six of the best wrote: ↑

Jun 11, 2020

Only the naive would suggest that no girls were never slippered in school but I personally never heard of any girls being slippered when I was at school in the 50s/60s

As estate agents say (allegedly), location, location, location!  

Had you been at my C of E Junior School in the Nottinghamshire coalfield in the early 1950s you’d have seen female classmates slippered and girls from the senior school awaiting their appointment with the cane on the bottom outside the Headmaster’s office.  Who knows, you might  even have been as lucky as me and largely avoided the same fate yourself!   .

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No information is available on his discipline record at Forest Gate County High School but Friends Reunited has a supposed recollection from a girl who attended a mixed secondary school in Forest Gate and claimed that the HM would give the cane at any excuse. The modus operandi described is doubtful  but she does say that all the schools in Forest Gate used the cane.

Anyway l thought it was interesting that Chester Barnes equated schoolteachers with caning.

A quite fascinating contribution, for which I am pleased to give you a ‘like’, not least because it may lead some of our very recent recruits back into the very early days of this estimable Forum.

You mention entries on Friends Reunited ‘from a girl who attended a mixed secondary school in Forest Gate‘.  As far as I am aware Friends Reunited departed to the great internet in the sky some 5 years ago, and for some time before that it was unusable unless you really, really liked non-return links and other impediments to sensible browsing.

However you also describe the SCP MO claimed for the young lady’s headmaster as ‘doubtful‘.  I am therefore led to wonder if the Friends Reunited entry to which you refer is this one:

The older girl told me that she had attended a mixed secondary school at Forest Gate in East London .She said the Headmaster was “an evil old bastard” who would give the cane at any excuse .In her case she got the cane a number of times, on her pants with her skirt up .As she put it “He only had to see me look at a boy and it was off to his office”

The crux of this post is that she also said that for trivial offences eg running in corridor, instead of caning the girls and entering details in the book he would put the girls over his lap ,take their pants down and spank them.Even after 15-20 years she was still outraged at this and told me that she thought it was disgusting that big girls of 15-16 were spanked on the bare. Strangely she accepted the cane because to her knowledge every school in the area kept a cane but no where else spanked ,also this never happened to the boys.

That may have been quite an early Friends Reunited entry, as FR didn’t open until 1999 and the entry was quoted in a contribution to this Forum to be found here and dated 14 January 2003.  In fact the quote may not actually be from Friends Reunited at all, as the author of the 14 January 2003 contribution, one Simon Junior, places it in his post under a category he describes as:

“Some hart [Sic] felt memories from a corporal punishment forum on the internet”

and he assigns it a sub-category of:

“These girls were also given smacked bottoms at school”

I am perhaps being unfair, but methinks Simon Junior might have been letting his imagination have free rein without being quite as honest as he should have been in flagging this.  The whole thread, commencing here is fascinating reading.  However current readers would be best to ignore the advice given by C Nickel (whom some believe later morphed into Lotta Nonsense) on 12 January 2003 regarding computer malware.  In the intervening years those nasty malware writers have got a whole lot cleverer.

All that said, Forest Gate is a rather strange place.  In the 1970s, together with two other weirdos colleagues typical of the eccentrics then to be found maintaining obsolete main frame computer operating systems I spent a few weeks in a very strange subterranean computer room attempting to learn GEORGE 3, the operating system used on ICL’s large 1900 series computers.

The computer room was strange because at street level one simply entered a terraced house, quite indistinguishable from its identical neighbours on both sides.  Beneath the ground though the basement must have extended under most of the street and contained a large 1900 computer installation and associated functions.

The young lady charged with imparting at least some of her undoubtedly considerable knowledge of GEORGE 3 to us was even stranger.  Despite her youth she was both taciturn and strict in equal measure.  Questions were discouraged, and if you dared to ask them she was less than pleased unless you already knew the answer, in which case you might get a grudging “yes, that’s so”.  We were absolutely forbidden to leave the small office we were allocated without her express permission unless it was essential.  A fire alarm might have qualified, but going in search of refreshments outwith allocated break times ……….

Well personally I wouldn’t have dared.  I had a strong feeling that having an incorrect  answer to the question one had just posed to her or being apprehended in the wrong place at the wrong time might well result in unforseen consequences.

In hindsight and in the light of the above alleged quote, if she’d been at the local school attended by Simon Junior‘s informant, that might well have been the production of a cane and an order to lower trousers and underpants and bend over!   Neither of my companions mentioned anything like that though, but I doubt they’d have admitted it anyway.    Happily before I became responsible for GEORGE 3 in my own installation fate took me off on another path.

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