The Spanking Writers

I find myself this evening in the comparative comfort of a Georgian country house in the South-West of England.

They’ve thoughtfully provided a history of the property in the bedroom. Its early years saw lavish entertainment: Pitt the Younger visited whilst Prime Minister. But (and this is where it gets interesting) it was soon converted into a home for “ladies of gentle birth and their servants”, with preference given to the widows and daughters of clergyman and of naval and army officers.

As if that wasn’t enough to trigger my mind into kinky overdrive, they also ran:

“a school for orphaned girls, like the ladies ‘to be of gentle birth’.”

I wonder if any of the ladies here as conference delegates – or indeed of the ever-so-cute uniformed staff – are game for some historical reanactments? I rather enjoy Regency-era scenes. There’s a birch tree handily positioned next to the car park, and I’m sure I noticed its branches twitching with anticipation as my carriage pulled up…

You wouldn’t have thought that in a school survey on corporal punishment the most support would come from the pupils, but if you believe the summary of “Maltonian Digest” (No.124 from September 1969) -

- a survey of views on corporal punishment was published.   Most staff were against, one or two not, though “last resort” and “extreme circumstances” were cited.   More pupils agreed with it than staff.

I wonder if it was an anonymous survey :-/

I posted recently about branches of British public schools popping up in China. I’ve visited Shanghai a couple of times in the past few years for work, and picked up a racy (and very well-written) book after my last trip that described some of the city’s dubious past. The Pearl of the Orient was so decadent that in the late nineteenth century that one missionary commented, “If God lets Shanghai endure, he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah”.

A couple of anecdotes might appeal to our pervy readers. The city’s streets were lined with girls from the country, earning their way:

“Fear of a beating by their madam should they fail to secure a customer for the night accounted for [their] aggressiveness. In the late hours of the morning, a customer might find himself seized by the arm by a girl who would desperately plead, ‘Please help me out!’…. Once a girl was in a brothel keeper’s or madam’s hands, she had few opportunities of escaping…

It was not uncommon to see a little slave girl break away from her [male servant] on the street… If she was caught, her body would rack for days from the keeper’s cuffs and lashes””

It wasn’t just Chinese girls who appealed to the city’s “gentlemen”: the Madams “always kept their eyes open for new talent”, including foreign women:

“One madam, the mistress of the chief of police, approached a visiting Margaret Sanger in a tearoom to leave her card: the admiral of the British fleet, the madam informed her, was dropping anchor in Shanghai in the next few days and the demure-looking Sanger happened to be ‘just his type.’”

And then there was the British Vice-Consul in the 1850s, who:

“ran afoul of the Church… by taking as his mistress a pupil at a Protestant girls’ missionary school in Ningpo. When he was transferred to Foochow he took the girl with him, which so outraged the head of the school, an upright Englishwoman named Miss Aldersay, that she reported him to the Bishop of Victoria in Hong Kong. The outraged bishop denounced the Vice-Consul from his pulpit, forcing the errant diplomat to send the girl back to her home.”

One might presume that said young lady would have been especially soundly whipped on her return home. Unless she ended up stopping over in Shanghai en route, of course.

Continuing to read W.H. Auden’s biography from my previous post, I find that he wasn’t overfond of the British education system:

Every English boy of the middle class spends five years as a member of a primitive tribe ruled by benevolent or malignant demons, and then another 5 years as a citizen of a totalitarian state.

[The adults were] hairy monsters with terrifying voices and eccentric habits, completely irrational in their bouts of rage and good humour, and, it seemed, with absolute power of life and death. Those who deep in the country are a safe distance from parents spend their lives teaching little boys, behave in a way that would have them locked up in an ordinary society.

When I read in a hostory book of King John gnawing the rush-mat in his rage, it did not surprise me in the least: that was just how masters behave.

From “Auden” by Richard Davenport-Hines, p.34
Hmm… This is a little reminiscent of Abel. He doesn’t eat carpets in his rage, but you can hardly call waving sticks around rational behaviour, can you?

That wonderful kids’ TV series, “Demon Headmaster”, comes to mind…

One doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I’ve just heard the most spankable comment from the seat behind me on the train. Thanks to the joys of wireless on-board internet connections, I can report it directly to you.

A youngish lass, pretty, smartly dressed, joined at the last station; a sixth-former, if I’m guessing her age correctly. She was chatting on the phone to her dad, and sounding unusually keen to finish the conversation. Opposite her, a small boy with his family accidentally knocked a glass of milk over the table. Cue much commotion.

“It’s nothing, dad,” cute student mutters. “Just the people next to me in the coffee shop.”

‘Coffee shop’? Right. That would be the 130 miles per hour type of coffee shop that comes with a locomotive at the front and runs along tracks.

So, dear readers, who’s she going to see? What furtive liaisons are planned for her afternoon? And what would daddy do on her return home were he to find out where she’d really been for the day?

W.H. Auden’s mother had interesting ideas about discipline. He remembers:

My elder brother repeated at a tea-party, where a certain lady was present, a remark of my aunt’s to the effect that the lady smelt.

For the next few days, to all his toys, to his sponge and toothbrush and all his belongings, he found a paper pinned on which were written the words: ‘Never Repeat’.

From “Auden” by Richard Davenport-Hines, p.11

You may have noticed that we’re forever coming across things that spark our pervy interest. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we’ve now pulled some of these together onto our very own Amazon bookstore. Kinky things for kinky people, as it were. Head on over and have a look!

We get a few meagre cents back from Amazon if you buy anything, too. (So order now: if we don’t make a million before Christmas, Haron gets whipped). (Joke).

We’d welcome your suggestions, too, for things to add to the site.

I’ve been so busy at work of late that it’s been hard to believe that the festive season is almost upon us. Until yesterday evening, that as, when I stumbled upon the choir from a most eminent girls’ school performing a medley of carols in their local railway station.

I happened to have a few minutes before my train, so paused to listen. Suddenly, a phone trilled. Not mine, dear readers, but that of a young lady in the front row of the choir. She stepped out of formation; spoke anxiously into the handset; returned shamefaced to her position. The supervising staff glared at her; she avoided their eyes.

I’ve never written a choirmaster story. I’m beginning to think that that’s an omission from my repertoire

One could enjoy the thought of a press-gang, roaming a port in search of fit young men for the navy, making the mistake of rounding up a boyish young woman in a new batch of unwilling recruits. Her protests would be ignored, and once at sea, self-preservation would be the order of the day amidst so many sailors far from home comforts.

Condemned, though, to a caning for failing to strip at wash time, the truth would then be discovered. To maintain discipline on board, the captain would decree that her whipping should continue “as if she were one of the men”, before taking her to the supposed safety of his private cabin.

An alternative naval scenario presented itself in a report of a Parliamentary Petition from 1659 describing the conditions facing “white slaves” transported to the colonies:

Elizabeth Dudgeon, had dared to talk back to a guard. She was trussed up to a ship’s grating and mercilessly whipped.

One of the ship’s officers relished watching her whipped: “The corporal did not play with her, but laid it home, which I was very glad to see…she has long been fishing for it, which she has at last got to her heart’s content.”

Time for a trip to the seaside. I wonder if any friendly captains would take us to sea for a day, and look the other way politely whilst Haron was stripped and tied to a mast?

The picture above may seem slightly risque to you, but it comes from “The Times”, so that makes it OK. Right?

The incident, captured on camera phone, was described in the paper thus:

The woman left a supermarket with three legs of lamb and tried to get away from staff chasing her over a fence. When they grabbed her legs she pulled her trousers off, showing she had no underwear.

Try and guess what Abel thinks is an appropriate punishment for her! I’ll give you a hint:

P.S. If I owe you an email – terribly sorry, but I’m so, so, so busy. I’m making something cool for the blog, though, which should make up for it in the end.