Book of the Month: Blazers, Badges & Boaters

 

Blazers, Badges, & Boaters, by Alexander Davidson explores the tradition, ritual and hierarchy of school dress and surveys changing fashions in not only in British public schools, but also naval, military, Quaker, charity and other state schools.

The book is not specifically about corporal punishment in schools but Davidson does reveal that uniform was often removed (or at least lowered) to facilitate a ‘flogging,’

He writes that lower uniform was removed layer by layer in the ritual preceding a public flogging at the great public schools during the Victorian era, and this practice achieved it purpose of both shocking the schoolboy onlookers and thoroughly embarrassing the victims. The ceremony was rarely done in private.

‘At Eton College, for instance, the victim knelt down on the block with his trousers down, and two boys would hold up the shirt tails throughout execution, while the rest of the school was watching.

‘The denuding [stripping] of pupils could of course backfire. One Old Etonian, about to be flogged, arranged for a picture of the headmaster to be painted on his buttocks. The flogger, upon lifting his shirt, found himself as it were looking in the mirror. As the story goes, he erased all traces of the picture with the application of two birches.

‘The more elaborate the initial process of removing uniform, the more mystical was the aura which enveloped public school floggings. At Winchester, this ritual was more sophisticated than at Eton, and involved the victim kneeling while one boy unbuckled his braces and another held up his shirt, exposing the small of his back.

‘In such floggings, and in corporal punishment of schoolchildren generally, it is the removal of underpants that embarrasses them most.

‘One self-styled Old Etonian and expert on beating of this era argued: “Any interposition of underclothing materially interferes with the efficiency of the operation.”

In the twentieth century, school beatings involving the baring of flesh became rarer.

 

Blazers, Badges, & Boaters, A Pictorial History of School Uniform, by Alexander Davidson, (Scope Books, 1990.)

Traditional School Discipline

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