Whenever I think of childhood spanking games, I am reminded of tents. In a tent we had our own domain, even though it was in somebody’s back garden, where we made up our own rules. One Sunday afternoon in July we had in quiz in a tent and Judy gave four wrong answers, so […]

I was too good a girl to get spanked at school, where they were rare. However being the youngest of the group of kids in our road I was at the recieving end of many “play” spankings. These have left a lasting impression on me. I would guess that many others had similar experiences.

  Mr Bruce Clyde Lumsden, Headmaster: “The school, like many others in both State and Independent systems at the time, was conducted under rigid discipline based upon corporal punishment. Every teacher carried a retributory weapon of some sort, usually a strap. The boys themselves were a match for this treatment. They expected it, and responded […]

He carried three or four leather straps in his hand. Having stood us back to back, he strapped us together for half an hour. When releasing us, he remarked ‘You should get along better in future.’” Mr Francis Henry Joseph Archer, Headmaster: “At the beginning of Archer’s career there were only two teachings aid, blackboard-and-chalk […]

Caulfield Grammar School. Again, not a vast amount of material (I’m hoping the next lot of books I get will be more illuminating), but for the sake of completeness, here are the quotes. Again, I noticed many oblique references that could have been very interesting if they’d had a bit of detail. The books is […]

  Sometimes they thought him unduly harsh, sometimes incomprehensibly lenient. He could be decisive, as he demonstrated towards the end of October, when he expelled two boys for stealing and roundly denounced the ‘deplorable lack of a sense of responsibility towards private property in the school’. Yet the staff, and Stump especially, no longer felt […]

V.F.O. Francis, Headmaster: “In second term, Mark Stump told Francis that the staff had lost confidence in him as Headmaster and were becoming concerned for their own reputations. He accused Francis of missing classes and failing to correct examination papers in time for reports to be issued when they were due. He said the spirit […]

Carey Grammar School. Mr Harold Steele, Headmaster: “School ended at 3.45 pm except for those boys undergoing detention, the normal form of punishment for misdemeanours, although H.G. Steele did not hesitate to cane for serious offences. Persistent laziness was an especially heinous schoolboy crime in his judgement and a severe caning the only cure.” “I […]

Michael Aikman, Headmaster: “When an article in The Age treated Haileybury’s traditional educational programme under the provocative (but misleading) heading, ‘Cane Makes Them Able’, Haileyburians were delighted by an unexpected flood of parental enquiries about school entry. It is true that Haileybury has not abandoned recourse to the cane as a deterrent disciplinary tool, and […]

Inclined to eccentricity, he was known to declare in terrible tones that ‘I’ll tear you limb from limb and splatter your brains across the room’, before banging his 36 inch ruler on the desk so that it sometimes broke. For students not easily intimidated, MacGregor kept a heavy leather tawse, providing an alternative punishment to […]