THE CANADIAN REGULATION SCHOOL STRAP: How the strap was adopted, dispensed and ultimately banned, and why it is gone forever. Corporal punishment policy, practice, procedure, regulation, and world, judicial and parental CP influences
by Harold A. Hoff
ISBN 978-1475239492
$16.95 (US) (black-and-white version) from Amazon com
This is Mr Hoff's third book about corporal punishment. In
part it is a natural development from his earlier work, "THE
COLLECTOR'S GUIDE TO THE SCHOOL STRAP: Scotland, England,
Ireland, Canada, Australia & Others", reviewed further
down this page. As the title suggests, at its core is a lot more
detailed research on the school strap in Canada and its use, which lingered on in one or two provinces until as recently as 2004.
The book is published in two versions, one with colour
photographs and the other in black and white.
Do not be deterred by its seemingly narrow focus. Here the
long subtitle gives a clue to a wider range of concerns. Indeed,
the very first picture in the book is not of a Canadian strap at
all, but has the caption "In 1941, a worker sprays a coat of
varnish on a wooden punishment paddle", and shows
industrial-scale production of school paddles under way,
presumably in the USA -- a fascinating and revealing photo that
was entirely new to me. As the author notes in his Preface:
"It is simply impossible to do justice to this
subject by looking at it in complete isolation. It is
inseparably woven with other practices in society. Therefore,
we must also examine aspects of judicial CP, and parental CP,
to understand the dynamics behind school CP. In the same way,
the experience of other countries is highlighted to
demonstrate why this necessarily influenced the Canadian
one."
Thus, chapter 1, "General History", adopts a world
focus, or at least a European/Christian one, starting with
Solomon and illustrating how British school practices had arrived
in Canada by the 18th century, and discussing the English
common-law doctrine of in loco parentis, which gave
schoolteachers the same legal powers of punishment as parents.
This concept was explicitly adopted by Canadian education
authorities, the school setting being seen as an extension of the
domestic one.
The author shows that in the early days a variety of different
punishment implements arrived in the New World from the Old; in
particular the cane or switch from England and Germany, and the
leather strap from Scotland and Ireland. (France, oddly enough
considering Canada's history, does not seem to feature.) It was
only later that the rubber/canvas strap -- unique to Canada, as
far as I know -- came to be the standard instrument of choice in
Canadian government schools, although canes, leather straps and
US-style paddles were all used in certain private ones. This
trend towards standardisation, Mr Hoff shows, was the product of
various unrelated influences between 1850 and 1900, and echoed
similar trends (though with different results) in the UK and
Australia.
Here I would quibble with the suggestion that, in the late
Victorian era, the usual target area for punishment in England,
as well as in Scotland, shifted from the buttocks to the hand. It
never did so for boys in the vast majority of English grammar
schools, or of boys' schools of any kind; it certainly did not do
so in private schools; only in government elementary schools,
mostly new in the very late 19th and early 20th centuries, could
one say that caning the hands was perhaps the norm. In more
recent times, at English secondary schools of all kinds ancient
and modern, leaving aside the minority that used the strap rather
than the cane, there is a huge mass of evidence that boys were
most frequently punished on the seat, and only girls (where caned
at all) generally on the hands. In this respect, as well as in
choice of implement, Scotland and England went sharply different
ways, Canada seemingly following the Scottish route, while many
other territories in the world -- Singapore, the USA, Thailand,
Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, and most of the
"British" parts of Africa -- have tended to follow the
English one, with Australia somewhat split according to State,
and a mixed picture also in Malaysia, the Caribbean and the
Indian subcontinent.
I fear that in this matter the author may have placed too
great a reliance on "Professor" R.G. Van Yelyr (very
likely a pseudonym of George Ryley Scott) and his poorly
researched, ill-informed, anti-CP tome of 1941, The Whip and
the Rod. "Van Yelyr", writing about England, said
that "the modern procedure is to apply it [the cane] to the
hand instead of the buttocks". This is quite simply a myth.
And much too much is made of the supposed psychological
disadvantages of punishing on the bottom. The physical danger of
caning the hands is far more significant, in my view. It is for
just this latter reason, Mr Hoff reveals, that the Lochgelly
tawse -- whose makers always said that it was designed to be
applied only to the hands -- was invented in Scotland in 1884.
Chapters 2 ("The Regulation School Strap"), 3
("Practice and Procedure") and 4 ("The Punishment
Book") go into unprecedented detail about the ins and outs
of school CP in Canada. This is clearly based on a phenomenal
amount of research which I am sure nobody has ever done before
(the book as a whole contains no fewer than 363 footnotes).
Standards or guidelines for CP were gradually defined in more
detail by the various authorities, starting in Toronto in the
1870s. This is where the strap made of rubber (or, more
precisely, rubber-impregnated canvas) first makes its appearance
in place of the traditional leather one, mainly it seems because
it was thought that leather could not be relied upon to be
consistent across multiple examples -- a concern which, whether
soundly based or not, never seems to have troubled the Scots.
This central part of the book might have been subtitled
"Everything you never realised you never knew about Canadian
CP". There are detailed regulations from different school
districts, with precise measurements, though it is interesting to
note that some districts never did adopt a specific policy, just
as in England. There are also court cases, anecdotes, surveys,
and statistics. As time went on, there was a gradual trend
towards greater restrictions on the use of CP, for example
stipulating a maximum number of strokes, requiring the punishment
to be administered in private, providing a punishment register in
which each instance is to be recorded, and in some cases allowing
an element of parental choice -- all concepts with which we are
familiar from various examples elsewhere, notably the USA in the
present day. Mr Hoff has managed to trace some of these concerns
back to their first appearances.
As usual with standards and generalisations, the rare
exceptions to the rule are of particular interest. Thus, we learn
about a few schools that used the US-style paddle instead of the
strap, and some (pretty well all private) ones where the
English-style cane prevailed.
There is some quite detailed discussion of modus operandi,
with subheadings such as "Hand strapping procedure"
(along or across the hand?), "Holding the Wrist", and
"Avoiding Self-Contact". The question of training
teachers in how to administer CP is also examined.
Mr Hoff has tracked down some old punishment books, and
produces interesting statistical analyses of some of their
contents.
Chapters 5 and 6 of the book concentrate on the decline of CP,
setting the stage for its eventual abolition at different times
in different places, for which the author has found many detailed
references; and finally leading to the Supreme Court's 2004
decision which outlawed it nationwide, though by then the number
of districts still using it was very small. Along the way we even
visit the question of judicial corporal punishment,
abolished in Canada in 1972. This has some relevance because the
author is able to show by reference to numerous countries that
the abolition of judicial CP always precedes the abolition of
school CP, which in turn invariably comes before the possible
banning of parental (domestic) CP.
In Chapter 7 the author examines many of the justifications
that have been put forward for ending the use of CP, and
rehearses at some length the arguments on both sides, with many
quotations from a wide variety of sources. His own opinion is
that some of the claimed justifications for abolishing school CP
do not stand up; for a start, most of the statistics put forward
by CP opponents are bogus, and he comprehensively demolishes the
"violence begets violence" myth: "As the 'violence
of punishment' has been incrementally removed from Canadian
youth, they have become steadily more violent". Despite
that, he thinks there is now no possibility of its
reintroduction, for various practical reasons which he sets out
fully. (He is even more scathing about official attempts to stop
parents from spanking their own kids, as in Europe and a growing
number of other places.) All of this applies of course to the
world, not just Canada.
In the final section of the book, we come back to the straps
themselves. Many models are described in detail and illustrated,
all of them subtly different. For those interested in collecting
such things, an estimated valuation is given -- although in most
cases surviving examples are rare. Lastly -- and here again this
is obviously the result of much painstaking and groundbreaking
research -- there is a list of known historical suppliers, with
illustrated extracts from their catalogues. These contained
slogans like "Regulation Strap, Specially prepared to meet
School Requirements", and "Every school should have one
of our straps". One or two of these exist in French
("Courroie de correction") as well as English, and this
would seem to put to rest any idea -- which I have encountered in
the past -- that French Canada did not go in for this sort of
thing.
Harold A. Hoff's meticulously researched 248-page work
contains many dozens of high-quality photographs. It is a most
impressive contribution to the serious literature on corporal
punishment. In this short review I can only hint at the vast
range of its scholarship. All students of our subject should
order a copy.
SPANKING IMAGES IN ADVERTISING AND CONSUMER PRODUCTS
by Harold A. Hoff
ISBN 978-1461032373
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
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
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.
