A toy, two fingers and double the thicknesses was a proper tawse
Oh I know only too well
Not at school but step father used the belt occasionally including the day before I walked out at 17 to London in 1983. Took a long time to talk to him and only for mums sake. He is still a selfish man pining for a time that didnāt really exist. The perfect post war years when everyone was white and respected authority no matter how flawed it was. Of course we all know that is crap.
The head of our comp, rejoicing in the name of Billy Cotton, was elderly bordering on senile, so beatings were dished out by the deputy, known universally as āPickerā due to his fondness for truffling for Nose Candy. He was a big, strong, well built fella, and beatings were⦠memorable, but he was never a cunt about it, I donāt believe he enjoyed it in the slightest, and there were never spurious reasons invented for them.
I know itās fashionable to sneer at corporal punishment, but as a kid with more than his fair share of nothing, I was always willing to lose it. Being a āsinkā school, I wasnāt the worst offender by a margin. Iāll hold my hand up and admit: I needed it, and fucknose I deserved it. I especially needed teaching some limits, because no other cunt was doing so.
Looking at the feral little cunts routinely stabbing one-another for shitsānāgiggles today, Iām not remotely convince that scrapping corporal punishment was the right move.
Youāve brought a little tear to my eye, thinking about what kind of person you might have been if youād have been treated with respect, and maybe even some affection, as a child. Some other kind of cunt, I guess.
I think I was caned across the hand on two occasions. The first was for taking a beaker from the science lab & keeping a stickleback in a mini aquarium in my desk.
The second was for missing a saturday swimming match (I was in the team) & going instead to the 1977 cup final (Utd 2-1 Liverpool) which was well worth the punishment.
Iād take the caning any day
It wasnāt either/or. You had to take both or neither!
Corporal punishment at my state secondary school (all male, 600 pupils, 1970s) was rare - it happened maybe a few times a term. It was always dished out by the headmaster, with a cane to the hand. From what I heard he was businesslike about it. There was no hint of him taking any pleasure in it.
But this was at a time when parents routinely smacked children. So getting hit by an authority figure didnāt seem out of the ordinary. Some kids certainly got worse beatings more often at home.
I was going to say it was at the top of the punishment scale, but maybe exclusion came above it ? Those were so rare that I can think of no more than a handful in all the time I was at the school. Thereās an argument to be had about whether they do more long-term harm than caning.
Thatās remarkably similar to my story, I was 16 at the time.
By the time I was in secondary school corporal punishment had gone away.
The school was private so it was all very St Custardās
- āgatingā - not allowed outside school grounds, no casual clothing - I guess this is pretty meaningless anywhere but at a boarding school
- ārusticationā - sent home for a couple of weeks
- expulsion
It all seemed to be dished out on a very case-by-case basis. One guy in my house got āgatedā 14 times because he was a determined miscreant, but there was nowhere for him to be sent back to.
Another guy got expelled instantly for disrespecting the college porter.
There was also the guy who got rusticated and came back with a tan. He said he got home, opened the door and his Dad handed him a ticket to Zermatt. Dad busy being some kind of corporate raider and Mummy had run off with a rock guitarist or whatever.
Really, really not my school .
Below caning we had detentions (being kept at school, deliberately pointlessly, after hours), ājobsā (like detention, but you picked up litter or mopped the changing rooms or something) and lines (mostly for kids who couldnāt be dettoād because they had to travel home on a school bus).
Our school favored the slipper (Plastic sole rather than spongy rubber) to be honest it was pointless and didnāt really hurt. Most of the kids had it at some point for bragging rights.
I was a nightmare at school, holding the record for on one hand some sporting achievements, and on the other the longest stretch of being āon reportā. I was also suspended on 5 separate occasions and had two meetings with the head from which I wriggled out of proposed expulsion both times. Consequently I had regular canings until they were abolished in my fourth year.
Mr Broomfield was the chosen head of year for handing out physical correction. He was a good pick from a staff point of view - he was 6ā 2", broad shouldered and muscular. He was also a complete authoritarian psycho with an unrelenting hard on for hitting children. I was well known amongst the staff for not exactly having much enthusiasm for accepting their authority and made my feelings on their other inadequacies quite clear.
The one memorable incident with Broomfield was triggered by a spat I had with the head who was covering for another teacherās absence (basically running circles around his lack of understanding of the subject and comparing him less favourably for the task of taking the lesson with a dinner ladyā¦).
Broomfield and I had history and openly despised each other. So the walk to his office for him to administer the punishment was a bad tempered one with some choice verbal exchanges to ratchet up the tension even further. When we finally got to it I said something like āyou really get off on this donāt you, patheticā¦ā which had him take a massive swing at me with the cane which i dodged but his momentum meant that he crashed down on the floor after catching his eye on a chair on his way down.
I remarked on what a fool he was making of himself and in retaliation he got up and grabbed my by the neck and thrashed wildy with the cane, all the while I just laughed mockingly at him as heād totally lost his cool.
Next day he came in with a hell of a shiner from his fall, but most of the boys spread a rumour (which I did nothing to deny) that Iād landed one on him in the scuffle and this became the accepted story which really got under Broomfieldās skin. He needled at me for the rest of the year, at the conclusion of which I threw his brief case into the school pond. I still have the lovely image of him striding into the middle of the pond to retrieve it, almost slipping over and traipsing out with soaking wet feet and trousers up to the knees, whilst some sixth formers leaning out of the science block shouted āgoing for a swim sir?!ā.
I was a marked man at the annual end of year boys vs teachers rugby/ murderball festival of physical retributionā¦
The school I went had a far more inventive paper style punishment than lines. You would be given a gatefold (4 sides) of a broadsheet newspaper (the Times usually) and you had to cross out every vowel. Fucking torture that wasā¦
Worse than a beatingā¦
Corporal punishment
Always thought that shoulda been @Penanceās taglineā¦