay four
shillings costs.
Extracted from
the Southend Echo, 12 July 2020.
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