“A delay like that would have saved Wilson some embarrassment at one swimming sports in the 1870s, when he noticed fearful bruises on the back (sic) and legs of young Ernest Jackson, and learnt to his horror that they were the marks of his own tawse. ‘I always bruised very easily’, Jackson wrote later.”

1920s: “Masculinity was at a high pitch in the boarding-houses, where prefects ruled supreme and often inflicted corporal punishment. Its results were visible in summer at the school baths where boys, by tradition naked, often wore ugly stripes.”