THE COLLECTOR'S GUIDE TO THE SCHOOL STRAP: Scotland, England, Ireland, Canada, Australia & Others
by Harold A. Hoff
Booksurge Publishing, ISBN 1439236437
New for 2009 is this marvellously well-researched catalogue of school punishment straps. There are over 250 colour illustrations. The book is 145 pages long and goes into tremendous detail about the different kinds of straps used in different countries.
The Scottish leather tawse takes pride of place. I had no idea there were so many different kinds: not just numerous varieties of the famous Lochgelly, about which we get an interesting potted history, but several other manufacturers too.
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, is also covered. There are shorter sections for England, Ireland, the USA and Germany (these being places where the strap was not the most usual CP implement), and a typically thorough chapter on Australia contributed by our old friend, antipodean CP researcher Dean Clarke. 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.
The book is remarkably well-produced, and it is obvious that a great deal of care has been taken over its compilation. While perhaps aimed above all at those who are interested in collecting these objects, it is also of much 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
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
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.
