P.M. Tony Blair, caned aged 17

Posted by Traditional School Discipline April 15, 2025

P.M. Tony Blair, caned aged 17

Tony Blair, who later became the UK Prime Minister found himself in the hot seat back in 1994 when he told a television programme he had been caned at school and went on to say that he thought there were better ways to punish children but he didn’t think it did him any harm. He got ‘six of the best’ when he was seventeen.

Blair was not PM at the time, but leader of the Labour Party. One cheeky (but enterprising) newspaper reporter went around asking other Labour members whether they had been caned at school.

Blair attended Fettes College in Edinburgh, Scotland during the 1960s. Fettes is one of the most exclusive private boarding schools in the country. At the time it was an all-boys’ school.

Blair said no more about the caning, but in 2001 political journalist John Rentoul in a biography Tony Blair: Prime Minister (Little, Brown, 2001) writes, ‘Roberts [his housemaster] beat Blair, the only master to do so, giving him “six of the best” at the age of 17 for persistently flouting rules.’ On another occasion, a prefect at Fettes beat Blair for smoking. Years later, Blair noticed with some smugness that at a lawyers’ dinner in Edinburgh the only person in the room with a cigarette was the same prefect.

Rentoul later told a journalist Blair was not the most popular boy at Fettes with figures of authority. ‘All the teachers I spoke to when researching the book said he was a complete pain in the backside, and they were very glad to see the back of him.’

The Scotsman newspaper in 2004 spoke with people who knew Blair at school, ‘Tony would wear his hair long, albeit greased down with butter to keep it inside the back of his collar, and is best remembered for a cavalier attitude to the rules of drinking and smoking.’

Roberts, the master who caned Blair, described him, ‘as the most difficult boy I ever had to deal with’.

After Blair’s TV appearance Brendan Carlin of the Southern Daily Echo (a regional newspaper in the south of England) collared MPs at the Labour Party conference to get their views.