We have found a curious passage in Time Magazine from Monday, Jan. 20, 1941.
Eton College (prep school), on whose playing fields the Battle of Waterloo was said (by the Duke of Wellington) to have been won, was bombed last month. When Etonians explored the ruins, they made a tingling discovery: the famed old “birching block,” over which headmasters had birched (i.e., flogged) boys’ bottoms for generations, was missing.
Although many an Etonian was disposed to let well enough alone, antiquarians searched diligently, eventually found the birching block’s remains in a bomb crater. Last week they reverently picked up the pieces, installed them in the Eton Museum.
I can well imagine some boy, who’d been flogged just before the bombing, looking at the birching block and heartily wishing: “I hope it bloody burns! And the Headmaster with it!”
Then – bang, crash, lots of dust and broken stone, the pieces of the block… The boy looking frantically for the Headmaster: “I didn’t mean it about him burning, I didn’t!”
I bet he would need to go to confession and pay the penance, even though the Headmaster is found alive and intact.