School Corporal Punishment History20

“There were, of course, other scandals and other problems. There was the case of the boy expelled from school for display of ‘French letters not of the epistolary kind’ on the Kew tram. There were mothers who fretted about draughts in dormitories and holes in shoes. There was detective work in the unraveling of schoolboy plots to run away. There were thefts, occasional drunkenness, truancies, late returns from vacation. If one parent saw lack of discipline as a symbol of a general decadence in the school, another promised court action for excessive zeal in strapping.”