A Proper British Upbringing: Oh, Thank You. That Hurt

 A very English debate broke out in the letters page of The Times of London over the legacy of one Anthony Chenevix-Trench, the headmaster of Eton College from 1964 to 1970. When he was drunk, which was quite often, Mr. Chenevix-Trench had an unpleasant habit of beating the students with a savagery unusual even by Eton standards, and then sobbing penitentially afterward – Sarah Lyall, writes in the New York Times in 2000.

Oddly enough, a number of his old pupils didn’t seem to hold it against him.

Christopher Hourmouzios, for example, reminisced to The Times that the headmaster “once flogged the living daylights out of me with a strap on my bare backside” and went on to beat all 21 students in a divinity class in a single afternoon. “However, this rather Victorian figure who believed in the value of corporal punishment,” Mr. Hourmouzios noted, “was a fine teacher who taught me Latin.”

In recent years, many European countries have wrestled with the question of corporal punishment, with some even making it illegal for parents to hit their children. Such proposals are heard here too, without much chance of success. Although the British finally outlawed the classic practice of caning, beating and flogging in independent schools last year, the debate over hitting in the home has been partly colored by the legacy of beatings some lawmakers received during their school days – at times from one another.

Many Britons in public life today, for instance, have recalled being flogged by Douglas Hurd, Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary, a notoriously avid doler-of-punishments who was known at Eton as “Hitler Hurd.” Sometimes caning is almost mentioned as a mark of pride, a rite of passage completed. It is not a coincidence that the French call spanking among adults le vice Anglais, recognizing that it is one offshoot of a society where authority and love were once linked with childhood violence, pain and stoicism.

For most of the last century, no one seriously tried to change the system. In the last 20 years, though, politicians began to realize that the state could no longer sanction such behavior, at least not in schools. In 1986, corporal punishment was outlawed in state schools – by just one vote in the House of Commons. In 1999, after an impassioned debate in which a number of legislators recalled how they had been beaten as schoolchildren, and quite right, too, it was finally outlawed in private schools.

The debate has now shifted to corporal punishment in the home, with the Labor government trying to rewrite the law to set out exactly what constitutes acceptable hitting.

“'There's a strong strand in English culture that thinks this is the best way of disciplining children,” said Alexander Chancellor, a columnist for The Guardian and The Times of London who said, nonetheless, that it ''would never have occurred to me to hit my kids.'”

When he was at Eton in the 1950’s, Mr. Chancellor said, he cunningly avoided getting beaten, even as schoolmates like Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh’s son, were flogged constantly for offenses like stealing coal for the fireplaces in their freezing bedrooms. “'Luckily, I'm a bit weedy, whereas he was very rebellious and was getting beaten all the time,” Mr. Chancellor said of Mr. Waugh, now editor of the Literary Review. “You’d almost want to beat him now.'”

As for the former Etonians beaten by the thousands, many still contemplate their experiences with a curiously nostalgic resentment, as the letters in The Times revealed.

One letter-writer told how he was sent to Mr. Chenevix-Trench’s study on several occasions for what was then called “six of the best,” only to be pleasantly surprised by the headmaster’s sudden change of heart.” After some discussion he would remove two sabres from the wall, throw one at me, we would fence (he was an expert swordsman) and the proposed beating would be forgotten.”

For his part, Matthew Thompson-Royds missed the Chenevix-Trench era but didn’t avoid being beaten. “Mercifully, my punishment was carried out by ‘Leggy’ Lambert, the lower master,” in the 1950’s, he wrote. Still, he seemed sorry to have lived before the era of human-rights courts.

“What, I wonder, would the bill be if all who had been flogged at Eton obtained full compensation?” he asked.

Extracted from the New York Times, 5 March 2000.

Picture credit: Sting Pictures

 For more on Anthony Chenevix-Trench, click here

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