I picked up a fascinating book at the airport the other day (because, after all, the bookshelves in my house aren’t filled with at least a hundred unread books – I confess to being far better at choosing them than reading them!).
This one lasted me for the duration of a short-ish flight and connecting train journey, and concerned “The Gangs of Liverpool” that made my home city (about which I’ll be writing more in the coming days) somewhat notorious in the 1870s.
One particular paragraph about some teenage miscreants caught my eye:
The ringleader…was sentenced to a spell in a reformatory, while the others were imprisoned for a week and given twelve strokes of the birch. The magistrate warned the parents that this was the last time they could expect such leniency.
Leniency, eh? I suspect it wouldn’t feel that way to a lass* tied over the whipping frame on admission to the jail, trying to take her dozen strokes as bravely as she could. But later, in her cell, as her marks were inspected by her fellow inmates – as must surely have been the ritual – she’d learn that 24 or 36 were more the norm, and would vow never to cross the path of the law again…
* and yes, I know that judicial punishment of females in the UK had been abolished by then, but a little inauthenticity can be allowed to creep in even for someone with an authenticity fetish like mine!
I am sure that a ‘good birching, in those Liverpool reformatory for a female , would consist of 25 swishes with the birch. That I am sure would be the normalcy of such judicial punishments, meted out on those naughty women. And rightly so.