REGULATIONS CONCERNING PUNISHMENT 1. A master or Prefect may for sufficient reason order a boy as many as six ferules. In exceptional cases the Prefect of Studies may order nine. 2. No boy shall receive more than six or, from the Prefect of Studies, more than nine on the same day. 3. ‘Flogging’, i.e. striking […]

  In none of the records nor in any of the answer to the questionnaire was there are any indication that at Xavier the use of corporal punishment was extravagant. Burke Hall was an exception. The Jesuits did not cope easily with the disciplining of small boys and some resorted to violence inordinately often. From […]

  Indiscipline was certainly more overt. Yet the laymasters usually commanded some alternative force. Mr. Ludwig Van Baer, who must had known more about the structural weaknesses of Xavier’s shaking floors and must have learned to hate venetian blinds more than most, had a fire in his eyes and an edge to his words that […]

  Indeed, if there was a rule about it at all, it was that those masters who used it most often needed to joke about it most constantly. Some would carry it under their gowns, some would carry it with their exercise books. Some would perform high jinks with it in the yard. The Jesuit […]

“The discipline at Xavier was not so much violent as all-pervasive. Corporal punishment, however, remained a part of that discipline. The ‘strap’ was a two foot long, sewn leather piece two inches wide and about an inch thick. It was the usual instrument of pain. It was surrounded by mythology and macabre stories. This one […]

Father Christopher Nulty S.J. (Rector): “He was remembered as an earnest, if dour, man. He had few qualms about associating pain with learning, and he preferred to urge his students along learning’s path with a stick rather than a carrot.” Father Philip Gleeson, S.J. (Prefect of Studies and Rector): “For all the thirteen years he […]

“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 […]

Its heavy door never quite masked the sound of summary justice being administered within. Merely opening it whipped up waves of suspense in boys’ minds as they prepared to proffer an excuse or present the note from their class-master which gave the reason for their execution. It was not a room for sitting or quiet […]

  “When the boys remember the Prefects, they remember their flogging ways and the guerilla war that gets created between the high regulators and the highly regulated.” “Rectors and Prefects of Studies were more distant figures, their respective rooms more awe-filled places. A Rector on the whole, however was seen as kindlier and more fatherly […]

These quotes come from ‘Xavier Portraits’ by Greg Dening and Doug Kennedy, published in 1993. Much of that book is a copy of ‘Xavier: A Centenary Portrait’ published in 1978.   “Rumours of what was put into straps to make them heavy were rife. Some were tan, some were black. Some were carried everywhere, some […]