The Spanking Writers

Sex workers had it tough in the time of Emperor Charlemagne:

Should a prostitute be found in a man’s home, he should be made to carry her, on his shoulders, to the market place where she would be whipped. Should he refuse to carry her, then he was to be whipped with her.

I’d hazard a guess that the carrying option would have been the more popular. As would have been skinnier working girls.

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I’ve been reading about The Red Lodge, Britain’s first reformatory for girls.The enlightened founder believed that the girls could be educated without regular recourse to corporal punishment. But I can imagine one resident pushing her luck too far: absconding for a third time, perhaps, having been given a very clear final warning.

She would be brought before the Governors. That, in itself, would cause her to quake: any bravado would have been long abandoned by the time she was led into the room. They would ask for an explanation; she would have none. They would warn her of the dire fate that might befall a homeless girl wandering the streets of Victorian Bristol. They would ask whether she recalled her previous warning:

“Yes, sir.”

“Then we cannot allow this to go unpunished.” They would confer amongst themselves, before the Chairman of the Governors turned back to her. “We intend to make an example of you, girl. We cannot allow the staff her to be undermined, and you were given very clear warnings.”

“Please, sir. Have mercy…”

“You are to be birched at nine prompt tomorrow morning.” The Chairman would turn to the warden: “Please make sure the girl is washed and put into a clean dress tomorrow morning, and bring her to the Oak Room at five to nine. Now take her away…”

–
A small group would gather in the Oak Room the following morning: the Chairman, with birch rods in hand. A governor or two. The warden of the reformatory. And the girl.

She’d be ordered to remove her dress, before being tied over the end of a long oak table. The Chairman would stand back: “I think we should wait until nine, gentlemen.” And so they’d pause, listening for the bells of the neighbouring church. Counting each of the nine peals. Knowing that the other girls in the reformatory would also be counting, would also be holding their breath.

Pausing, once silence reigned.

And then beginning her thrashing: hard, measured, teaching a lesson that even the most tolerant of reformatories knows how to punish when punishment is due.

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Sometimes a mere photograph of a book cover can generate hours of daydreaming. Mind, not any old book, but the Punishment Book used at Llandeilo Workhouse in Wales from 1878-1907:

One example: three young inmates who…

… instead of going to school absconded and walked to Llanelly where they were seen wandering about by the Police and locked up”. The Master retrieved them the following day, for which he “applied 6 strokes with a birch”.

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Drum roll…Curtain opens…

My Lords, Ladies and gentlemen… (and the rest of you )

We are delighted to announce…

For the first time ever…

“The Spanking Writers”, our book!

Yes, folks, it’s true. We’ve finally made it into print. We’ve just taken delivery of our own copies of the anthology which brings together the highlights of the first two years of our blog (that would be 2006 and 2007). And it looks wonderful: hardback, a lovely dust jacket which you can remove if you want to read it in public, and so many fond memories as we read through the entries that we love the most.

If you fancy buying a copy, you can get it here. (It should be on Amazon before long, but we get to keep more pennies if you buy it from our own store. Not that we’re ever going to be millionaires, mind, but it’d be nice not to lose money on the deal). Happy reading!

Fiona Locke, the best-selling author of “Over the Knee” has this to say about the book:

“Discipline has never been sweeter. Quite simply some of the best spanking erotica you will read anywhere. The authors are imaginative, literary and above all, genuine.”

(Should we say something like “great gift idea - buy early for Christmas”? Or just “why not treat yourself to a little relaxing reading before falling asleep…”)

Here endeth the commercial break.

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One little phrase in an item reproduced from a newspaper’s archive really caught my imagination recently. In a story from the start of the last century, of a young criminal “sentenced to 14 days’ imprisonment and 10 lashes”, the Salmon Arm Observer commented that:

It is interesting to note that it was necessary to send to the coast for a lash, this being the first time such a thing has been required.

Oh, the anticipation…

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Next up, in our trawl through the court archives of the Old Bailey: young Maria Gurdham, aged 18, who was punished on this day in 1799.

She’d been taken on 1 March in as a servant by John Allingham, landlord of the “Greendragon”, a pub in Hart Street (known these days as Bloomsbury Way). She came with character references “from Princes-street, Westminster.” Yet on the 18th, her new employer noticed that various items were missing from his bedroom.

“We accused her of it”, the landlord explained, but she denied it. Yet her guilt was in little doubt: the items had subsequently been recovered from the local pawnbroker, Samuel Morritt of nearby Long Acre, who swore that he had received them from young Maria.

Up to that point, of course, she must have hoped to get away with her crime. But I’m imagining the conversation playing out:

Allingham: So you still proclaim your innocence?

Maria: Of course, sir.

Allingham: Then how do my possessions come to be at Mr Morritt’s pawn shop?

Maria: I have no idea, sir. You’d have to ask him that.

Allignham: But I did. And he assures me that it was you who sold him the items in question.

Maria: Please sir. I can explain. Have mercy on me. Please don’t send me before the court.

But before the court she was taken, where she was:

indicted for feloniously stealing, two shirts, value 8s. a linen sheet, value 3s. a pair of nankeen breeches, value 3s. a dimity waistcoat, value 2s. a pair of cotton stockings, value 12d.

She was tried before the second Middlesex jury, whose names are recorded for posterity: Thomas Hill, James Ward, Joseph Welch, Matthew Long, Henry Young, Thomas Brown, William Nash, John Morgan, Joseph Leach, James Watts, Hezekiah Denby and Robert Thompson.

They found her guilty, of course, and Lord Kenyon passed sentence:

The prosecutor having consented to take her into his service again, the Court ordered her to be privately whipped , and discharged.

“Having consented to take her into his service again?”!! Do I sense that, despite her criminal ways, Mr. Allingham might have had something of a soft spot for young Maria? If so, might he have stood outside, waiting while she was whipped, before taking the sobbing, remorseful girl back to the Green Dragon to comfort her?

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An Easter Sunday wander along an incredibly cold Eton High Street might have been expected to inspire kinky thoughts. After all, the school is synonymous with discipline and birchings.

In the event, it was so cold that we didn’t make it as far as the College itself, turning back towards the comparative comfort of Costa Coffee. As we crossed the road, I happened to glance up – and look what I found:

So, it was deemed that the local girls would benefit from a traditional Etonian-style education, was it? One imagines that the experience must have been fully authentic – the masters strict, the birchings soundly administered at the front of the class.

Further along the street, we came across the village stocks, abandoned in front of (I kid you not) a half-timbered Chinese restaurant.

And around the corner? Could it be – I so wanted to tie Haron to what we guessed to be the whipping post, but it was far, far too cold!

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I called Haron in glee the other morning, as I realised that the meeting I was about to attend was to take place in Newgate Street. The fabulous “Victorian Dictionary” provides the historical context, with a journalist’s description of attending a flogging at the infamous old Newgate prison:

Ten o’clock, and the prisoners were waiting. Through grim passages and corridors and across the yard where the gallows is erected, and so into a bleak hall, bare of furniture except for a table and a form or two, and over against the whitewashed wall on the other side the whipping apparatus - an odd looking contrivance with holes to clasp the wrists in, and secure hampering for the feet at the ankles. Then the executioner produced his cat-o’-nine tails… The handle was about two feet in length, and the “tails” about fourteen inches.

The 25 strokes took “exactly a minute and three-quarters”. If anyone out there would care to recreate the whipping frame and ‘cat’ for us, I should feel it to be my duty to provide a modern-day report on the efficacy of the punishment…

Sadly, my meeting was rather more mundane, although I spent some of it with a rather faraway gleam in my eyes…

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As promised last week, here is an extract from one of the book we unearthed in the fine private library where we are members.

This comes from “Public Schools for Girls”, ed. Burstall and Douglas; 29 June 1911.

It is hardly too much to say that, apart from orphanages and certain schools of restricted scope, public boarding schools for girls did not exist in England before 1870. Private boarding schools, of every degree of merit and demerit, were plentiful, and offered almost the only alternative, before 1850, to home education.

In most cases, the training provided by these private schools was, intellectually, an extension of the teaching by governesses and masters at home: manually and physically an extension of family discipline.

Aaah, yes. I can well imagine a girl’s parents having long conversations by the fire about how they should like to find a school for young Millicent that would keep her under the firm control she is used to at home.

The dormitories, it seemed, were particularly strictly governed:

“The rule that no girl is to enter another girl’s cubicle is very strictly enforced; in some cases it is the only rule…

In many instances, absolute silence is required in all dormitories; in others, speaking is restricted, for example after all girls are in bed, conversation is allowed for a fixed period, which is rarely exceeded…

The enforcing of rules and order in the dormitory is in most cases entrusted to elder girls, specially appointed for this purpose.”

I imagine, these elder girls would be exempt from the rule that proscribes entering another girl’s cubicle. A curtain would be drawn after she entered, and the whole dorm would hear, but not see, the cane cracking down onto their friend’s bottom.

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