By the 1970s the old disciplinary system was already being questioned.
Teachers, parents and educationalists were debating whether corporal punishment still had a place in modern schools.
Some regarded it as a necessary deterrent.
Others considered it an outdated survival from a more authoritarian age.
Eventually the argument would be settled by legislation and the old punishment books would cease to be working school documents.
They became history.
Yet perhaps their greatest value today lies not in counting strokes of the cane or comparing one headteacher with another.
Their real value is in showing us how childhood itself has changed.
Read carefully, those faded pages tell the story of changing attitudes towards authority, obedience, boys, girls, teachers and parents.
They show us schools in transition from the rigid discipline of the early twentieth century towards the very different educational world which followed.
And tucked between the names, dates and offences is a simple reminder:
The past really was another country — and school was a very different place indeed.
