SPANKING IMAGES IN ADVERTISING AND CONSUMER PRODUCTS

by Harold A. Hoff

ISBN 978-1461032373

$32.40 (US) from Amazon.com

• Notice by C. Farrell

The author of The Collector's Guide to the School Strap (see below) has now turned his attention to CP more generally and its artistic depiction in the popular culture, notably in advertisements, postcards, calendars, magazine covers and comics. These are drawn primarily from North America and Europe (including the UK).

This very nicely presented new work of 175 pages contains hundreds of illustrations, the majority of which are in colour. Assiduous readers of this website will find one or two familiar images, mainly from our Spank while you sell feature, but for the most part they will be new, as indeed they were mostly new to me. A truly impressive amount of painstaking research must have gone into finding these illustrations, some of which are obviously quite rare. They date from throughout the twentieth century, or in a couple of cases even slightly earlier.

Almost one-third of the book is devoted to picture postcards, many -- mostly humorous -- of the "seaside holiday" sort, a few with a more political or educational purpose. Most of these are coloured drawings but a certain number of them are (evidently posed) photographs.

As might be expected it is domestic (family/parental) spanking that takes pride of place in illustrations of this kind, but school CP does feature in a handful of instances.

A particular section is given over to humorous wine labels for the famous "Krover Nacktarsch" brand in the Mosel region of Germany, showing young lads being spanked by the Kellermeister for helping themselves to the wine and getting drunk. Over 40 examples are presented. I had no idea there had been so many different versions of this picture over the decades.

Mr Hoff's wise commentaries on each item make clear that he is not entering the lists for or against corporal punishment, but merely recording for posterity the evidence of some of the ways in which it has been portrayed in the past as a matter of cultural observation. Where appropriate, he has also added an estimated value for those items, such as certain postcards or prints, in which there might be a trading potential for collectors of ephemera.

In the interests of transparency let me state that I did assist the author with one or two images and a few factual historical points, and am delighted to have contributed in a small way to a fascinating and surely unique work which is well worthy of the attention of all scholars of our subject.

THE COLLECTOR'S GUIDE TO THE SCHOOL STRAP: Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, Australia & Others - Second Edition

by Harold A. Hoff

ISBN 978-1460976425

$46.00 (US) from Amazon.com

• Notice by C. Farrell

This marvellously well-researched catalogue of school punishment straps first appeared in 2009. Now for 2011 comes the second edition, considerably enhanced: there are now some 400 high-quality illustrations, mostly in colour. The book is over 200 pages long, and goes into tremendous detail about the different kinds of straps used in different countries.

As before, the Scottish leather tawse takes pride of place -- more than half the book, in fact. There is a surprising number of different kinds: not just numerous varieties of the famous Lochgelly, about which we get an interesting potted history, but several other manufacturers too. The Scottish section also has an addendum in the form of a short section on the judicial tawse, reminding us that until 1948 the Scots courts could order boys aged between 14 and 16 to be given up to 36 strokes of the tawse across their bare buttocks, as an alternative to the birch. Remarkably, the author has managed to track down one of these implements, made in the reign of George V (1910-1936), and provides us with photographs. It has three tails and, as one might expect, is rather larger than the typical school strap.

There is a much-expanded section on the school strap in England, and here I must declare an interest: some of the information in this part of the book came from your humble reviewer. While the cane was by far the implement of choice in most English schools, there were significant pockets of strap use, like Walsall in the Midlands (a centre of leather manufacturing). Unlike in Scotland, errant schoolboys in Walsall were strapped across the seat of the trousers, not the hand.

Canada, the home of the book's author, where in modern times the straps tended to be made of canvas and rubber rather than leather, likewise gets expanded coverage in this new edition. There are again sections for Ireland, the USA, Australia and Germany (these being places where the strap was not the most usual CP implement). In each case there is a page or two of background information on the (former) corporal punishment situation in the country concerned.

For each kind of strap listed and pictured, the dimensions are given, years of production, and estimated value at auction or from dealers if you want to buy a genuine used one today. It is evident that, since school corporal punishment was declared illegal in most of the countries covered, such of these items as remain in existence fetch in many cases a high price from collectors: some rare examples run to many hundreds of dollars.

For that very reason there are also fakes and forgeries around, and a section of the book warns against these and how to tell the real thing from the fraudulent impostor.

As before the book is remarkably well-produced, with a great deal of attention to detail. Though aimed primarily at those who are interested in collecting these objects, it is also of great interest to non-collectors who are students of the history of CP.

JUST AND PAINFUL: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals

by Graeme Newman

• Notice by C. Farrell

This is an entire book on the Web, by an American academic, Graeme Newman. He is Professor of Criminal Justice at Albany University. The book argues the case for judicial corporal punishment (JCP). It was first published in 1985.

Briefly, he argues that JCP can be justified on the grounds that society requires offenders to be punished as well as reformed, and that prison does neither properly, as well as costing the taxpayer a fortune.

What I found most interesting was Chapter 13, in which he pulls to shreds the Cadogan Report - the 1938 British government study which has always since, even very recently, been trotted out as the justification for claiming that JCP does not work.

Cadogan's resilience over all that time, and not only in the UK, has been quite extraordinary. Nobody ever seems to have dared to question it publicly. I always thought some of its argumentation pretty shallow and arbitrary, so it's most welcome to find it subjected at last to critical examination by a real academic philosopher.

Unfortunately the kind of corporal punishment Newman has in mind is electric shocks - because, he says, they can be scientifically administered and accurately regulated. However, he does countenance the possibility of "whipping" (details not specified) for violent offenders.

You can download each chapter of the book separately from:-
Graeme Newman's Pages of Punishment

SONS OF THE BRAVE: The Story of Boy Soldiers

by A.W. Cockerill
Leo Cooper / Secker and Warburg, London, 1984

• review by C. Farrell

The universe of discourse for this work is a tad vague at first glance. The blurb gives the impression that it might be about boy soldiers the world over. And, goodness knows, there are still plenty of them fighting terrible wars in awful places like Africa and the Middle East.

But no, it turns out that what we are essentially studying here is the British military tradition, a story which lies pretty firmly in the rapidly-receding past. However, that includes the Commonwealth, and there are some snippets of fact about such previously little-known phenomena as boy soldiers in Canada. Much of the book's information, at least about relatively recent times, appears to come from letters the author received in response to an appeal for reminiscences. So the emphasis is on anecdotal rather than official evidence (of which, the author complains, there is very little), and on daily life as seen from the point of view of the boy soldier himself.

Cockerill touches on the issue of CP quite early on in his chronological tale. He has discovered a documented case in 1694 of a boy soldier, John Coopman, being sentenced to be whipped for desertion in Ostend (in what is now Belgium), where the English were helping the Dutch to repulse the Spaniards.

Flogging for army disciplinary offences in general arises here, too, if only in passing, because of the curious and long-standing custom in the British Army whereby one of the duties of boy drummers was to administer the cat-'o-nine-tails to offending adult soldiers. The author fails to discover a reason for using boys to perform this distasteful task. At all events, the number of army floggings rose sharply in the eighteenth century, not because the regime became more severe but because, on the contrary, there was a growing disinclination to use the death penalty for relatively minor infractions.

But it is not until the nineteenth century that we get into much detail. By then special educational institutions had been set up for army boys. They seem to have been a particularly unruly lot in the early days: at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, established in 1741, the boys were said to "fight like wild animals" and the main role of the duty officer was to protect the masters from being pelted with missiles thrown by the students.

At another such establishment, the Duke of York's school in Chelsea (later moved to Dover), it is recorded that in 1852 "Privates Bateman and Barry stole a muff from the regimental chapel and cut it to pieces. For this offence they collected 18 strokes of the birch each and four days in the black hole, followed by six days of extra drill. ... They were both 13 years of age."

Birching was also used at the Royal Hibernian Military School in Dublin, but a six-foot-long bamboo cane was the more usual instrument of punishment there. This seems unusually long for a cane. As in the Navy, the word "cuts" rather than "strokes" was officially used as the unit of measurement, as these extracts from the punishment books show:

3 March 1852: Pte Vialls, aged 13. Trade, Shoemaker. Charged with breaking two awls and telling an infamous lie. Punishment: 18 cuts.

30 December 1852: Pte Ends Seta, aged 13. Charged with answering the Commandant in a disrespectful manner. Punishment: 6 cuts and 6 hours in the black hole.

31 December 1852: Pte Ends Seta, aged 13. Charged with kicking and making a noise in the black hole, and being insolent and disrespectful to the sergeant major. (He threw his mug of water out of the hole and called the sergeant major a fathead.) Punishment: 18 cuts.

Thus Private Seta was caned twice on successive days. Cockerill provides us with a description from contemporary sources of how these penalties were inflicted:

"For administration of the cuts awarded, a sergeant major gripped the offender's head between his legs, high in his crotch, pulled out the boy's shirt tails and took a firm grip on his trousers. With his feet set apart for balance and his posterior raised, the boy, doubled over, gripped his sergeant major's legs with his arms. Then would the regimental sergeant major's rod be poised ready ... Boys waiting for cuts were said to be 'standing by to receive boarders'."

At the Duke of York's School a boy called William Tart received no fewer than 106 strokes of the cane in the course of 1888. However, the author assures us that "the majority thrived on the discipline they received".

All this sounds pretty much par for the course in what were basically boys' schools like any other, albeit with military ethos and jargon thrown in. It would be more interesting to know about the canings given on ordinary active service, either "in the field" or in camps and barracks where boys were serving alongside adult soldiers. But here the author fails to come up with anything very specific. What regulations applied, and how often were they put into effect? Were any records kept? We are not told. There are simply several anecdotal references to teenage soldiers receiving "six of the best" from their superior officers - whether officially or unofficially remains unclear.

For example, one Frank Ebdon joined the Royal Rifle Brigade in the First World War and was sent to the Isle of Sheppey, where he remembers "being caned good and hard by the Provost Sergeant in the yard of the Quarter Guard building for being absent from retreat parade". One waits for more details, but they are not forthcoming. Even more tantalising, another correspondent recalls a birching as recently as 1928 in the Royal Horse Artillery - but we learn nothing more about it.

Caning continued in the army schools until recent times, but Cockerill reveals that by the late 1940s it was becoming customary for the authorities to seek parents' consent first. Back at the Duke of York's School, older boys ("sergeant prefects") lost the right to cane younger ones in the middle 1950s. The author is himself an old boy of that establishment.

Of course, this book does not set out to be about CP so one cannot accuse it of failing to deliver what it promises. As a first stab at producing a history of an evidently under-researched aspect of past British military life before all the first-hand witnesses die off, it represents a commendable effort to come to grips with a hotchpotch of rather disparate evidence. The result is a bit of an unfocused ramble, but as unfocused rambles go it is scholarly and well-produced.