This episode from the schooldays of Lawrence Olivier has stuck with me since I’d read it a couple of years ago, to the point where I had to go and look it up again. In most accounts of public school punishments and supreme rules of prefects we see the events from the point of view of the recepient of the punishment.
Not so in Olivier’s case:
The High Church was good on incense, slums and stark schools. St Edward’s was stark… Prefects could beat their juniors, or give up to two hundred lines as punishment, to be copied from the works of Virgil…
[Olivier] recalled that he once had a hand in unjustly beating a smaller boy, Bader, who was uppity and terribly good at games, and who had incidentally bowled him out in a house cricket match. Olivier was jealous, and had him hauled up before the president of his form room for cheek:
“And I think I had the luxury, because I had made the complaint, of delivering two of the blows, and I simply loathed myself.”
(From “Olivier: the authorised biography” by Terry Coleman, p. 15)
Surely one gets over that sort of loathing with practice?
Well, judging by some of the prefects I know, one apparently does get over it
I think it speaks well of Olivier that he had regrets about his actions back then. Thinking about the men I know who were prefects back in the days when they had the right to corporally punish boys, those who took advantage of that with no regrets, continued on with their lives pretty much taking advantage of everyone – and so too have their sons.