A Friday caning was a real spoiler for me.
If you could have postponed a caning you received on Friday to the following Monday would you choose to do so?
Given the choice I would.
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Hello 70sboy,
I would always prefer to get it over and done with as soon as possible. Spending the weekend anticipating it would have been far worse in my opinion. Mind you, we never had the choice, punishment usually came quickly after the crime.
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I am in full agreement with hcj on both the points he makes.
You raise the option of a postponed punishment, as did AliceOttley in her recent contribution . In practice all the SCP I encountered, as a recipient or involving others, was administered when and how the instigator or administrator dictated.
There was a built-in delay for canings awarded by the prefects’ court. but that wasn’t optional. There wasn’t time to complete both hearings and canings in the weekly slot allocated for court sittings and there was a right of appeal to the headmaster against a caning verdict, though it was seldom exercised.
This meant you returned to be caned at a time dictated by the prefects after you’d had chance to exercise your appeal. As the court sat on Wednesday you might potentially have to wait until the following week to be caned. Equally, as there was Saturday morning school, you might be caned in Saturday morning break. However the most likely day for that trudge back up the innumerable steps to the prefects’ tower room was indeed Friday. But the timing certainly wasn’t optional!
Happily I was never caned by the prefects. And on the two occasions I was in receipt of SCP the wait was longer than I’d have wished. In one case that was the interval between my realising what was going to happen and the teacher completing smacking the leg of the girl in front of me in the queue and bending me under her arm to begin operations to hoist the leg of my short trousers. In the other it was the time to walk from the back of the class to the front and briefly wait my turn to bend over a front row desk for the slipper.
Luckily we never had such a system but our school dealt with bad behaviour by first issuing the pupil with a weekly report card which every teacher had to mark at the end of every lesson. If you failed to get a good report it was made clear that the cane would be administered. I was on report once thinking midweek that my card wasn’t 100% perfect so I was expecting to be caned in a couple of days but luckily my report card was good enough.
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Luckily we never had such a system but our school dealt with bad behaviour by first issuing the pupil with a weekly report card which every teacher had to mark at the end of every lesson. If you failed to get a good report it was made clear that the cane would be administered. I was on report once thinking midweek that my card wasn’t 100% perfect so I was expecting to be caned in a couple of days but luckily my report card was good enough.
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Never was CP punishment handed out for poor grades or report cards here at our schools….you either passed or failed and were held back a year. CP was left up to your parents. My parents were happy if i showed any improvement from last term. But they were more interested in the comments the teacher wrote beside the grades that decided if i was punished.
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Theoretically yes and yes. Practically it was very unusual I think. It was only likely to happen to a boy who for whatever reason had failed to make either prefect or privileged sixth former (usually abbreviated to priv, a sort of sub-prefect) and who fell significantly foul of the disciplinary regime while in the sixth form. While the former did happen, the latter was quite unusual By the sixth form most people were well behaved and working fairly hard, It would also probably require the caner to have attained prefect fairly early in their sixth form career, which was also unusual
However there was reputedly such a case early in my time at the school, but as a lowly 3rd former I was very distant from the boys involved and didn’t know them by sight. The caner was slightly younger than the boy he caned apparently.
A case I was familiar with was a boy in the upper fifth form at the same time as me. You had to wear the school cap when out of the school in uniform unless you were a prefect or a priv. The former got very fancy caps with tassels to mark their status, reputedly these were girl magnets. Privs were excused caps and could go capless But neither status could be attained until you were a sixth former.
The girlfriend of the boy concerned, from a neighbouring girls’ school, considered his ordinary school cap rather silly and teased him about it. He took to taking it off on the bus home, on which the girlfriend usually travelled with him. Unfortunately a priv regularly travelled on the same bus and put him in the prefects’ book each time he observed him capless.
This was towards the end of the school year and it became a battle of wills. When increasing numbers of lines failed to stop the cap removal the prefects’ court eventually sentenced him to the cane, 3 strokes, and they were administered by a prefect less than a year older than him. Possibly this indignity was deliberate. He had given the prefects rather a lot of trouble!
On the subject of punishments administered by younger pupils to older ones, one area where this could happen was the school CCF (combined cadet force) where promotion was less by age than by merit. No CP involved though, they’d abandoned military floggings by the time I was there!
I didn’t join the CCF as at the time I was a left wing pacifist and so had to do civil defence instead. How to build a nuclear shelter with a table, an interior door, and some sticky back tape, that sort of stuff. Well no, actually it was quite good. The Civil Defence had a deliberately devastated group of buildings and we learnt how to rescue people from the ruins without bringing the whole lot down on top of us and similar useful life skills.
Although I wasn’t in the CCF I can say with certainty that a second year sixth form private had to clean his rifle, which was quite a lengthy job done in one’s own time, twice a week instead of once a week for several weeks. However well he cleaned it, it was always found to be in a disgustingly dirty state at the weekly inspection and had to be done again. Foolishly he’d made a pass at the upper fifth form armoury sergeant’s girlfriend.
