The cane supplier speaks on TV
Many readers of this blog will be familiar
with Eric Huntingdon, the eccentric man who in the 1970s and 1980s supplied
school-type canes to a grateful clientele from his shop in the seaside town of
Bognor Regis. We
met him here.
Now, the BBC has released an
unedited clip of Huntingdon being
interviewed for its regional news programme South Today in May 1980.
He shares his experience of being caned
himself and his attitude to the corporal punishment of his own sons.
He talks about making canes and says
everyone must have the traditional curved handle. Then he goes coy about how
the handle is made, as if it were a secret handed down to him by the Inca
people.
“I was taught how to make canes by the old blind
basket maker in Bognor and he asked me not to give his secret away.”
Thanks go to the discussion group CP-Rem
for finding this piece of social history.
Picture and video credit: BBC
For
more TV News and Documentary, click here
Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com
I think this clip is from the "BBC Rewind" site. That site also had a longer clip about birching in the Isle of Man that was mostly quite dull but had some interesting parts. Probably only available to people in the UK or people using a proxy to look as if they're in the UK:
ReplyDeletehttps://bbcrewind.co.uk/asset/60af866c7d0adf001fd6e30f
"Tonight: Isle of Man - Birching. Douglas, Isle of Man. Monday, 16 January 1978. Vincent Hannah reports from Isle of Man on the issue of birching, which is still a legal punishment there." (14 minutes)
They interview some fairly crazy old ladies who insist that England has become a degenerate society because teenagers aren't being whipped with birches enuff.
The early parts of the program are pretty misleading, they say that birchings aren't bare bottom any more (all birchings were always bare bottom), and they say the guy giving the birching isn't allowed to raise it above shoulder height (which turns out to be false later on).
If you skip forward to just before 8 minutes in, the narrator wittily mentions that the guy who used to give the birchings ("Phil Coollit, former policeman and publican") isn't allowed to talk to the media any more, "lest he repeat this famous 1969 demonstration". They then show the demonstration, he hits a chair instead of a person, if you turn the sound up you can hear the MASSIVE *swish* *crack* noise it makes.
The guy also described how one particular teenager being birched said that he would bend over the chair on his own and he didn't need anyone to hold him down. But he says, after he gave him the first whack, it needed *five* policemen all at once to hold him down for the rest of the whacks.