Corporal punishment has for generations occupied a curious position in British education. It has been both commonplace and controversial: commonplace because thousands of schoolchildren have experienced it, and controversial because opinions have always differed considerably as to its fairness, usefulness and proper limits.
The purpose of this survey is not to argue either for or against corporal punishment. It is instead an attempt to record how it has actually been used in schools, particularly during the years following the Second World War.
Official records provide only part of the story.
Many schools keep, or have at some time kept, a punishment book in which serious disciplinary offences are recorded. Such books can provide useful information about punishments ordered by headmasters and headmistresses. They may record the pupil’s name, the offence, the date and the number of strokes administered.
They do not, however, necessarily provide a complete picture of everyday school discipline.
A considerable amount of corporal punishment is administered by ordinary members of staff. A boy may receive the slipper from his form master for talking during a lesson, while another may be struck on the hand for untidy work. In some schools such incidents are recorded; in others they are regarded as ordinary classroom discipline and no permanent written record is made.
Consequently, the historian attempting to discover how frequently corporal punishment is used encounters an immediate difficulty.
Newspapers are equally limited as a source of information. A perfectly ordinary school caning is unlikely to attract the attention of the Press. Newspaper reports generally concern exceptional cases—perhaps where the severity of a punishment has been questioned, where parents have complained, or where some unusual circumstance has brought the incident to public notice.
The ordinary punishment disappears from history.
Yet it is precisely the ordinary case which is of greatest interest to this survey.
The Method of Enquiry
Those contributing accounts were therefore asked to provide a number of basic facts.
These included the pupil’s sex and approximate age, the year in which the incident occurred, the offence committed or alleged, and whether the punishment was administered by the head or another member of staff.
Information was also sought concerning the instrument employed—the cane, slipper, strap or paddle—the number of strokes, where they were applied, where the punishment took place and whether other pupils or members of staff were present.
Finally, contributors were asked perhaps the most important question of all:
Did the punishment work?
This is not as simple a question as it first appears.
A pupil who receives three strokes of the slipper for talking during a lesson and never commits the offence again might reasonably describe the punishment as effective. Yet another pupil might refrain merely because he fears another punishment, while remaining convinced that the original punishment was unjust.
Others remember corporal punishment as having made remarkably little difference to their behaviour.
The survey therefore distinguishes between the immediate disciplinary effect and the pupil’s later opinion of the punishment.
The Problem of Memory
Personal recollections must, of course, be treated with caution.
A man recalling a caning received thirty years earlier may remember the incident vividly while forgetting minor details. Numbers of strokes may be confused; dates may be approximate; even the precise reason for a punishment may have become uncertain.
Nevertheless, certain incidents remain extraordinarily clear in the memory.
Former pupils frequently remember waiting outside the headmaster’s study, seeing the cane or slipper, hearing another pupil being punished, or returning to a classroom afterwards.
Such details demonstrate that corporal punishment was not merely a regulation written into school rules. For many pupils it formed part of the atmosphere of school itself.
This survey is therefore concerned with that everyday reality: not simply whether corporal punishment existed, but how it was administered, what offences brought it about, how pupils reacted to it, and whether those who experienced it believed that it achieved its purpose.
