Schoolboys caught smoking should expect a caning

 

CANING FOR PUPILS 

FOUND SMOKING IN

CITY SCHOOLS

THE stick comes into use if pupils are caught smoking in Newcastle schools.

“It is one of the few occasions on which we inflict corporal punishment,” said Mr. J. H. Chantler, headmaster of Wharrier Street School, one of the biggest secondary modern schools in the city.

“But some of the older boys aged 14 to 15 do smoke off the premises as the stains on their fingers indicate,” he said.

Mr. Chantler, who is an executive member of the National Association of Head Teachers, was commenting on an investigation into the smoking habits of schoolboys at a secondary modern school at Cheltenham reported in The Lancet today [22 March 1957.]

It showed that 38 percent of the boys had smoked before entering the school at 11. two boys, aged 14, said they smoked over 40 cigarettes a week.

Mr. Chantler said the suggestion that lectures in schools about the possible dangers of cigarette smoking was not a good one as the lectures might put the idea of smoking into the heads of the innocent.

Meanwhile two 16-year-old boy pupils of Monkseaton Secondary Modern School have been suspended by the headmaster because it is understood they were found smoking cigarettes in a toilet at the Empress Ballroom, Whitley Bay, during the school’s annual speech day and prize giving there this week.

They were told to leave their lessons and return to school on Monday, when the headmaster’s decision would be made known.

The headmaster, Mr. Robert Walker, has refused to name the boys.

He said: “This is too trifling a matter for me to make any comment to the Press. It is purely a matter of school discipline and in the boys’ interest it is better that I say nothing to the Press about it.”

Extracted from Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 22 March 1957.

Picture credit: Oscar Leo.

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