Prefects were almost invariably prominent school sportsmen. Academic achievement might get you priv, but seldom prefect. Thus they tended to be big and brawny, and by all accounts they laid it on extremely painfully. Happily, as I’ve said, I was never on the receiving end!
Not very long after I’d left the school the prefects voluntarily decided to abandon caning, the swinging 60s were just beginning and even the prefects must have been affected by the increasingly liberal ideas of those times. As a result of their decision the then headmaster, Mr K R Imeson, a true gentleman, a brilliant headmaster and teacher, and the man who got me through A level maths, decided to abandon caning himself, not that he ever used the cane a great deal anyway, at least by the standards of those times.
Caned by the Prefect5
