Some written accounts of corporal punishment

SCHOOLDAYS

A Friday Appointment: the ritual of prep school punishment in the early 1960s.

Caught Out: cheating during the annual school cross country leads to unpleasant consequences.

The Cane and the Book: recalling the ritual involved in corporal punishment at a secondary modern school.

Getting The Whack: 1950s grammar school CP recalled.

After lights out: memories of boarding school in the 1960s.

The Pump: an account of slipperings at a junior school.

The wrong choice: Faced with the choice, should a schoolboy opt for a detention or a caning?

Boarding school discipline: a housemaster's caning recalled.

Public school memories: corporal punishment in the 1950s.

Caned after Detention: a correspondent remember his grammar school days.

Fags and Fagmasters: recalling fagging at a public school in the late 1950s and how fagmasters dealt with lazy fags.

Some recollections of school corporal punishment in the 1960s and 1970s.

A well-remembered public school caning.

A contributor recalls his first school caning.

Caned for fighting - vivid memories of a grammar school boy's first encounter with the cane.

An unofficial punishment: nowadays drugs are a problem in many schools, but in the 1960s it was cigarettes that incurred the wrath of the powers that be.

My first school caning: in the days when the cane held sway in English schools, a boy always retained particular memories of that baptism of fire, his first whacking.

The Time Travelling Headmaster: what a headmaster from a previous generation might have to say about discipline in today's schools. This article is fictional, but is based upon the recorded observations of retired schoolmasters.

A boy recalls his first caning at prep school.

Stars and Stripes - more memories of prep school punishments.

Tawsed! - an English boy is punished the Scots way.

'Three strikes and you're out' - an account of a comprehensive school caning in the 1970s.

'Fag on Duty' - public school memories from the 1960s with some photographs from the period.

Recollections of state school punishments in the fifties and sixties.

A personal memoir of a Scottish school tawsing in the 1970s.

Memoir of a boarding school caning in the early 1970s.

A retired headmaster's views on the efficacy of corporal punishment in schools.

'Our lives were governed by rules.' Personal memoir recalling a time when a boy might be caned just for failing to wear his school cap.

Six to Remember: recalling an unforgettable six-of-the-best.

A Fact of Life: memories of school CP in the late 1950s.

Caned at Christmas - a seasonal reminiscence.

'Whacked in the Dormitory' - a memory of boarding school life in the 1950s.

Five for the Cane: the painful consequences of reckless behaviour.

INSTITUTIONS

A strict upbringing: memories of prewar school and orphanage corporal punishment.

A brief historical account of the judicial birching of juveniles in Britain.

MISCELLANY

Corporal Punishment Rules from an un-named private school. These sensible rules would be just the job if the cane was ever reintroduced into British schools.

The language of corporal punishment An extract from 'The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.'

Text of a brochure produced by a company supplying school canes during the 1960s.

'Caning a Schoolboy'. What constitutes 'reasonable corporal punishment'? An interesting legal case from 1929.

Corporal punishment could sometimes be a joking matter: a selection of cartoons and jokes.

ELSEWHERE IN THE CORPORAL PUNISHMENT ARCHIVE

Read a selection of accounts of schooldays corporal punishment extracted from published biographies and memoirs. This page will be added to periodically.

Fictional accounts of corporal punishment. This page offers a selection of CP stories, which although classified as fiction are often based upon the authors' schooldays experiences.

Public Schools......State Schools.....Institutions

Films and TV....Instruments....Gallery