Many punishment books disappeared when schools closed.
Others found their way into local archives, education authority collections or private hands.
Some occasionally appear at auction.
For former pupils, discovering that their school’s register survives can be an extraordinary experience.
There, written in faded ink, may be an incident they have remembered for fifty or sixty years.
But access can be complicated.
These registers contain personal information about hundreds of former pupils, and archives may therefore restrict access or remove names from material made publicly available.
For researchers, patience is essential.
Sometimes the school log book proves more useful because it contains the story surrounding an incident rather than simply a name, offence and punishment.
