The humble gym shoe — universally known as “the slipper” — presents historians with a particular difficulty.
Although remembered by countless former pupils, slipperings were frequently absent from official punishment books.
Why?
Simply because many schools did not regard the slipper as sufficiently serious to require a formal entry.
The cane was official.
The slipper was often regarded as an ordinary classroom punishment.
This means that a school might possess a beautifully maintained punishment book recording every formal caning while hundreds of lesser punishments passed entirely unnoticed by history.
School log books can therefore be even more revealing.
Unlike the punishment register, a log book might contain comments about incidents, complaints from parents and decisions made by the headteacher.
Individual departments sometimes kept records of their own as well.
The result is rather like attempting to reconstruct a family history from an old photograph album.
What survives can be fascinating.
But we should never assume that everything which happened appears in the album.
