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A more ominous situation usually awaited the boy who was referred to Prefects’ Court, which was held every month under the direction of Mr. A. H. Watson (who was in overall charge of discipline in the school until he retired in 1955) and by the Headmaster KD Anderson until 1962 when caning ceased.**( see footnotes below) As far as I can ...
Feb 24, 2017 · Vital to an understanding of the Public Schools is a knowledge of the methods by which their values have been inculcated and discipline maintained. The most distinctive single feature of these methods is the prefect-fagging system.
- 1950s Elementary School, and only One Pervert in Sight
- Putting on The Ritz, and The Itchy School Uniform
- Two Flavours of British Masters--Bull Dogged Or Moth Balled
- Caning, and The Bully-Boy Brits
- From Pitts to Ruggah "Prick"
- The Aroma of Poor Codfish
- Choir Boys, Or Indentured Labour?
- From Spit-Wads to Straight-Jackets; from Pink Belly to Black-Balling
- A-Muricanos and Duh Boys
- A Lone Escape Artist
I remember in "public" elementary school our generation of kids was taught by middle-aged widows who'd lost husbands in WWII and who'd come back into the classroom (unprepared and out of sheer economic necessity) to "battle-axe" and "school marm" their way through their work day, having perhaps last taught very briefly after finishing high school a...
So, then, at age twelve, off I was, in itchy grey flannel pants (oops, trousers), white shirt, navy blue crested blazer, and school tie, to a "terribly British" private (and boarding) school, where my uncle and two cousins just ahead of me had gone ("Brown Hall" named after my uncle's best school friend, the oil baron--the school dining hall, that ...
The teachers were either/or. Two groups. Those wet-behind-the-ears early-twenty-something Oxbridge cricket and rugby players hired each summer by our dapper, fatuous Head Master and paid a pittance plus dodgy room and board (and even so, kicked out of their rooms in the summers so the Head could rent them out!). And the truly old fart wheezing geez...
So you and I went to a school where incompetent teaching, and conformist mind-shaping, and where abuse and bullying--all were norms (more on specific "teachers" in a moment). And so too, now, right off the 'bat', to the over-riding, much-used notion of "giving some stick," as the teachers referred to the whip-rod bamboo cane. The welt-producing "ca...
I think Philby ("Pitts"--shirt wet under the arms) was a good teacher, as was, of course, Dirk (who came from England to teach at age 23, and shortly went on to do his PhD in California and become Chair of History at SFU and then head of university programming, for the better part of his career, at the government's large, well funded Open Learning ...
"Codfish"--or, just plain "Fish," another of the French teachers (an Englishman, of course). I was second worst in French class (I was actually in the top three of my classes until grade eleven, at which time mother always said I'd become a disappointment for a few years--out from under her skirts, is my way of putting it), and caned by the Head af...
And a quick note about the much used student "detentions" at the school, the main form of student "control" (oh, Orwellian), just edging out canings. A few hours of detention would be accumulated weekly per student, for minor (non-caning) infractions. On Friday, your number of "hours" for that week would be tallied and posted. (Mine were cumbersome...
Not that we students never had fun--when Masters' backs were turned in the classrooms, the Wimp Masters' backs, that is (not the ruggah boys--those bully-boys would have simply assaulted us if we'd tried any antics in their classrooms; as it is, they continually knuckled us hard on the crowns of our heads, scuffed the backs of our heads--hard enoug...
But back to the main story, of daily student life. As for the actual 'types" of students, in all this private school "private" fright and menace, some, as I say, "bought in" to the terribly anachronistic "days and ways" (Virgil, as I recall), the harsh treatment, the incessant canings (which today's teachers would assuredly call "abuse" and pervers...
Of course I've never maintained school friendships. How could I have? Why? And with whom? (I don't own a three-piece.) I turned sharp left immediately after school (and am a lifelong, although occasionally lapsing, NDPer; I barely know a soul from a lifetime of teaching, my writer friends, and so on, who isn't somewhere on the left), and the rest o...
Sep 2, 2023 · It’s hard to believe but a whole swathe of the British population, still very much alive today, was legally beaten by teachers with canes, gym shoes, straps, and anything else to hand in the name of classroom discipline up until 1986. Corporal punishment was a strong feature of 1970s schools.
The prefects pushed all the trunks to the walls, and just left two piled up in the middle for boys to bend over. It worked well but it was a stuffy, airless room. Most boys who wore glasses came out of the room after the beating with their glasses misted up.
Subject: Punishment system. I was a rebellious boy at school and was caned on five occasions. In my first year, I made the first of my three appearances at Prefects’ Court. These were held in room ten in the quadrangle containing the lost property box and opposite the biology lab.
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Oct 5, 2022 · Educational institutions at the time were operating under a 1968 “code of practice” governing the use of corporal punishment, although the official line from successive governments was that they were committed to eventual abolition once “acceptable alternatives” were agreed.
