Discipline and Detention: Looking Back at School in the 1950s
My husband and I had an unusual experience this week. We visited his old school, along with about 60 other men in their 60s and above. There were also a few other wives. Let me explain why we were there, and the impact of the visit.
New Use of School Premises
In the early 1950s, he went to a boys’ grammar school. In the UK, this is a state high school for boys aged 11 and over. It was located in the extensive docks area near Tower Bridge in the East End of London. Most of the boys were from local working class families, but the school had a good reputation and they studied hard.
In the late 1960s, the school re-located to another part of London and the premises were used for various other educational purposes. It eventually fell into dereliction. The area, in the meantime, changed beyond all recognition and is now full of restaurants and office buildings spilling over from the business district in the City of London.
A few years ago, the school building was bought by an Indian luxury hotel chain called the Lalit. It was given a complete makeover and is opening for business shortly. As part of the hotel opening, all alumni of the school and their wives were invited to a reception to see how it had changed. We were feted with champagne and taken around the building.
The old assembly hall had become an elegant dining room and the ordinary school rooms had become well appointed guest rooms. There were also the usual places associated with a hotel, including reception rooms, a bar and so forth. Everyone agreed that the renovation had been an excellent job. It was splendid to see.
Read My Awkward Aging Story: How Denial Played a Trick on Me.
Memories
While we trooped around the premises, the men exclaimed about the changes of use. They said things like “This used to be the physics lab!” and exchanged memories of being there.
There were memories of sports events, exams, the way assembly was run, particular teachers and eccentric classmates. Conversations started with “Do you remember…?”
But by far the most common memory was of having been caned by the headmaster. This is known in England as “six of the best.” One man remembered a stool he had to hold onto while he bent over to be thrashed. Another, presumably a bit of a tear-away, proudly claimed to have had over 150 lashings over his time at the school.
My husband said that he had had only one caning, for admitting that he had taken a second pudding, or dessert in American English, at lunch. He had not been the only boy to do so – just the only one to admit it.
Nobody remembered the head with any affection.
Read The Golden Years: Embracing Old Age.
Women’s Memories
An equivalent group of women of a similar age, wherever they are in the world, are likely to have very different memories of school. Punishments might still be a strong component. Indeed, it brought back my own memories. I was generally a very well behaved little girl, but I still remember being called in to a head teacher when I was about eight for loudly singing the well-known Christmas carol about three kings in its inappropriate form. The words included something about a rubber cigar.
We girls were beaten much less frequently than boys, I am sure. However, we were told off, given detention and generally forced to undergo some unpleasant activity in an effort to make us behave. And corporal punishment continued in some places for a long time, as my daughter-in-law, who left her school in a small town in Louisiana in the 1980s, informs me.
These memories sit in the back of our heads, rarely aired. But when they come out, they are very strong.
Read Ageism vs. Wisdom of the Elders.
Also, read Are You Old Enough to Know Better?
Let’s Have a Conversation:
What are your memories of school? Were you ever punished? What form did it take? How do you think this shaped your attitudes toward discipline in schools? Please join the conversation.
Tags Nostalgia
I was at an all girls school in the late 1960s. Discipline was strict but fair. I kept out of trouble for much of the first year just collecting 100 lines for running in a corridor. By the second year most of my friends had received the slipper at least once and one had been caned on her palms.
My good record of not receiving corporal punishment was shattered in the third year when the class went on a field trip. A group of us got lost left a public footpath and entered a field by mistake. A gate got left open a some sheep escaped. The farmer complained to the school and we were summoned to see the headmistress the next day.
We were asked to explain what happened and then torn off a strip about letting the good reputation of the school down. We knew that we were in for a severe punishment but none of us thought we would all be caned.
We were told to wait outside and line up in alphabetical order. There were 6 of us and I was second. We all looked terrified and the first girl went in. We soon heard some swishes and thwacks as she received three strokes. She came out in tears and I was ordered in.
The headmistress was looking very stern and holding a cane. It was the first time I had seen a school cane. She then asked me if I wanted to be caned on my non-writing hand or my bottom. I was confused and didn’t answer immediately so she shouted “which is it to be” I blurted out “bottom please”
I was made to bend over a desk and she pulled up my skirt. It was not long before I felt my first stroke and the other two soon followed. I was in tears and staggered out of the room. I then went to the cloakroom to wash my face and saw the first girl there. She was caned on her hand and had it in cold water. One other girl was caned on her bottom and the rest on their hands
It is strange that after all this time I can remember all the details of my caning
I generally enjoyed school, but I’ll always remember my first paddling with my pants pulled down, in front of the entire class. The paddle reddened my entire behind, underpants notwithstanding. I tried not to cry but couldn’t. I was so embarrassed, not to mention the pain!
Ann, you asked “What are your memories of school? Were you ever punished? What form did it take? How do you think this shaped your attitudes toward discipline in schools?” (Sorry, I’ve only just seen this, or I’d have responded earlier. And please excuse the pseudonym.)
I’m in my mid-seventies, so I was at school in the fifties and sixties, but in north-west London rather than east London. My main point here is how corporal punishment might have affected, not so much discipline in schools, but the sexual development of children, something perhaps swept under the carpet a little.
In fact I was usually well behaved at school, and was punished only twice, both times in junior school between 1957 and 1961. The first time was when I was eight, and was given a symbolic tap on my hand with a short cane by Miss Bruce. It didn’t hurt at all.
The second time was the following year, when I was nine. Our teacher that year, Mr Cooper, was a lovely man and and used punishments very rarely. One day for some reason I wanted to tease him, and walked out of my desk towards the front of the class. Of course I was told to go back to my seat, but then I did it again. Mr Cooper started to move towards me, so this time I ran back and huddled into a ball on the floor. Big mistake! I felt a sudden sharp pain in my backside as his slipper managed to find its target. Back at my desk I was very quiet for the next ten minutes or so as the pain subsided, and I remember having to wipe tears from my eyes. But I didn’t resent it.
What I didn’t ever experience, either in junior school or afterwards in grammar school, was the ritual experience of being ordered to bend over and present my bottom for a formal punishment with the cane or the slipper. I might well have hated the humiliation even more than the pain. And the reason, I think, goes back to my very first term at junior school when we were just seven years old.
In that term we had a teacher, Miss Ward, who had come from New Zealand, and she was very strict. Whenever a boy misbehaved, he would be told to come out to the front of the class and bend over a chair. Miss Ward would then take her slipper out of the desk drawer and apply it once to the seat of the boy’s trousers. This always happened in complete silence, in front of the class of some forty boys and girls, and we always tried to see if the boy was crying when he went back to his desk. This must have happened at least a couple of dozen times during that single term. (We had a different teacher the following term.)
I’ve said “whenever a boy misbehaved” and that was usually the case; most of the girls were pretty well behaved in class. So it was something of a surprise when Miss Ward caught B, one of the girls, talking to her friend instead of working, and called her out to the front. What followed was a theatrical performance, a warning to the girls but entertainment for the boys. First, B didn’t bend over the chair far enough and had to be guided into position. And then her skirt was very thick so it had to be lifted out of the way. I can still, nearly seventy years on, visualise the slipper smacking down on the seat of B’s navy blue knickers. Just like a miniature porn movie, though I wouldn’t have known what that was at the time..
I’m sure, from the reactions of some of the other boys, that they will have been affected in a similar way, though of course at the age of seven we would have been too young to have experienced any real form of sexual arousal. But I appreciate that this type of event would have been pretty rare. Much more common would have been the reverse: an audience of girls in a mixed class, maybe even teenagers in secondary school, watching a boy being told to bend over for the slipper or the cane. What I can’t know, of course, is whether the girls would have experienced similar feelings, and whether these would have lasted into adulthood. I don’t know whether you or any of your correspondents would have a view on this.
Thanks for your very full report from the past. My school didn’t go in for corporal punishment and I found the strong response when I visited my husband’s school quite a revelation. Even more so when I see the responses from women here. I had no idea!
I guess that, looking back, the way boys and girls were treated differently at school in those days can be surprising. But then it was just how things were, and we didn’t question it. If you were a boy and you misbehaved, you’d nearly always have to bend over to be caned or slippered. But if you were a girl, corporal punishment was overwhelmingly less likely; and if it was used in the school you attended, it would more commonly have been administered to your outstretched hand rather than to your backside.
Actually I have one more recollection which is relevant, because it concerns a former acquaintance who was a few years older than me, and so like you would have been at secondary school in the 1950s. She once ran a pub of her own, but when I knew her some 25-30 years ago she was working behind the bar in a private club. One day during a slack period we were chatting, and she told me that she’d been caned at school by her teacher for being late for class, and that she resented it because it wasn’t her fault. I’ve no idea what we were discussing at the time, but it’s striking that, in her late fifties, that particular event from her teenage years was still strong in her memory.
Ann.
You were lucky not having corporal punishment. In most secondary or grammar schools it was normal and accepted. Some schools only used it on boys,but as girls wanted equality, it became used on them as well. Many women will admit getting the slipper or cane. Girls enjoyed seeing the boys get whacked but not as keen when it was used on them.
Pete
I was caned twice at my girls’ grammar school in the 1960s, once for shouting an obscenity on the sports field and once for playing truant and lying about the reason. in both cases it was six strokes across the skirt from the head of year. It was very painful!!
Jane
Those were both automatic caning offences in my grammar school. Both warranted six strokes and, as you say, very painful!
Pete