Few of these potential clients, again, would concur with the father mentioned by Wildman who, when his son was three years old, had already purchased and stored in a wardrobe a series of instruments for the punishing of the lad in succeeding years, culminating in a flexible Wildman Smoky Malacca cane which was to wait till his son’s fourteenth birthday.

Not that Wildman was always on the side of the big battalions: on the contrary, he continually championed moderation in chastisement. He was no sadist; he paid a lavish subscription to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. His concept of moderation stemmed from his horrors at the enormous chastisements of the past, whether under masters like Busby or Keate, or in the Armies of the Peninsula War.