Memories: Serjeant Ballantine and the ‘cold-blooded unsympathetic tyrants’
Serjeant William Ballantine was in his time a top legal figure in England. In his memoirs he recounts one of the favourite modes of inflicting pain adopted by his tyrant schoolmasters was, when the boys came in on a winter’s morning shivering and gloveless, to strike them violently with the cane over the tips of their fingers. This extract was published by The People newspaper in 1882.
I was (he says) a day scholar. There were four
masters, all clergymen. Dr. Sleath was at the head. Of him I knew nothing,
except by sight, never having reached the classes over which he presided. He
was a man of portly presence, a good scholar, I believe, and much respected.
Bean, Edwards, and Durham were the other three instructors, and, however,
different these were in many respects, they possessed one common attribute.
They were all tyrants – cruel, cold-blooded unsympathetic tyrants.
Armed with a cane, and surrounded by a halo of terror,
they sat at their respective desks. Under Durham the smaller boys trembled;
Edwards took the next in age. Each flogged continually. The former a somewhat
obese personage, with a face as if cut out of a suet-pudding, was solemn in the
performance of this, his favourite occupation.
The Rev. Mr. Edwards, on the contrary, though a cadaverous-looking
object, was quite funny over the tortures he inflicted .... One of his
favourite modes of inflicting pain adopted by these tyrants was, when the boys
came in on a winter’s morning shivering and gloveless, to strike them violently
with the cane over the tips of their fingers. I nearly learnt at that school
the passion of hatred, and should probably have done so but that my mind was
too fully occupied by terror.
Bean was a short, podgy, pompous man, with insignificant
features His mode of correction was different in form, and I can see him now,
with flushed, angry face, lashing some little culprit over the back and
shoulders until his own arm gave way under the exertion. Amongst the amusements
of this gentleman, one was to throw a book – generally Entick’s Dictionary,
if I remember rightly – at the head of any boy who indulged in a yawn, and if
he succeeded in his aim, and produced a reasonable contusion, he was in good
humour for the rest of the day.
Extracted from The People (UK), 2 April 1882.
Picture credit: Vanity Fair.
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Traditional School Discipline
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