Memories: Another rotten caning coming up

Posted by Traditional School Discipline August 23, 2022

Memories: Another rotten caning coming up

“He’d move the desks out of the way so that he could run right across the classroom to give extra power to the whack,” – UK writer and broadcaster John Suchet remembers his schooldays in the 1950s.

Aged eight, he was sent to a boarding school, Grenham House in Birchington, Kent, “a monstrous place and long gone”.

“I have to remind myself all the time that in 1953 that was where you sent a boy if you could afford to do so.”

“I’ll never forget my first night in the dormitory. I climbed into an ice-cold bed and looked out of the window. All I could see was the grey North Sea. I went to bed crying my eyes out with the sound of a foghorn in the distance.”

“My actor brother, David, followed me two years later and hated the place as much as I did. The headmaster, Denys Jeston, used to beat David and me with a long bamboo cane for breaking school rules.

He’d move the desks out of the way so that he could run right across the classroom to give extra power to the whack.

“He caned us both together on one occasion. I bent over first – thankfully we didn’t have to pull our trousers down – and suffered my six strokes. You don’t feel them when they first hit but, two seconds, later the sting is terrible. I can still feel it even now.

“I walked away clutching my behind and David moved forward to take my place. I remember saying to him, ‘Don’t cry, David. Don’t cry.’ And this evil man limbered up and started whacking poor David.”

“But I couldn't help getting up to mischief. One day I climbed over a fence into Jeston's orchard, picked some apples and climbed back. Unfortunately, the gardener saw me.

That night, in the dormitory, I could hear him downstairs telling the headmaster about it. I thought, ‘Oh no, another rotten caning coming up!’”