Smoking (and caning) across the decades

 

Smoking (of cigarettes, not drugs) has been seen as a major “crime” over many decades and schoolboys were often caned for taking a crafty drag. In the first of these newspaper items a boy offered a bus driver a cigarette to “calm him down” after he ordered rowdy kids to get off his bus. The local education committee later wanted to discuss whether it was permissible for the headmaster to cane the boys for misbehaviour after school hours.

Sunday Mirror 25 November 1951

 

Here’s a reader’s letter published in the Newcastle Journal, 16 October 1958, after a report that schoolboys had been “flogged” for smoking.

Physical punishment and its psychological consequences are again in the news following the flogging of some boys at a Morpeth school.

Your correspondent Mr Langley suggests that “their only crime was smoking.” I prefer to think that they were caned for breaking a school rule, because they needed disciplining.

Yet it was the unfortunate headmaster who was put on the carpet. Thank goodness he was completely exonerated.

Is too much importance attached to the after effects of punishment? A Sunderland magistrate recently said that a youth appearing before him would not have been there if his father had trashed him now and again.

Surely, we can use a bit of discretion with this problem.

R. SWEENEY,

Northallerton.

 

In this report, a headmaster undertook a “probe” of smoking habits among his 530 pupils at his school in Hampshire. He was told a four-year-old is regularly given cigarettes by his parents to keep him quiet and a 15-year-old at school arrives every day smoking a pipe.

Sunday Pictorial, 7 December 1958

 

One headmaster was at the end of his tether when he discovered a shop close to his school was selling cigarettes to his pupils. He dished out two strokes a time on the backside to boys caught smoking.

The People, 30 January 1972

 

Click here to see a number of other reports about smoking at school.

Picture credit: Sting Pictures.

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