There have been many posts about canings and slipperings at school, and about the comparison between the punishments meted out to boys and to girls. I’m sure that a lot of these are true, although there are some obvious fantasies, and there are also numerous challenges to the veracity of some of the postings. In the notes below I recount my recollections of a junior school in the late 1950s in London, in what was then the Borough of Willesden (now part of Brent). I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can, stating only what I saw with my own eyes, or what I am otherwise convinced is true. There was, indeed, a great difference between the punishments used for the boys and for the girls in that school; but it’s also true that on at least one occasion a girl was slippered, on her bottom, with her skirt raised, in front of a mixed class of around forty boys and girls.
