The painful penalty for smoking, unless ...

 Smoking cigarettes seems to have been one of the worst “crimes” a schoolboy (or girl) could commit and the penalty for offenders often resulted in a sore backside. Not all schools took the same attitude ... Here are two contrasting reports from 1962; both published in the UK Sunday tabloid The People.

10-A-DAY SMOKERS FACE THE CANE

A SHOCKED headmaster has lectured “guilty” parents who approve of their children smoking and warned: “I'll cane your kids if I find them having a smoke.”

The headmaster, non-smoking Mr. Maurice Davidson, was startled when a survey showed that 31.5 per cent. of the 400 pupils at his secondary school, at Ferndown, near Wimborne, Dorset, were smokers.

Some puff their way through 70 a week. And 34 said: “Mum and dad let us smoke.” Mr. Davidson, 38, pleaded with parents at the school prize giving: “Join me in an anti-smoking campaign.”

He said: “I can assure parents there is no smoking on school premises. I have had to cane only two boys for this offence.”

“What does concern me is the number of the children who said they had their parents’ approval—and the fact that many said they started the habit at 10 or 11.”

In the survey, published in the school magazine, children said they bought cigarettes from their pocket money, which was, in cases as much as £1 5s. 6d. a week.

As published in The People, 18 November 1962

THE JUNIOR SMOKING-R00M...

THE Rev. Edwin Smithies, bachelor headmaster of a Church grammar school, is to set up a smoking-room where his older pupils can enjoy an after-lunch cigarette.

“I have been unable to stamp out smoking. so I must regulate it,” he said yesterday.

“Having an official smoking-room should stop the secret smoking that goes on in the bolierhouse, lavatories and potting sheds.”

Pipe-smoking, Mr Smithies, 38, headmaster of Highfields Grammar School. Horbury, Yorks, is also curate at the local parish church.

He said his smoking-room would be open to all boys and girls over the age of 14 who had their parents’ written permission to smoke. The school would supply ashtrays.

Once the smoking-room was in operation, he added, the penalty for smoking in secret – six strokes of the cane – would be “rigidly enforced.”

Mr. Smithies said he thought about 80 per cent of the 110 fee-paying pupils at the school were regular smokers.

His smoking-room plan – which has not yet been discussed with the school governors – comes at the height of a campaign by the West Riding County Council to discourage school children from smoking.

More than 50,000 boys and girls in the country recently received letters warning them of the dangers of the habit.

As published in The People, 30 September 1962.

Picture credit: Unknown

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