In the curious byways of post-war London there emerged, from time to time, figures whose obsessions propelled them briefly into public notoriety before they vanished once more into the city’s endless fog of eccentrics, reformers and self-appointed moral guardians. Among these was Eric A. Wildman, proprietor of the Corpun Company, a man whose peculiar crusade for the preservation of corporal punishment carried him from obscure mail-order entrepreneur to one of the most controversial public agitators of his day.
Wildman was not content merely to sell his wares quietly by catalogue or private correspondence. Such ordinary commerce could never satisfy a man who plainly regarded himself not as a tradesman, but as a missionary engaged in a moral campaign. At considerable expense — and, many believed, against even his own financial interests — he launched an ambitious publicity operation across London that quickly attracted both ridicule and alarm.
Pinned to crowded notice-boards from Kensington to Camden, from railway platforms to suburban shopping arcades, there appeared neat yellow cards bearing the unmistakable Corpun imprint. Wedged incongruously between advertisements for furnished flats, dancing lessons and sewing machines, these notices urged parents, teachers and guardians to seek guidance from Eric A. Wildman on the proper upbringing of the young. More particularly, they invited the public to inspect his extensive selection of canes, birches and leather straps.
The message was couched in the language of stern moral concern. Parents were implored to think of their children’s future, their discipline and their character, and not to shrink from “the necessity of occasional corporal punishment.” The cards also displayed a portrait of Wildman himself: pipe in mouth, expression sober and reassuring, the very image — at least in his own estimation — of a dependable middle-class authority figure to whom anxious parents might naturally turn for advice.
Yet if the advertisements seemed eccentric, Wildman’s later methods bordered on the theatrical. During his period in Kensington he escalated his campaign dramatically. Either personally or through hired sandwich-men, he dispatched processions through the borough carrying enormous placards emblazoned with provocative slogans. “Parents — Do Your Children Need Beating?” demanded one notorious sign. Such displays caused predictable outrage among residents and passers-by alike, and it was perhaps inevitable that Wildman’s tenure in the district proved short-lived thereafter.
Far from retreating under criticism, however, Wildman expanded his activities still further. Public meetings were organised at Caxton Hall and other London venues, where supporters and opponents gathered in increasingly hostile numbers. These assemblies often degenerated into uproar. The issue of corporal punishment already stirred strong passions in post-war Britain, where educational reformers, traditionalists, churchmen and psychologists clashed bitterly over the discipline of children. Wildman’s meetings became battlegrounds for these competing ideologies.
Those who attended seldom forgot the sight of the man himself. Wildman appeared with almost ritualistic consistency dressed in academic cap, mortar-board and gown, as though assuming the costume of scholarly authority might lend additional gravity to his cause. His demeanour was utterly earnest, his eyes carrying the fixed intensity of the zealot. Yet his speeches disappointed even some sympathisers. Delivered in a monotonous drone, they were notoriously long-winded, repetitive and devoid of rhetorical flair. If Wildman possessed conviction, he possessed little charisma.
Nevertheless, the controversy surrounding him ensured an audience. Journalists regularly attended the meetings, notebook in hand, amused as much as intrigued. Reports — often written with heavy irony — appeared not only in British papers but overseas, circulating as far afield as Canada and Australia. To many readers abroad, the spectacle of a London businessman campaigning publicly for the virtues of caning seemed almost surreal, a relic from another century improbably surviving into the modern age.
Yet there was no hint of irony in Wildman himself. One suspects that the ridicule merely strengthened his belief that he was a misunderstood defender of social order. To him, opposition may well have confirmed the righteousness of his mission.
Inside his offices, matters grew stranger still. During school holidays, visitors might encounter what Wildman described as a “resident housemaster,” installed on the premises to provide free advice to parents regarding the discipline of boys. Remarkably, some members of the public did indeed seek consultations.
Accounts from these interviews reveal discussions conducted with extraordinary seriousness concerning the supposed merits of different methods of corporal punishment. Considerable debate centred upon whether punishment should be administered over clothing or directly upon the bare skin. According to the “resident housemaster,” there existed “two schools of thought” on the matter. He himself inclined toward the latter method, arguing that the greater humiliation involved increased the moral effect of the punishment while permitting the chastisement itself to be physically milder. Such reasoning, he maintained, rendered the process ultimately “kinder” to the child — though, as he conceded with curious formality, “circumstances alter cases.”
This philosophy aligned closely with Wildman’s own publicly expressed views. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he bombarded newspapers with lengthy letters defending corporal punishment in increasingly explicit terms. Many editors declined to publish them. Some, however, found in Wildman’s correspondence a source of irresistible controversy.
In 1951, amid a particularly heated national debate on school discipline, the Richmond and Twickenham Times printed one of his more substantial contributions. In this formidable epistle Wildman repeatedly extolled what he described as punishment administered upon “the bare buttocks and upper thighs,” a phrase reiterated with almost obsessive insistence throughout the letter. To supporters, such language represented blunt honesty in defence of traditional discipline. To critics, it merely confirmed their suspicion that Wildman’s crusade concealed motives far less respectable than moral reform.
By then, his reputation was firmly established. To some he remained a crank, to others a dangerous eccentric; but to all who encountered him, Eric A. Wildman stood as one of those uniquely British figures whose peculiar fixations briefly thrust them into the public gaze — earnest, controversial, faintly absurd, and impossible entirely to ignore.
