12 sixth-formers caned for pub visit

 

This true story reads like the kind of fiction I might have written myself.

It is the end of the school year at a suburban grammar school in 1959 and the headmaster tells the school assembly that the pub is out of bounds. Needless to say, some senior boys take no notice, they go and are found out. Then it’s six-of-the-best all round. According to a national newspaper report at the time, 12 sixth-formers were caned. If they were in the Sixth that would have made them seventeen and eighteen years old.

Then 66 years later a copy of a letter the headmaster sent to the parents of the boys at the time surfaced on a Facebook site.

He said he caned them for ‘flagrant defiance of my instructions’.

And yes, the headmaster’s name really was Birchall.

The school involved was called Purley County Grammar School for Boys, which became Purley High School for Boys, and again made the news in the 1970s for the frequent canings dished out there. See a detailed account of all that on the Corpun website here.

As published in the Daily Express, 24 July 1959

 

Here’s the letter the headmaster sent to parents.

Main picture credit: Generated by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)

 

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