My older sister was one of them, and she’s admitted to me in later life, it was quite a popular game – not so much with the little kids like myself, but they’d pick out a 12-year-old boy and decide ‘Let’s get David strapped’. I got the strap a few more times at that school, some I deserved, some I didn’t.
When my father came back home, he immediately put us both into private schools – in my view, primarily because he did not like my sister’s behavior. I wound up at the local grammar school which was an interesting choice because we were Catholic and it was C of E, and there was a private Catholic boys school just as easily accessible (somehow over the next couple of years, we all turned into Anglicans, except my sister who’d been sent to a Convent school, just in time for me to go to GGS).