Whilst looking on Friends Reunited, I came across The Sir Wilfrid Martineau School in Birmingham Where it appear that a certain Mrs Shervington use to punish girls on the hand with a plimsoll. There are also references on the schools Facebook page by girls who were slippered by her. Was this a common form of punishment, especially for girls? As I have never come across it before.
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I’ve just looked that one up. It seems Mrs Shervington was not exactly the most popular teacher!!
I have never heard of the slipper on the hand before, very odd. I was at school in the 60s and 70s and the slipper was always given on the bottom.A couple of female teachers at my school used to slipper girls on the bottom, though only rarely in public, but what great joy when a public slippering happened. Both the girl and the teacher went very red in the face!
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A maths teacher once slippered me on the hand – one whack with a trainer which I had to have repeated because I moved my hand. It stung quite a bit and he warned me that next time he would put me over a desk and slipper my bottom. I was nervous of being put over the desk to have my bottom slippered by him as I imagined that he slippered bottoms hard.
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A year or so ago I worked with a woman from the Leeds area who said she got the slipper at primary school. I of course listened intently – but then she concluded “my hand stung for ages”.
Not so uncommon then.
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I believe it was rare but it happened on occasion. One of the teachers at my school definitely did it – I had it on my hand from her a few times. I think one or two other teachers might slippered hands also but I can’t be sure. Why they did it is anyone’s guess. It might have been to make it more painful although I expect they’d claim it was to spare us the embarrassment of bending over and having it on our bums.
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I wanted to follow up on the ‘schoolmasters slippering on the hands’ theme, but did not wish to trip the other thread over to a new page until more people had a chance to see the post (sadly the evidence is that some readers do not bother to back page in threads). The obvious solution was therefore to pursue slippering on the hands in a thread already devoted to it.
Readers of this thread to date will observe that although slippering on the hands is mentioned in various instances, only in the case of the Maths teacher who slippered TR on the hand (contribution #3) can we conclude with certainty that the reference is to a schoolmaster. TR says quite definitely ‘he’ on two occasions. Alas I cannot recall contributor TR and therefore have no idea of their gender. In other cases (contributions #4 and #5) there is a possibility that a male teacher might have used the technique, but no statement of this.
However there is more in other threads. Here sadly missed contributor Paul, aka Marathonx aka various other names, keeper of a vast archive of material on SCP, writes that from material in his collection a lot of girls got the slipper on the hand. Alas no indication as to the gender of the teachers who so punished them. In another post here Paul says that the technique was used at his own junior school.
Several references to the slipper on the hand in this thread. In contribution #5 use by a female teacher, then here at contribution #11 an account of a male history teacher using the slipper on the hand at a grammar school by Alan Turing. The ‘earlier reference’ Alan Turing mentions is in another thread, “investigating M/F British school discipline” and is to be found here.
A little further down the original thread, here at contribution #13 we have Paul again, this time with an example from Friends reunited of a Mr Wilson who would take students into the stockroom for a dose of the pump (a common term for a PE shoe used in a punitive context) on the hand.
So, three more references to schoolmasters administering the slipper on the hand, one of them from Alan Turing, certainly a reliable source I think. There are probably more instances here, but that will do for now. Tapatalk has slowed to a crawl and has already presented me with one interesting problem tonight in connection with quoting contributions in threads other than their source thread. I’ve done this several times before but not with quite such a long quote as I originally attempted tonight. Of the three most likely problem causing possibilities regrettably I chose to investigate the wrong two first!
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Yes indeed, my earlier contributions were accurate as far as I remember. The history teacher who used the slipper on boys’ hands was of Sri Lankan descent (then called Ceylon, of course). Unhappily he died suddenly in the summer holidays after our first year at grammar school.
I also mentioned, in the “earlier post”, that the deputy headmaster in my first year used the cane on boys’ hands. His name was — wait for it — Mr Hands”
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I saw rulers used to smack across the hand, but not a slipper (plimsoll). I only saw the slipper smacked across the seat of gym shorts whilst boys touched their toes, by the gym teacher, got it a couple of times myself.
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Hi – I have never heard of the slipper being applied to the hand, both my father, uncle and various schoolmasters who used the slipper on me applied it very firmly to my bottom.
I suppose one advantage of the hand getting slippered was that i would,nt have to assume the various positions to present my bottom for punishment, i hated going over my fathers knee, my uncle used the same position to whack my cousin and myself for misbehaving
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My spankings sound as though they weren’t anywhere near as painful as the ones you received. So sorry that you had to endure them. Looking back my handful of spankings over my Dad’s knees, was better to receive it in that position, rather than bending over, were the smacks could be administered much harder.