I can remember a couple of boys managing to get on top of the cubicles in the toilets and make footprints on the ceiling.
They were caught red handed by the headmaster himself. Needless to say it wasn’t their hands that were red.
There seems to be a divide in practice on either side of the pond. These usually have a section on rules and discipline, whether or not this includes corporal punishment. I would assume that before the days of the Internet, these handbooks would be printed and given to parents and/or pupils. There is no explicit reference to corporal punishment but it was a boys-only school from an era when the cane would have been the de facto consequence of serious misbehaviour. I think where it says pupils could be “reported to the head master” it would be widely understood to mean that they would expect to be caned.