For those that think girls are all sugar and spice, offences – leaving school without permission, general disobedience, rudeness, defacing ceiling, throwing stones, striking the headmistress, hiding the coat of a delicate girl, impatience, Truancy, forging a letter from parents. I feel Jenny would agree, the punishments at this school were very lenient to what we would both have expected to receive.
You’re right, I do think they were very lenient. I’m sure we would have got more than four strokes for some of those offences you listed.
It’s difficult to make an assessment though because the simple offence doesn’t tell us much. What, exactly, did the “impatience” amount to for example?
“Striking the headmistress”? If I’d have done that I dread to think what I’d have got. What did “forging letter from parents” attract? A friend of mine got six strokes for that when she wrote her own note to explain her absence. She would probably have only got half of that for the truancy she tried to cover up.
I am still working out how to go about obtaining the punishment book which will, I assume, contain my name. I’m not sure how it is possible to see your own record without at least seeing the names on the same page. I do of course know the names of the other four boys who were caned with me, but the page will have more names than that listed on one page.
I still see my old housemaster from time to time and saw him very recently, and I wonder if he might know where the books are kept. I did speak to him about caning once, in recent years, and he was obliged to witness a few.
I remember Karen McAdoo being interviewed on the radio, maybe ten years ago, in an item about corporal punishment, probably on Radio Five. She said that two teachers had to hold her down and the head said she was getting six strokes but in fact she claimed she got nine.
I liked the Linda Cockerill entry ” calling Miss Holloway a cheeky sod”. Linda has another mention as well.
In the descriptive narrative of the original PB eBay listing, it mentions the initials of the manager, clerk or inspector entered in the PB.
Does anyone know the role the school inspector played in this regard? Was examining the punishment book a mere formality to ensure CP was being recorded as required, initial the book and thank you very much, a tick box exercise, or did this involve writing a comprehensive report on the findings? In the case of Clara Teale, the girl who refused to hold out her hand and had to bend over would it have been noted in any report that the number of strokes had been omitted from the records or questioned as being an unusual practice for the school concerned?
Did the same inspectors also inspect school cane/s at the same time to make sure they conformed to the LEA standards?
Another punishment book recently surfaced finding its way to eBay last week. The bidding ended before finding time to post a link, commanding a final price of £143.00
The book relates to the “Technical School For Boys” (no details as to location)…… dating from 1945 through to 1960.
Unusual, in the seller indicated three different methods of CP recorded in one book. Stated the “number of strokes”, using either rubber tubing, leather strap or cane. A rubber tube I would imagine be considered unofficial, so surprised to find it documented in any punishment book.
There’s a local educational authority stamp on one page, but hard to distinguish a region of the UK, possibly we are looking at a school in the north, where the strap was more favoured. The stamp could have been placed in recognition of the inspection process, if so did the inspectorate turn a blind eye to the reference to rubber tubing, rather than the official cane or strap?
It’s Barrow-In-Furness on that stamp.
In that era, that town was part of the County Palatine bit of Lancashire that was cut off from the rest of Lancashire by a bit of Westmoreland.
Lancashire was definitely one for the strap in most cases, as opposed to the cane, and that applied to girls as well, from the memory of a couple of girlfriends who were schooled in Manchester & Preston respectively in the 1960’s/70’s. Unfortunately, said strap put them off the idea of being spanked by me
Whilst in England the requirement to maintain a Punishment Book in schools was almost universal, no such requirement existed in Scotland. I do question how accurate the English Punishment Books really are as I am aware of a number of canings that never were recorded in punishment books and, if the figure were to be extrapolated across all of England, and over a number of decades, we would end up with many hundreds, if not thousands, of unrecorded punishments with the cane.
