Given our inexperience (and possibly blood lust), I think that the Prefects’ meetings were conducted in a fair and reasonably balanced way, allowing the usual assumption that ‘if you weren’t guilty, you wouldn’t have been here in the first place!!’ If found ‘guilty’ (and most were), the penalty was discussed and agreed by all the prefects before the guilty party was advised [1956].

In 1956, as the strokes were administered, prefects sometimes gave a score out of 10 for what the stroke earned. They signalled it by holding up fingers out of sight of the victim. A recipient writes of ‘the whistle of the cane and the biting pain after the first stroke. You felt the second one also, but after that the pain numbed the remainder.’ When Brian Taylor (Captain 1928) caned a boy for smoking, ‘the offender’s trousers burst into flames. Some wax matches had ignited in his pockets.’