Memories: Choosing the belt across the bare buttocks
We met Anthony Chenevix-Trench here when he was a notorious flogger as headmaster at Eton. Previously in his career he had been a housemaster at Shrewsbury School. Here, journalist and political activist Paul Foot recalls ... “Trench explained that I had a ‘choice’: the cane, with trousers on; or the strap, with trousers off. There was no choice, really, though Trench enormously enjoyed watching me make it.”
At Shrewsbury he was my housemaster from 1952 to 1955. When I first encountered him I was 14, underdeveloped, and utterly bored with the way I was being taught classics. Trench closely followed reports from the classroom and suggested I could improve my performance by regular visits to his study with my prepared work. He seemed to have endless time for these encounters, and the reason quickly became clear. He announced that if there were fewer than three mistakes in the work, I would get a piece of chocolate; if more than three mistakes, a beating.
Beating
on the backside with a cane was a common practice in the house, but it was
usually inflicted by senior boys on their juniors. A beating by the housemaster
was a serious and painful business. The prospect drove me to approach some of
the older Greek scholars in the house, who, in solidarity with my predicament,
helped all they could. The standard of my Greek translations improved
miraculously, but three mistakes could usually be found. A beating was certain,
but then, to my relief, the prospect of the cane diminished. Trench explained
that I had a ‘choice’: the cane, with trousers on; or the strap, with trousers
off. There was no choice, really, though Trench enormously enjoyed watching me
make it.
When the relatively
painless strap was nominated, he became extremely cheerful and excited.
Clapping his hands in joyful anticipation, he would lead me out of the study to
his upstairs sitting-room on the ‘private side’ of the house, where he locked
the door, pulled down my trousers and pants, lowered me onto his sofa and laid
into me with his belt. The blows hardly hurt at all, though the humiliation was
excruciating. The worst part of the ordeal, however, was yet to come.
The
beating over, Trench would insist on the deep and lasting nature of his
friendship with me. In particular, he was keen to get my approval for what he
had done. Wasn’t it only fair, he drawled, to offer a boy a choice of
punishment? ‘Oh yes, sir,’ was the prompt reply. On one occasion, Trench, who
stank more than usually of drink, questioned me closely as to whether I thought
there was anything reprehensible in his behaviour. ‘Oh no, sir! Of course not,
sir.’ Did I ever contemplate the possibility, he continued, that he was some
sort of paederast (a word which he pronounced, probably correctly,
‘piederast’). ‘Oh, my goodness no, sir,’ I stammered, quite honestly, since I
had not the remotest idea what paederast meant.
My
slender knowledge of Greek helped me a little – pais, ‘child’; eros,
‘love’. But when, in probably the only piece of independent research I
conducted in my first three years at Shrewsbury, I looked up the word in the
dictionary, I found, simply: ‘paederast: n. sodomite.’ And I was none the
wiser. Trench was not a sodomite. In a revealing remark to a senior boy at
Bradfield he described buggery as ‘not only messy but futile’. He was what is
now known as an abuser. He derived sexual pleasure from causing pain to young
boys, especially by smacking their bare buttocks.
Extracted
from London Review of Books, 5
September 1996.
Picture credit: Unknown.
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more True Memories, click here
For more on Anthony Chenevix-Trench, click here
Traditional School Discipline
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