Spanking Dennis the Menace

Dennis the Menace is famous for having got spanked all the time back in the day. This is the first context in which I learned about him from my British friends: the cartoon character who got spanked a lot.

Well, Dennis is celebrating his 60th birthday this week, and an article in the Scotsman makes a point to mention his regular run-ins with corporal punishment:

For older readers, the memory of Dennis the Menace and how he terrorised Walter the Softie, the bow-tied goodie-two-shoes, is invariably wrapped up with the “slipperings” delivered at the end of the strip by his moustached father. So frequently was Dennis beaten, that the scriptwriters would leave the final panel blank and allow the artists to indulge themselves with seasonal variations, so he was leathered with a cricket bat in summer, a broomstick at Hallowe’en. When it was his granny delivering the punishment, “The Demon Whacker”, made from elephant hide, was used.

The slipper was last wielded in 1980, one of a number of changes to the comic strip over the decades. Maurice Heggie, a former editor of The Dandy and a historian of The Beano says: “When I worked on The Beano in the 1970s every second adventure ended with corporal punishment, but that was what it was like in the schools. One of the great things about Dennis and how we operate is that the scripts are written in-house and week to week so whatever is affecting kids in the UK always influences the scriptwriters and, as corporal punishment was phased out in the school, so it was phased out in the comic.

It seems like a birthday spanking would be most appropriate!