'Our lives were governed by rules.'

The writer of this memoir was a boarder at a minor public school in North Wales in the late 1960s.

When I joined my public school I quickly discovered that life there was governed by numerous rules, regulations and conventions. Unfortunately most of these requirements were not spelt out in any rule book as such. A new boy was expected to become conversant with them by some mysterious process of osmosis - emulating the behaviour of more experienced boys and noting the fate of those who fell foul of the system
But however punctilliously a boy conducted himself, a moment's carelessness or bad luck could result in his having to pay the penalty for rulebreaking - a penalty which as often as not involved corporal punishment, for this was a school which believed in the efficacy of the cane.

Unpopular rules
Some of the most unpopular rules concerned the possession and wearing of the school cap. This had been introduced just after the war to replace the straw boater and was dark blue in colour, matching our blazers. The school cap had to be carried at all times and produced for inspection on demand by any duly constituted authority, be he master or prefect.
Occasionally an inspection of the entire school took place after morning assembly and absolutely no excuse was accepted for being without your cap - not even a genuine reason such as loss or theft. The penalty for being capless at one of these surprise inspections was a caning and it can easily be imgained how much unneccessary worry such an inflexible rule brought into our already highly pressurised lives.

Easy target
Another reason for discontent was the fact that we were expected to wear our caps at all times when we were off the school premises. This made us an easy target for pupils from nearby state schools whose uniform requirements were much less exacting. In consequence, and in a general spirit of late sixties rebelliousness, the rule on wearing caps was widely flouted.
Obviously we did not walk brazenly out of the school gates bareheaded, or remain capless when a master or prefect was in the vicinity. But otherwise the accepted practice was 'caps off' at the first safe moment, following which it became a challenge to ensure that the despised headgear was quickly back on one's head before any representative of school authority spotted the offence.
Generally boys enjoyed a fair amount of success in not being caught, but inevitably some rulebreakers were detected. Periodic 'purges' were organised by housemasters and prefects, usually after a long spell of inactivity had lulled boys into a false sense of security.

Caps purge
At the age of 14 I was caught during a sudden caps purge, along with two other offenders. We had our names taken for walking capless along the street of the town in the lunch hour. I can recall being annoyed at our recklessness: the place where we were seen was a very public one where we should have been on our guard.
We each received four painful strokes of the cane. Nine other boys were dealt with at the same time and on the same charge: our housemaster must have put in overtime during that purge. At least there was no time consuming written impot to fulfill so the punishment I suffered on that occasion had the merit of being short - albeit unpleasantly sharp.
This was not my first caning, of course. The school beat boys - especially junior boys - for all sorts of major and minor offences and also for poor work or laziness. In my very first week at the school I was unfortunate enough to be included when an entire class was caned for riotous behaviour. Although we only received three strokes each, it felt very nasty at the time and I was surprised to discover how much the cane hurt. (I had only been slippered at my prep school.)

Six of the best
My worst beating happened to me in the fifth form, when I received six of the best for illicit smoking. As this was a repeated offence, the housemaster laid on the six strokes pretty hard and I'm not ashamed to say that I was close to tears. It was certainly the most memorable thrashing of my school career.
Looking back on my schooldays as a boarder in that inward-looking closed community, where our existence was hedged about by numerous petty rules and regulations, it is interesting to note that even the most rebellious boys meekly accepted the justice of the 'system' when it chose to bear down on them.
Corporal punishment was a fact of life, as natural as the weather. Although it seems quite unfair in retrospect to have been thrashed with a cane just for not wearing one's school cap, we never thought of questioning the rules. Defy them, yes; question them, no. Instead we accepted our lot and made the best of our existence within the system. After all, a rule such as the one on caps was very clear and if a boy chose to flout it he was well aware of the risk. If caught, he accepted his punishment like a good public school boy.

Other schools had similar rules

Perusal of the rule books and punishment books of other British schools of this time reveals that many of them had similar petty rules concerning the wearing of the school cap. These extracts from a grammar school punishment book of the early 1960s are typical:

Name and form	Offence	Number of strokes of the cane
Watson R J 3b	Not wearing cap at bus stop	Three
Erswell K B S 4c	Not wearing cap on way to clinic	Three
Mills D P 5b	In town at dinnertime without cap	Four
Watkins P 4c	Out of school without permission & capless	Six
Mahoney I G 3b	Absence of school cap	Three
Grover J R S 5c	Deliberate flouting of caps rule	Four
Grant L M 4b	Failure to produce cap during inspection	Three