Beating rituals at Eton in the 1950s
An academic researcher studies varieties of corporal punishment in the 1950s at Eton College, possibly the most famous of England’s elite public schools. They include prefect beatings, headmasters’ birchings and the quaintly named ‘pop-tanning’.
Beating by the captain of the school or a deputy
Before evening Prayers, the
miscreant would be summoned to a reading room which served as a common room for
those ten senior Collegers who were members of the sixth form. The ritual was
conducted by the senior boy in College (captain of the school) or his deputy
(or a captain of football, cricket, etc., if the offense concerned had taken
place on the sports fields). Again, permission had to be obtained from the
master in College, and appeal was theoretically possible. All boys other than
the sixth formers and the miscreant were supposed to be working in their rooms.
Occasionally a cane was rattled along the doors of one of the long corridors by
the officiating sixth former, but this was an unusual act of flamboyance.
When the miscreant entered the
reading room, he found all the sixth formers except the officiant in armchairs
reading (or pretending to read) magazines. The officiant subjected the
miscreant to a sustained rebuke which he ended by saying, “I’ve decided to beat
you. Please wait outside.” The miscreant left the room, and while he waited
outside, a folding chair was set out in the middle of the room. The miscreant
was then told to come in again, bend over the chair, and grasp the horizontal
bar at the back, leaving his trousered bottom extravagantly exposed. He could
see the officiant upside down.
Again the officiant drew a
small line with chalk to assist his aim, but in this case the instrument was a
rattan cane. These canes came in various sizes, denoting the status of the user
as did many sartorial details such as collars, ties, caps, scarves, etc. Sixth
formers had canes with ridges on them, whereas captains of houses who were not
sixth formers were allowed only a less painful kind without ridges. The captain
of the school, being ex officio a member of Pop, was entitled to a cane with
not only knobs but a crook at the end so that it could be used as a walking
stick. Canes were stocked and sold at the school barber’s in the High Street, a
smart establishment that had another branch in London’s West End. The officiant
flicked aside the tails of the victim’s morning coat with his cane before
beating him. The usual number of strokes was six, but this was sometimes
exceeded. Good form decreed that the victim not shriek or weep, if possible.
The victim occasionally padded his trousers with an extra pair or two of
underpants, but excessive padding was liable to be detected and the miscreant
told to go outside and remove it.
Birching
This was the immemorial form
of punishment at Eton for which it was famous. It was inflicted by the
headmaster or the lower master (headmaster for the junior two-fifths of the
school) for serious disciplinary offenses, possibly as a prelude to expulsion.
It was embedded in an elaborate ritual.
Every weekday morning
offending boys were summoned by the headmaster’s representative, one of the
sixth formers appointed for a week at a time by rotation. The “praepostor” went
round the school and opened classroom doors without knocking, asking without
waiting for permission to speak, “Is X in this division (class), sir?’ (a
prescribed form of words). The assistant master in charge of the class had to
tolerate this intrusion, as the boy was an ambassador of higher authority. The
boy went on, “He is to see the headmaster at 12: 15.” At 12: 15 the headmaster
sat in judgment in his own classroom, an imposing room decorated with a
reproduction of an Athenian frieze and classical busts of old Etonian
statesmen. He was dressed in a black cassock and black gown, with stiff white
collar and two white clerical bands hanging down from it, indicating his high
rank, which gave him a quasi-ecclesiastical status even though he was not in
holy orders. He sat behind a table, and two praepostors summoned in the
miscreants one by one.
Usually they would be given a
punishment such as a Georgic (writing out Virgil’s first Georgic, about 500
lines of hexameters) or kept in for a day at the end of term. Sometimes with
lesser offenders the headmaster might get quite chatty and talk to the boys
about their families. But sometimes the headmaster uttered the dread words,
“I’m going to flog you.” The boy then went downstairs to school yard, the
school’s symbolic center, where a small crowd often gathered, or at least a
number of people contrived to pass by. The headmaster went into an ancient
schoolroom (now a museum show piece), followed by the two praepostors and the
uniformed school messenger (one of whose other principal functions was showing round
tourists, whom he would presumably regale with anecdotes). Then came the
offender, who was obliged to kneel on an ancient flogging block, and the
messenger instructed him to “drop your trousers.” The boy lowered his trousers
and underpants and knelt, the messenger standing closely over him.
A praepostor’s duty was simply
to act as a witness, but according to folklore he was supposed to see that the
headmaster did not raise his arm above his shoulder. Some six strokes were
administered. The instrument was not a cane but a birch (a bundle of birch
twigs tied at one end to form a handle). After delivering the punishment, the
headmaster left, walking majestically across the school yard to his house in
the cloisters, keeping to the flagstoned path rather than taking a short cut
across the cobbles as everyone else did. It was said that the cost of the birch
was added to the offender’s bill at the end of term, since it could only be
used once.
Pop-tanning
This was the most feared form
of punishment since it was delivered not by a middle-aged, cultivated
schoolmaster but by an athletic young man of 17 or 18, subject to little
restraint on his severity. It was not common and was generally administered for
serious disciplinary offenses outside the boarding houses and also outside the
academic domain, e.g., for smoking and drinking. “Pop” was the nickname of the
Eton Society, an elite club of some 20 senior boys, largely self-elected for
their athletic prowess, worldly prominence, or other much appreciated qualities,
with a few boys like the captain of the school appointed ex officio. Pop had
its own clubroom. Beating was carried out by the president of Pop. According to
folklore, in times past each member of Pop struck a blow.
The miscreant was summoned in
writing by a note delivered by a fag (junior boy performing obligatory tasks
for seniors such as running errands, making toast, etc., another tradition
later abolished at Eton). The miscreant was told to wear an old pair of
trousers … it is recorded-and was always believed-that the miscreant was made
to put his head on a window sill with a sash window closed over his shoulders
and chest.
A pop-cane was selected from a sheaf, and
the president of Pop was allowed to beat really severely, even brutally
(possibly at least 15 strokes.) An informant who was once a member of Pop
recalled one pop tanning in November 1957. There was no meeting of Pop as a
whole to discuss it beforehand. He thinks the recommendation would have been
reached by the committee of six boys (of which he was not at the time a member)
before discussion with the headmaster. A senior Eton master writes in a
personal communication that Pop tanning was extremely rare. The headmaster was
consulted beforehand, and so was the house master (to ensure that there were no
medical circumstances that would have made a beating inadvisable). It was very
much a last resort after other punishments had proved ineffective. All members
of Pop would have been likely to know of the boy as a troublemaker and would
have been aware that he was likely to be so disciplined though only a few would
have known the precipitating event. Pop tanning was never officially abolished,
but
M. W. McCrum, headmaster 1970-1980, ruled
that it could only take place in his presence, which not surprisingly put an
end to it.
Extracted from Invisible wounds: corporal punishment in British
schools as a form of ritual, by Jonathan Benthall, Director, Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London, in Child
Abuse & Neglect, Vol 15, 1991, available here.
Picture credit:
Eton College.
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