Memories: Oldest boy to be caned at school?
Was a nineteen-year-old the oldest boy in England to be caned by his headmaster?
Paul Kitchener had
to bend over and touch his toes for four strokes after he had left the school
premises in the afternoon without permission to go swimming. It happened in
1968 at Wellingborough Grammar School, Northants.
He told an online forum in 2005 he had stayed on in the sixth-form for a
third year to prepare for entrance exams to Cambridge University.
He said the
headmaster Harold Wrenn “probably
took the ‘easy option’. He wrote, “I had in fact gone out after he had refused
me permission already so it was what was called in those days ‘straight
defiance’. Also, I was only 19 by a couple of days and I’m sure he wasn't aware
of this.”
He added, “I admit it was far from being my first time, but the whole
procedure was no different from when I was a 14-year-old; he didn’t seem to
differentiate.”
He wrote, “Exactly what was he going to achieve by doing what he did? If
it was in front of a class or the school then, fair enough, it would be some
kind of ‘example’. But what was the use of this ludicrous ritual in private
with a [just] 19-year-old?”
A lively correspondence took place in the forum after Kitchener’s first
post with some doubting the truth of his account. Kitchener wrote, “I am quite
sure he didn’t realise I’d turned 19, but I doubt he’d have cared. I’m also
quite sure in my mind of his ‘normality’ and [he] had no weird/sexual
motivation. He was just a typical product of those times who worked on the
premise, ‘If it’s in a school blazer, hit it. That’ll do the trick’.”
“I can honestly say my reaction was completely neutral. I had no
resentment at the time at ‘being treated as an 11-year-old’ possibly because it
was an element of school humour that the gentleman concerned never noticed his
charges growing up! His general demeanour towards the sixth form was the butt
of many a joke, and indeed there were occasional references in class from
iconoclastic junior staff about his attitude in staff meetings which matched
our ‘Victorian’ perception of him.”
Kitchener said, “You must
view this incident against a background whereby, although I achieved
academically, I had been a ‘regular’ in his study (one or two times a year)
throughout my schooldays so I can’t say there was any psychological effect.
“At the time, it was damned annoying and the source of amusing
conversations. Had it been a first experience, however, the outcome could have
been more traumatic.”
We have seen a number of accounts of sixth-formers (including those aged
eighteen) being caned at school, including:
Caned for
nobbling annual school cross-country race
Smoking
sixth-formers set study on fire
Head
canes 18-year-old for freeing rabbits
Caned
18-year-old runs to court
Jeremy
Vine caned after pantomime cow prank
Picture credit: Sting
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