The Spanking Writers

I got my hands on a very interesting book, “Letters to Schoolmasters” by one F.W. Felkin, who, it seems, had had a very long career as a teacher, and somewhere in the 1930s published this book. Each chapter is a letter to a different type of teacher: the headmaster, the new master, the subject teachers, etc. It’s exactly the sort of stuffy pomposity that you would expect from an old schoolmaster in the 30s.

He opines:

“Some Headmasters, when a complaint is preferred against a boy by a master or against a master by a parent, feel an instinctive desire to find the master in the wrong. The desire should not be instinctive; it should be forced from the Headmaster by sheer justice and his more instant desire should be to back his colleague. The discipline of such Headmasters is usually bad: it is founded on some hazy notion of love for the boys, whereas a schoolmaster’s love should be that high form of love which we usually call justice.”

I love the “hazy notion of love for the boys”! You wouldn’t want a teacher to be fond of the pupils, that’s just namby-pamby and beyond the pale, frankly!

He also offers this opinion about the newfangled tendency for accepting foreign pupils:

“A dangerous stunt, with special temptation for Headmasters of newspaper reputation, is the international one. Foreign teachers and boys have much to learn from us, but we have little to learn from them and that little is better left unlearnt. …Of course our public schoolboy has his vices, but they are not the continental ones which emasculate.”

Appalling, isn’t it, how continental sins just seep into decent public schools, infecting good English boys with their foreign ways.

…Wouldn’t you love to have this teacher at your school? In role-play, the teacher characters are often quite stuffy and pompous, but they have a lot to learn from this guy.

Tomorrow I’ll give you a little glimpse into F.W. Felkin’s attitude to discipline.

In this new episode of SpankingCast, our spanking podcast, Abel reads his new, exclusive schoolgirl spanking story.

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Of all school punishments when I was at school, suspension always struck me as the most ludicrous. If one plotted the hierarchy of ways in which offenders were dealt, it ran – in increasing order of severity – something like this:

• “fatigues” – for misbehaviour during Combined Cadet Force afternoons; not treated terribly seriously, typically consisting of polishing the rifles, sweeping the range, or tidying the kit store
• “job” – after-school litter-picking duty or similar, awarded and supervised by prefects
• “WD” – a Work Detention, for poor academic performance (e.g. submitting homework that was slapdash)
• “PD” – a Punishment Detention, for misbehaviour
• Saturday detention
• cane from your housemaster
• cane from the headmaster
• suspension – awarded, typically, by a housemaster
• expulsion – the last resort, and always the headmaster’s prerogative.

Of course, I was angelic throughout my school years, and never had to experience any of the above. But I’ve been reflecting on it recently whilst pondering punishments for girls in my oft-imagined schools, and the nonsense of “suspension” has become increasingly clear – for surely a caning would be a more severe, and more dreaded form of discipline?

For sure, suspension would humiliating, a girl’s very absence being a public sign of the school’s displeasure with her. And some girls might find that being suspended came with painful consequences at home – although that could apply for pretty much of any of the punishments on the list, were their parents / guardians to be especially strict. But a few days at home? Not that punishing, to my mind.

I’d have to fix that, in my schools. It certainly wouldn’t be an “either/or” case of cane or suspension: the latter would come with the former guaranteed.

I can see two options – before, or after. In the before situation, a girl would be informed of her suspension and then caned. Inevitably, there’d be a degree more severity than for a standard dose of corporal punishment – perhaps eight strokes as a minimum, rather than a usual maximum of six, or maybe administered on the bare rather than over her skirt of knickers? And, of course, afterwards she’d be escorted by the headmaster’s secretary (or perhaps a prefect) back to her classroom to collect her belongings; the lesson underway would have to pause whilst she gathered her things, the other girls looking on in silent sympathy, knowing that their friend would have been caned moments before.

Or after? “You are suspended from school for three days. You’ll report to me at eight o’clock on your first morning back, to tell me how you’ve spent your time. And you will be caned before the start of school”. That has the advantage of giving her time to contemplate – as well, if the number of strokes was dependent on her conduct whilst out of school – to incentivising her to use her absence in diligent study.

Then again, there’s the “cane her out and cane her back in again” option. Or how about:

• every morning whilst suspended, the girl has to report to the local education committee’s punishment centre, to receive six strokes of the cane
• or, every morning, she has to report to school – but half an hour earlier than usual: the headmaster canes her in his study  before assembly, and then sends her straight home.

They rather work for me, too…

I’m travelling into London for the day, and I’ve completely forgotten to bring a book to read on the train.

What happens to girls who forget their books for school?

Well, at first the girl would probably wonder if she can conceal it, somehow sharing a book with her desk neighbour. But then she’d think better of it: what if the teacher thought they were talking in class? Then they’d both be in trouble.

So she would admit her forgetfulness to the teacher before the lesson as he’s walking into the room. She would ruefully follow him to his desk, where he would tell her to bend over it’s side and raise her skirt.

Five stinging smacks of the ruler would follow. They would smart, but the punishment wouldn’t be as awful as having to go through all this in front of all her classmates, particularly that boy she likes.

He has seen her knickers now, she’d think as she wanders back to her desk. Did he like the view?

I found myself earlier in the week in a rather lovely little hotel near Blackpool. Despite a somewhat grim location and grey exterior, the inside was a delight – family-run, friendly, recently refurbished and comfortable.

The only downside was the location of the room they allocated to me. Being the first in the corridor, it was nearest the fire doors to/from the stairs and hence to the bar, the other bedrooms, the staff quarters. After going – relatively early – to bed, I was therefore continually disturbed by the coming and going of my neighbours, the creaky door swinging open and shut every few minutes.

It could have annoyed me, had I not imagined myself to be the resident tutor in a girls’ boarding school. I’d have the corner room, at the end of the corridor of the girls’ dorms. The housemaster would administer any punishments to the girls last thing in the evening, after they’d got ready for bed.

Each swinging of the door therefore marked a girl heading to his study to be caned, or returning tearfully after being disciplined. As tutor, I’d not know which girls were wending their way to see him – just that there’d be a few such pyjama-clad pupils passing my room each evening.

Of course, one could expand the horizons of the fantasy. The tutor’s bedroom would be below the housemaster’s study; each stroke of the cane, every loud sob would echo clearly through the floorboards. And one girl returning from her punishment would be a good girl I tutored, surprisingly in serious trouble, who might knock on my door on her way back to her dorm for sympathy and a cuddle…

I had to get up early so that I could finish some work before going out for the day. It reminded me of some early morning extra gym lessons I had to have in second year, because I couldn’t vault a horse. I had to be at school an hour early, so that the gym master put me through my paces. (I still can’t vault a horse, and I still haven’t forgiven him.)

Of course, my current fantasy about early morning tutorials is slightly different. It’s not just for gym, it’s for any lesson where a girl might need help. And it doesn’t just involve studying or working out, it also involves a final slippering, to focus the girl on the school day ahead. A bit like detention, but it’s not a punishment, it’s help. Yes, the slippering is also helping.

…I should never be allowed to run a school.

The slave girl is lying on her pallet in the dark, curled up against the chill of the night. Her tunic is bunched up, and her right hand is thoughtlessly tracing raised welts on her bottom. She can feel each one, six in all. She remembers them falling. Mistress had said, this was only the beginning.

The girl keeps going through the events of the last few days, wondering how she could have acted differently. She hadn’t tried to attract the attention of Mistress’s son; she hadn’t thought he would ever have a reason to notice her. And yet, somehow, he did – maybe when she was going past with a platter of fruit, so focused on not dropping any that she didn’t notice him staring.

Notice her he did, and this very morning he caught her as she walked across the atrium, and pressed her to the wall to steal a kiss.

Perhaps, he biggest mistake was that she didn’t mind. She enjoyed it – he was a handsome young man, strong, smelling fresh with massage oil. She allowed herself to enjoy the kiss, to sink into it, and to respond with her own lips and tongue.

Perhaps, if she’d fought, Mistress wouldn’t have been so infuriated when she saw them. Mistress isn’t one of the women who think that dalliances with slave girls don’t matter: she insists that her son must stay faithful to his bride. She sent him away, promising a stern talking-to, and then turned to the girl.

“Come with me,” she said curtly. “I’ll teach you to flaunt yourself before men.”

It would have to be a painful lesson, and a long one. Mistress has decreed that the girl is to get six lashes every day for the next ten days, so that it sinks in properly. Mistress is going to do the punishing herself, just to make sure the lesson was properly delivered.

The girl lies in her hard bed, counting the weals with her fingertips. There are only six there so far. Only.

She wonders how she can steal another kiss.

The Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology contained a rather fascinating article in its March 1916 edition, entitled “Punitive Pain and Humiliation”. The author, Marquis Eaton – a Chicago lawyer – starts with a discussion of the 1630 penalty for poisioning (“boiling in oil, water or lead”), but quickly moves onto more palatable topics:

The whipping act passed in 1530 required vagrants, without sex distinction, to be whipped naked at the cart’s tail; the statute remaining unchanged until the 39th year of Queen Elizabeth, when it was so modified that the culprits were permitted clothing from the waist line down.

In 1769 at Nottingham a young woman, 19 years of age, was found guilty of obtaining goods under false pretenses and was ordered stripped to the waist and publicly whipped on market day in the market place. It was not until 1791 that this statute was amended to forbid the whipping of female vagrants.

It is only recently that the Dutch abolished the public whipping of women… In Germany and Switzerland the magistrates and judges possessed almost unlimited power in this matter. There were towns in which they placed female offenders in an ingenious kind of machine wherein they could not make the slightest movement in order that the blows might fall all the more conveniently. One of these instruments may still be seen, it is said, in the old prison at the Hague. In some instances female prisoners were allowed to retain one garment and the flagellation was performed by a woman; but in general there was no idea of making any such sacrifice to decency…

One finds it often asserted that this administration of the lower discipline (a daily occasion in the police courts of Holland and elsewhere) was considered sufficiently interesting that visitors came in groups and paid the officials for the privilege of witnessing…

Ignoring all the evidence, those remain who deplore the receding popularity of the rod as an instrument of correction. They urge it for the larger service in the home, the school, and in institutions for education and reform.

And for kinky fun, of course! More from the article in another post soon…

It has occurred to me recently that tops tend to have favourite implements, which people associate with them. My dear Abel is famous for his love of canes, which he swings with considerable gusto.

For a while I didn’t realise this, but as a top I’ve also developed a favourite implement, and it worries me somewhat that it tends to be the hairbrush. I seem to feel a particular affinity with brushes, and love to apply them to bottoms squirming over my knee. The reason this worries me is that brushes are quite evil; this is well known. Am I therefore evil?

Be that as it may, I’m not about to reject the brush. I need to reflect upon why it attracts me so much. Perhaps, it’s the feeling of spontaneity: when a punishment is necessary, I grab the first thing my eye falls on, which is my own hairbrush on the nightstand. Maybe it’s that I’m never travelling without a brush, and therefore am never without an implement. There’s also the intimacy of the over-the-knee position, my favourite both as a top and a bottom. Long live the brush, and its evil pleasures.

That said, my caning practice is going very well, thank you for asking.

Our wonderful (?) Tory leaders are active in their promotion of the concept of the “Big Society”. I think I get the general idea – that activities previously carried out by the state should instead be undertaken for profit by their private sector friends, or (better still) at no cost whatsoever as local volunteers step forward to put public sector workers out of jobs. [Excuse party political rant - I rather got carried away there!]

Anyway… I took to wondering how this might play out in respect of the discipline of young ladies. I picture the network of Punishment Centres around the country, to which girls have traditionally been sent to be birched, being disbanded at the stroke of the Prime Ministerial pen. Instead, a worthy group of gentlemen would have offered their services free.

No longer would a girl have to present herself at a Centre run by the local council or courts. Rather, she’d be given the address of a private house locally, to which she would be required to report at a specified date and time. Each of the gentlemen in the scheme would have set aside a suitable room in their property for the administration of corporal punishment. With the help of a small set-up grant from the government, they’d have installed a punishment bench; the birches would have been gathered free of charge from the local park.

The girl would knock nervously on the door, and be shown inside. The gentleman concerned – sometimes kindly, sometimes less so – would show her to the room and allow her privacy to strip and position herself over the bench. And then he’d return to tie the leather restraints in place, and to administer her flogging.

You know, I’m rather warming to this “Big Society”. And if any young ladies want to help test the effectiveness of such a scheme, my study stands waiting. We could even send the photos to that nice Mr Cameron (or not, as the case might be).