The Spanking Writers

In the last couple of posts I’ve been looking at the 1930s book “Letters to schoolmasters”, and its author’s no-nonsense attitudes to education. I’ve found some pretty useful tips for future role-play, if ever I find myself in the position of role-playing a schoolmistress.

Before we say good-bye to him, here are some ideas for how non-corporal punishment can be used in the classroom:

Punish slightly at first and, so far as school custom allows, by punishments which touch you personally, such as short passages of repetition. But remember that repetition may be the most uneven of punishments: one boy may memorize in a twelfth part of the time another takes. It is your business to rectify this: watch the self-satisfied smirk and turn it down for a wrong syllable; carry the lame dog over his stiles.

…A really forward class needs drastic measures: it takes a stubborn lot to hold out long against repeated doses of dictation (use all sorts of language like the builders of Babel!) served out to them too fast for their comfort but not so fast as to give an excuse for recalcitrancy, until the manliest spirit wilts.

I particularly enjoyed the last bit – I can just see a class of miscreants, scribbling away, languages swapping every few paragraph, with a promise of a caning to the bottom three spellers in the class.

Yesterday I gave you a glimpse at the psyche of an English schoolmaster in the 1930s. Let’s have a look at what he has to say about discipline at school. First, the gravest crime of them all:

Only with regard to one sin must a Headmaster admit no compromise – lust… bodily, sexual lust. When such becomes overt, in almost all cases it is a vice of some standing, not a sudden fall. …The vice is so infectious, so emphatically the one sin which uniquely and almost solely destroys, that always when it is known to others, and generally when it is not known, the offender must be expelled.”

I hope you’re ashamed of yourself, there in the back row.

But what about lesser crimes, the ones that don’t concern the terrible sin of lust?

“Have you sacrificed that worthy instrument, the cane, to the Moloch of a false humanitarianism which professes to rule by means of a sense of honour that is still in the course of formation? Then remember that bad teachers use it frequently, passionately or – never. The perfect teacher who never needs it does not exist.

Rejoice not, O misguided child,
That thou art seldom smacked:
The world’s hard hand will soon supply
All that thy mother lacked.”

All you aspiring educators, I hope you’re taking notes. It’s a bad teacher who never canes, I hope we’re all clear on that.

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.

Any screenplay that includes 14 mentions of the word “whip” has to be worth a read. So how on earth did I miss the film “Four Feathers” back in 2002?

The most interesting scene is set in the desert between Egypt and Sudan. Harry, one of the officers, is riding his camel at the front of the caravan, accompanied by Gustave, a French slave-driver:

Behind them ride SAADI, his Dinka assistant, and three beautiful DINKA SLAVEGIRLS.

GUSTAVE: The British soldiers rent my girls off me for three dhirrams an hour. Well worth the trip to Suakin.

He looks back at the DINKA SLAVEGIRLS, who are whispering amongst themselves.

GUSTAVE: Shut up!!… (To Saadi) Keep them quiet! What do I pay you for?!

SAADI says something to the SLAVEGIRLS in their native Dinka tongue. From the deference in his voice it’s clear the women are from a higher caste than him.

SAADI hoists some water up in a goatskin canteen. He offers the canteen to GUSTAVE. The French slave-driver is about to take a drink when he hears one of the DINKA SLAVEGIRLS murmuring in her native tongue. He wheels his camel around angrily.

GUSTAVE (To Saadi) What did she say?

Before SAADI can make an excuse for her, the DINKA SLAVEGIRL starts cursing in her native tongue, her eyes fixed on GUSTAVE.

GUSTAVE lashes out with his whip. The SLAVEGIRL’s camel rears, throwing her to the floor. GUSTAVE rides towards her, raising his whip, ready to beat her.

HARRY’s camel suddenly lurches between them. At first it looks like he’s lost control of the animal, but as he steadies his mount, it becomes clear he’s put himself in Gustave’s way.

GUSTAVE sneers. With inch perfect skill, he starts to circle HARRY, trying to get a clear view of the girl. With equal skill, HARRY twists his own camel round, keeping her blocked from him at every turn.

GUSTAVE grows impatient. He raises his whip, threatening Harry. HARRY doesn’t flinch. His eyes are fixed on Gustave the whole time. Finally GUSTAVE backs down, intimidated by the mysterious stranger. He stares at HARRY, half in anger, half in admiration.

Jolly gallant, don’t you think? Makes one proud to be British, thinking of our chaps saving local girls from whippings…

A vanilla blogger, to whom I’m not linking to spare her blushes, made me laugh the other day. She described a dialogue with her daughter:

…She had torn apart our living room and was starting to throw Candyland cards around the room despite my repeated warnings – that I said something that even surprised myself:

“M…, do you want a spanking??”

That was all it took. She stopped immediately, quickly jumped to her feet, dropping the rest of the cards, and said, “Yes!”

Whatever a spanking was — she has not been and won’t ever be spanked — she was so excited to get one. It made me laugh and we picked up the cards together.

That reminded me of a conversation I had with my parents once when I was about 12. My father returned from a parents’ evening at school disappointed at some of the reports he’d had about me. Mum said, “Well, what do you suggest we do with her? Spank her? Marry her off?”

“I vote for spanking, please,” I said hopefully.

My parents looked at me as though I was an alien, and both burst out laughing. My hopes were dashed. I wasn’t to get my first spanking until I was an adult.

Parents shouldn’t joke like that with kids like me, they’re only getting our hopes up.

I was innocently listening to the radio, when a song jolted me with the following lyrics:

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
“Son fear is the heart of love”
So I never went back

It’s “I will follow you into the dark” by “Death Cab for Cutie”. The song is OK, I guess, but the lyrics pleased me a lot. I’m not sure about fear being the heart of love – I’m sorry, just no! – but hand-smacking nuns in my song lyrics are always a good thing.

My searches often turn up weird and wonderful spanking stuff, and here’s a cartoon that’s made me both giggle and groan:

What do you think this is?

It’s the Chinese government spanking a property developer. Who doesn’t seem to mind at all, but instead is looking at his watch.

I might try the watch-glancing technique some time, when my pain tolerance is back to normal, or I’m feeling particularly brave.

(via)

I’ve never been one for the strange world of fan fiction – but an example of the genre popped up on a Google search recently, and it made me giggle.

The tale in question is apparently related to the Twilight books – not that I’ve explored those, either – so the background to the writing is pretty much lost on me. But it did rather catch my attention with the following, in which our hero gives his instructions to her personal guard, Jasper:

“I want to arrange a whipping.” he looked up at me with a hint of pain in his expression. The poor man hated violence, especially when it was directed toward the towns people.

Straightening up, he asked, “For whom is this? And more importantly: why?” he didn’t hide the disapproval in his tone. “Because if I find that you are only doing this for your own amusement, I will have no part in it.”

I sighed, “That was once, and it was mainly my parents idea. To show the people what would happen if they rebelled.”

“None the less.” he glared at me as he spoke, “Who? and Why?”

The ‘who’, it turns out, is a maid who’s been disrespectful towards the crown prince. She’s imprisoned, and the speculation as to her fate begins:

“She’s a woman, they can’t stand much pain. She’ll be out by the 5th lash.” I told him and started toward her holding cell once more.

Of course. Girls regularly pass out when I’m playing them, some after as few as three strokes. This lass must be a tough one, if she’ll make it to five before keeling over.

It gets better. The girl’s to receive 15 lashes, it seems. Enough, apparently, for her to be “whipped until death”. Fortunately, the author seems to have run out of steam after six chapters, and we never get to read of her agonising demise.

Sometimes I don’t think vanillas quite get it when it comes to corporal punishment…

I’m not the biggest poetry fan in the world. John Betjeman, Roger McGough, Benjamin Zephania? Yep. Anything requiring more work on the reader’s part? Then, frankly, I’d rather read prose.

The other day, however, I discovered the following little poem by Latino poet Martin Espada, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst:

“When the Leather is a Whip”

At night
with my wife
sitting on the bed
I turned from her
to unbuckle
my belt
so she won’t see
her father
unbuckling
his belt.

OK, so maybe I’m going to have to re-evaluate my stance on poetry…

A couple of weeks ago the Observer had an article on 10 best illustrated children’s books.

Number one? “The Lonely Doll” by Dare Wright, first published in 1957, the book full of “glamour, mystery and melancholy.”

Oh, and spanking.

Edith and Little Bear had been very naughty, you see. This is what happens when little dolls and bears are naughty.

I’m delighted that the Observer has picked up on my old favourite, and placed it so high on the list, noting: “The book has recently been republished, which is amazing, if only because Mr Bear, I am sorry to report, believes in smacking his charges”.