Training Ship

Unread postSep 13, 2023#1

Having returned a little early from my travels and seeing little activity, I have started this thread

During a cruise up the East Coast coast last summer, my crew and I met and spent a very enjoyable and somewhat alcoholic late afternoon /evening in the excellent company of a fellow yachtsman on board his fine vessel which was considerably larger than my modest craft .
During much amusing recollections of our lives and families it seems his grandfather was born in poverty in the early 1900s and spent his young teenage in a Naval training ship before joining the Royal Navy and having a distinguished W W 2 record as a Petty Officer in destroyers engaged on convoy duties.
Discipline on the training ship was apparently very harsh and the female “commodore” . A certain
Ma Fry it seems had a penchant for caning the bare bottoms of teenage boys. Ms Fry had a somewhat chequered history having been the mistress of a rich gentleman at the age of 15..

There is no specific confirmation of this but I did some internet research at the time   and the following infers there may have been some truth in the allegation . I did not post at the time as it was a little off topic and probably of limited interest, However with the current dearth of contributions !

Training Ship Mercury was founded in 1885 as a charitable venture by a rich London
banker benefactor, Charles Hoare, as a nautical training school for “poor but honest
working-class boys to receive training for life at sea”. At this time, there were either
fee-paying training ships for prospective officers or reformatory ships for juvenile
delinquents. He bought a sailing barque ‘Illovo’ to train boys for the Royal and
Merchant navies. She was kept as a sea-going ship based at Binstead on the Isle of
Wight and in 1888/89 made a voyage to the Mediterranean. In the early years most of
the cadets were poor London boys and some were as young as nine.
In 1892 ‘Illovo’ was permanently moored on the Hamble River where gradually a
shore establishment was built in Satchell Lane. These buildings included classrooms,
a theatre, band room and a chapel which was dedicated to St. Agatha. Throughout its
history the boys slept on the training ship in hammocks, not ashore. Charles Hoare
had caused a scandal by having an affair with a girl aged 15, Beatrice Holme Sumner
and as his mistress had two of his children.
Charles Hoare shared a common interest in cricket with the famous scholar and
sportsman, C B Fry, and when he died in 1908 C B Fry took charge of TS Mercury.
He was mostly a figurehead and the school was run by his wife Beatrice known by
the boys as ‘Ma’ Fry. He had married Beatrice ten years earlier who was the girl who
had been Charles Hoare’s mistress. Mrs Fry ‘ruled with a rod of iron’ and the boys
endured a tough regime to prepare them for a career at sea but they also enjoyed
sporting and other activities.
Little money was left to run the training ship so C B Fry had to use his connections to
raise funds for it to continue and it could no longer provide free education so had to
take boys from the poor houses. By the First World War ‘Illovo’ was not big enough
so was replaced by the ‘President’. The training ships were accessed by a rowing boat
via a pier. The original pier was further up river than the one built for the ‘President’
whose remains you can still see today. During the war, there were Admiralty
Inspections and it received very good reports.
Between the wars a sailing tender ‘Vishalla’ was purchased to provide sailing
experience. In 1930 there was a disastrous fire and many of the buildings had to be
rebuilt. Music was very important to Mercury life and the band took part in many
local events. The band was led by Chief Officer ‘Bandy’ McGavin who is buried in
Hamble churchyard.
During the Second World War many of TS Mercury officers, who had been in the
reserve service, were recalled to sea. Previously most of the boys went to the Royal
Navy but from this time many more of the boys joined the Merchant Navy.
In 1946 Mrs Fry died and this was not mourned by many Mercury boys and in 1950
C B Fry was persuaded to retire.

For those interested the actual training ship Mercury during the grandfather’s time still exists today. It is the famous HMS Gannet and is open to the public at Chatham Dockyard. I personally have not yet visited but ,one assumes, it is now sans any Ma Fry type character
HMS GANNETT.webp (164.3KiB)

six of the best

1,163109

Unread postSep 14, 2023#2

Nautical training ships of the past were well known for their strict discipline. I have read somewhere that there were such training ships still in use until the late 1960s. Back then as most here will know UK school corporal punishment was still very much in use. So the nautical schools were doing much the same as both state and private/public schools of the time. However UK state schools were not permitted to cane across bare backsides. Although There are plenty of references to public schools using the birch and cane across bare backsides in the past.

There must be plenty of these who were youngsters of the 1960s who trained on these ships still around. These ‘ships’ were not necessarily ships in the true sense some were landed based establishments. I have no idea if the land based ‘ships’ used the same methods of discipline.

Nowadays youngsters can join the Royal Navy at 16, parental permission if under 18 and no active service under 18. The Sea Cadets are a UK uniformed youth charity which I am told is not officially Royal Navy supported unlike Army or Air Force cadets, odd.

Unread postSep 15, 2023#3

Great stuff Sir John 2!  As six of the best observes, “nautical training ships of the past were well known for their strict discipline” and flagellation seems to have featured in the Naval discipline of young persons long after it was abandoned for sailors of mature age.

A certain amount of information on Naval chastisement of younger members of the Senior Service has appeared here in the past, some of it not totally reliable.  In the latter category were the notorious ‘caned WRENS letters’, fake readers’ letters allegedly written by a short-lived female editor of the then flagging Sunday Telegraph in an effort to boost circulation.  Dealing with the claimed caning of young female recruits to the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) they made amusing reading.

The caned WRENS may have been fiction, but Beatrice Holme Sumner, for 61 years from 1885 to 1946 effectively in command of the Training Ship Mercury private Naval training establishment discussed by Sir John 2 in his foundation contribution above, appears to have been only too dreadfully real.  Those interested will find a little more information about her interesting life and training methodology in this Spectator review from August 1985 of the book  ‘The Captain’s Lady’ by Ronald Morris about the life of Beatrice Sumner and published in the same year.

Those clicking on the above link who have sensibly set their browser to eschew non-secure sites will be met by a warning message as the Spectator archive where the page resides is an http not an https site.  As far as I can see it is completely safe, the Spectator just hasn’t paid one of the relevant bodies the iniquitous fee for the checks necessary to merit that terminal ‘s’, so just click through to the page.

six of the best

1,163109

Unread postSep 15, 2023#4

I too have heard of/read of WRENS being caned.  However I was lead to believe this was ‘informal’ discipline during training. Barracks blocks/dormitories were often in the control or a NCO, often a corporal or  equivalent rank in naval terms. This would have been a young lady of only a few years older than her charges. Similar to the the prefect system of boarding schools

We must remember that in the past, perhaps 1940s to 1960s, many of the WRENS, girls in their late teens/early twenties, may have experienced corporal punishment at school and been spanked at home. So an unofficial caning as a WREN would not have seemed that strange, an unofficial punishment rather than  a formal one through official channels. Like other corporal punishment it would have been over and done with far quicker than a formal punishment like confined to barracks, cleaning duties or loss of privileges.

All that said I know very little about WRENS other than it was first formed during WW1 then disbanded until WW2. The WRENS then continued until 1993 when girls became part of the Royal Navy. As to what sort of girls joined the WRENS: I am unsure but the accepted  image is of smart well educated girls is usual. WRENS seen in films are generally seen working with male naval officers. A good few WRENS distinguished themselves working at Bletchley Park as cipher clerks during WW2.

Unread postSep 15, 2023#5

Hello six of the best,

Again my congratulations on, and my thanks for, your efforts to keep the Forum going.  But we surely cannot really have a situation where I am dismissing reports of young ladies being caned as fiction and you are saying that they probably were caned, and on the bottom too.  It is contrary to the basic laws of nature as demonstrated here over so many years and who can tell what dreadful consequences may ensue!  

For clarification and the avoidance of doubt (thank you Sarajane, who in later years reputedly morphed into Lotta Nonsense for that excellent and useful phrase and indeed for the sound advice contained in the accompanying contribution) the earliest mentions of the caned Wrens letters in this estimable Forum are to be found here and here.  There is subsequent discussion in a short thread entitled Caned Wrens and there have been subsequent mentions of them on various occasions since.  The letters, published in early 2006, were allegedly compiled by journalist Sarah Sands, then briefly the editor of The Sunday Telegraph,  and presented as readers’ letters in an effort to spice the paper up a bit.

But seriously, or in reality perhaps not quite so seriously, your suggestion that errant WRNS girls might have been caned by “a young lady of only a few years older than her charges. Similar to the the prefect system of boarding schools” really does send me a signal that I must progress a current project, even though I can’t quite convince myself that readers are ready for it.  More anon in other threads – or not, as the case may be! 

Sir John 2

60283

Unread postSep 24, 2023#6

My belated thanks to Another Lurker for providing his usual excellent additional information . His link to The Spectator review of The Captain’s Lady was most informative although sadly gave no direct collaboration of the cane welding activities of Ma Fry herself allegedly suffered by the grandfather of my informant .

However I note the ceremonial floggings delivered by the Petty Officer referred to were particularly harsh with substantial recuperation times. One would assume that these were for more serious offences and that minor infractions might well have been dealt with by Ma Fry herself.. She certainly comes across as the sort of lady who would have no qualms about delivering 12 crackers with a cane across a bare backside. I would like to think this was a possibility as opposed to a grandfather, for no logical reason. completely making up such an experiences.

The various stories regarding WRENS will always persist..Whilst appreciating the vivid imaginations of most of he authors I think one must be realistic of the likelihood of what might have occurred  when an authoritarian male is put in charge of instructing young teenage ladies. I actually find it quite hard to believe that over the many years a that at least one young WREN did not feel the cane on her bottom and probably a few were subject to a hand spanking.

Whilst on the subject of authoritarian males and young ladies I was reminded of the Court case relating to an instructor at Hendon Police College circa 1980? Sadly,presumably because of the age, I have been unable to locate any reference to it on the internet but it may be that somebody else will also recollect the case.

My recollection is that a male instructor at Hendon Police college would in private give a strong verbal dressing down to teenage female cadets whom he believed was not making the grade . Then , no doubt inspired by the activities of schoolteachers of a type frequently mentioned in this forum, the young lady would be required to touch her toes . Her skirt then would be lifted.. her underwear and tights yanked down and her completely bare bottom soundly hand spanked.

One such young lady ,who had apparently failed to compete the training course later raised strong objection to her treatment and her complaint resulted in the instructor being charged and the case going to Court with appropriate press coverage. . The instructor was actually acquitted as it was considered unsafe to convict on uncorroborated evidence … not one other cadet had come forward.

I started this thread in an attempt to encourage some slightly off topic CP posts . Hopefully it will not just fade into the archives.

Unread postSep 25, 2023#7

Hello SirJohn 2,

Ask, or even just mention, and ye shall receive, if I can find it!

In this case it comes courtesy of Colin Farrell who has done magnificent service for our mutual interest over the years, but who now, with almost a  year since the last update, may be finding the burden of maintaining his massive, complex and comprehensive corpun website hard to bear.

Here on the corpun site are Daily Mail and The Times reports from September 1981 of the trial of Inspector David Henley on a charge of allegedly spanking a trainee policewoman on the bare bottom a year earlier  at the Hendon Police College during his employment as an instructor at the college.

It should be noted that Inspector Henley denied the charge, was found not guilty by the jury verdict and was awarded costs.   There is no mention of a conviction being regarded as unsafe, which would usually imply that the case was marginal.  The award of costs to Inspector Henley suggests that this  one was pretty clear cut.

Sir John 2

60283

Unread postSep 25, 2023#8

My dear A L
Your usual excellent speedy response.Thank you.

Hopefully we will get some other contributors for this thread in the not too distant future.  The forum could definitely do with a tad more activity..  I shall be off again soon but will try and come up with at least one more post before I go.

Unread post4:33 PM – 1 day ago#9

Apologies for this very weak post which is some way off topic but I was catching up on internet browsing recently and came across the following on “Harry’s” excellent site. It made me smile so I thought I would share as posts have been somewhat limited of late.

This is from an article about spanking in stage productions although in this particular instance there is no actual spanking. I wonder if this is one of the most original excuses for being “caught”with a young lady across your knee with her skirt up and in the process of striking her bottom with a ping pong paddle.

The Motor Trade (1991), by Canadian playwright Norm Foster (1949- ), is a comedy set in a showroom of Doral Valley Motors. One of the topics of conversation between disillusioned Dan Torelli and cynical Phil Moss is Jerry, another car salesman of their acquaintance, recently deceased, ‘who liked spanking his secretary with a ping-pong paddle’. Phil goes on to describe the scene in vivid detail:

The time we walked into his office unannounced and he had what’s her name across his knee. That was her name? Terry! Terry something. And he’s got her across his knee, her skirt hiked up, ping-pong paddle up in the air and in we walk! (Laughing) And there they are, both of them just staring at us in shock. And Jerry says… he says a spider went up her skirt and he was killing it for her. And you say… you say, ‘Damn, I guess that means we’re in for some rain now.’