Caning on the Hands
In this picture from the 1890s (left) a miserable looking board school boy staggers back to his desk after suffering
'a hander' from his schoolteacher. These were the early days of compulsory state education in Britain, and classroom
order was given a high priority. Schoolchildren were caned for what would now be considered quite trivial offences,
and the punishment was as often as not applied to the upturned palms of the culprit's hands. An Edwardian schoolboy
later recalled the dire penalty for arriving late one morning:
I was the only boy to arrive late that day and was hauled in front of the entire school at assembly. The headmaster gave me three mighty slashes across each palm in turn with a thin cane. My God it hurt, believe me.
Remembering the days when corporal punishment held sway in the majority of British schools, a newspaper columnist recalled:
Getting the cane on a regular basis was part of juvenile life. Petty offences in the clasroom - blots on your exercise book, talking without permission, disobedience - all were rewarded with two or four handers. With some teachers it was almost a mechanical action. It certainly hurt - it was intended to! There were legends that the sting was taken off if you rubbed orange peel or raw onion on your palms beforehand. The trouble was that none of us had an orange or onion handy (or the chance to apply the same) when the stick was ordered. The usual way of soothing stinging palms after a caning was to squeeze them under the armpits or to sit on them.
In many schools hand canings were the favoured method of punishing wrongdoing during lessons, administered by the classroom teacher to the culprit's outstretched palm. More serious offences would be dealt with by the headmaster in the privacy of his office, with the cane being applied to the boy's backside in the customary fashion. However, it should not be imagined that hand canings were necessarily an easier punishment. A vigorous dose of 'hand correction' with a hard springy cane could leave an offender's palm or palms sore and stinging for the remainder of the lesson.
The majority of schoolboys certainly feared hand canings and the immediacy of the punishment acted as a useful deterrent to offences such as latecoming. However, on occasion the oppressed pupils decided that enough was enough and refused to submit to the cane or even went on strike. A newspaper story from the early 1970s reports that:
More than half the pupils at a comprehensive school are going on strike today, for the second time in a week, because of the cane. The strikers from the Essex school say they will not attend today because the headmaster canes latecomers. Last week the pupils returned to school after receiving assurances - they claim - from the headmaster that they would be caned only after three warnings for lateness. But this week, they say, the headmaster has already caned seven boys for the offence without prior warnings. A fifteen-year-old said: ' I was beaten hard across the hands on Wednesday for being just a few minutes late.' Parents have demanded an enquiry into the mass canings but a spokesman for the education authority said that 'matters of discipline are left entirely to the head'.
A hand caning and its lingering after effects, realistically depicted in the film 'Kes'
It takes a certain amount of bravado - or blind obedience - too stand meekly with your hand outstretched for the cane, particularly when you are well aware of just how much it will hurt. A story from the early 1980s which was given much prominence in the family-oriented 'Dail Mail' newspaper told of a 12-year-old who was suspended from school for seven weeks after refusing to submit to a hand caning from the headmaster. Under the headline 'A brave boy who went back to take his caning' the newspaper recounted how the schoolboy at last returned to pay the price of smoking in the toilets:
Now he was back, holding his hands out in the privacy of the headmaster's study, and soon, for his pains, to be praised in front of the whole school for taking it without flinching. Whether you are in principle for or against corporal punishment, you may agree that this story with a sore point and happy ending does also have a moral. In these unruly times one able head keeping order is worth a council chamber of educational reformers.
Pueblic school boys were also subject to hand canings. The Eton-suited boy in this prewar school story is holding out his hand to a stern schoolmaster who is certainly not sparing the rod. Hand caning was also featured in the recent TV movie version of Goodbye Mr Chips, set in a traditional English public schoool.
A boarding school pupil recalls:
In some ways getting swished on the hands was worse than a caning on the backside. A boy enjoyed the protection of trousers for six of the best across the backside, which must have tempered the sting a bit. When getting swished across the hands you experienced the full bite of the cane and the pain could be acute. Even worse was having to stand with your palm outstretched, waiting for the cane to lash down. You wanted desperately to pull your hand away, but didn't dare since that would invariably result in extra strokes.
In my school if you got the cane in class it was given across your left hand, so that you could still hold a pen for the rest of the lesson. Of course if you were left handed the opposite applied. Two or three cuts was the usual ration. However, for more serious crimes you might suffer a 'double hander' - three stingers across each hand. That was murder, I can tell you.
'Topped and Tailed'
In some schools, boys who were guilty of especially heinous offences might be topped and tailed. This involved receiving a dose of the cane on the hands and buttocks in turn: a very painful procedure.
A 14-year-old boy named Drinkwater, who was in the same class as myself at boarding school in the late 1950s, was often in trouble. Indeed he boasted about the whackings he received from the headmaster and was quite proud to show off the latest set of purplish-red weals on his bottom when we were changing for games. However, when he was caught shoplifting in the town it must have been the last straw, since the headmaster topped and tailed him - an unheard of punishment in our school. As the rather chastened Drinkwater recounted afterwards, he had been made to hold out each hand in turn (the 'hands of a thief' the head had called them) for three blistering cuts of the cane. He didn't even have time to blow on his burning palms before he was commanded to bend over for an almighty six of the best which left his backside red-raw and tingling.
