Every class has its resident ‘naughty boy’ and John was mine. He wasn’t a very bad lad, to be honest, but he was from a pretty rough home and constantly in trouble. I’d given him a few telling-offs and a couple of doses of the ruler already. Now, he’d hit another child during playtime and hurt him quite badly.

Though found on sale in Scotland, this instrument turns out to be probably a German "Peitsche", somewhat resembling the French martinet. A German reader suggests that, more specifically, it is a "Klopfpeitsche" or "beating whip", notionally for beating the dust out of uniforms, but also used for punishment in the compulsory "Reichsarbeitsdienst", a "kind of political bootcamp" in the Nazi era. This procedure is described by my informant as "the traditional method of discipline at the university until the mid-1980s". Picture captioned "Boys' counsellors at Camp de Sales, Brooklyn, Michigan, 1950s". This was, and apparently still is, a Roman Catholic summer youth camp. One of the counsellors holds a big paddle while one of the boys obligingly touches his toes as if to receive it. Obviously posed for fun, but the paddle looks real enough, and we believe corporal punishment was not unknown at some summer camps in the past. I started teaching primary in 1971 at the age of 21, so if your maths is up to scratch, you will know that I am now 69! After five initial years in the classroom, I took some time out to have my own two children. I returned to teaching in the mid 80s and took early retirement in 2001 due to health issues. Cf. this Feb 1952 news item, also from California, which mentions that some "hot rod" clubs -- organized groups of young car enthusiasts -- had a system of paddling for breaking traffic rules.

Later in the day they were working on rehearsals for a drama production and my colleague just stood there watching like she was supposed to when the sub asked her why she wasn’t in her costume and just standing around. She again tried to explain who she was, but the sub cut her off and told her to put on costume on now and quit wasting time or she was going to spank her and put it on her herself. She grabbed her arm, gave her swat, and told her to scoot. My colleague went into the room, but didn’t know what to do, she said she was very confused. She finally opened the door to confront the sub, but the sub marched in, grabbed her by the arm and sat down on a nearby table and pulled my colleague over her knee and started to spank her and give her this lecture about how she came to school late, has been nothing but trouble all day, and now won’t change clothes and she was tired of it and was going to teach her an old fashion lesson. After her spanking which she said was only about 10 swats, the sub started to pull her dress over her head. Feeling confused and defeated, she didn’t put up a fight. The sub took off her dress, took off her bra and made a comment that no 25 year old has breasts like this and that there is no point to lie to adults about her age that one day she’ll mature but she must learn to respect her elders, and held the leotard type costume for her to step into and she zipped her up. She gave her another swat and sent her outside with the other students to practice. He asked for a volunteer (I can only remember it was one of the male students who went to the front with typical bravado) and produced a two-tailed tawse from his bag. Poster advertising the 1960 British comedy film "Bottoms Up!", starring "Professor" Jimmy Edwards as the crooked, cane-wielding headmaster of a tenth-rate boarding school for boys. The title is a double entendre, referring both to the position adopted by the students when bending over for posterial punishment, and to a phrase sometimes said as a toast when people are drinking together (Edwards's character is portrayed as frequently drunk). See the trailer here. Caroline Tolbert of Anderson holds a paddle used for corporal punishment when her father, Carroll F. 'Frog' Reames, was principal of Boys High School in Anderson, South Carolina". See this Sep 2011 news item.

The next year, I was allocated Year 3. Any teacher will tell you that there is a big difference between five and seven-year-olds when it comes to behaviour, and it was only a few weeks into the new term that I found myself calling a boy to the front and retrieving the tawse from my desk. A school punishment strap on display in the museum at Melfort, Saskatchewan. This looks as if it is probably made of leather, whereas more recent ones tended to be made of rubber and canvas, as in these pictures. So all of my pre-adult positions were either holding my legs or the other side of a desk. Small wonder that my adult spanking dreams put these two positions at the top of my list.

This is from a mainstream movie, Bored To Death, they are fooling around and get caught by the janitor. Another domestic punishment paddle. This one is probably for joke purposes only. It comes with its own special display stand, and bears the message "Don't get behind with homework".

Punishment at a Shaolin martial arts academy, allegedly. For possible explanation see these video clips. John Merriman (Master of School House) administering a caning in c.1970 at this boys' boarding school in Hampshire where "The cane or the slipper ruled", according to a reminiscence on the

This came with a caption reading "Denver reform school scandal, straps used in flogging, 1941". I don't know what scandal is alluded to here -- can anyone throw any light on this? From an online photo album about Persia (now Iran) between 1870 and 1930, this is captioned "Administering discipline by bastinado at the rashti-duzi workshop, needlework, Rasht ca. 1880". Rasht is the capital city of Gilan province. Caning the soles of the feet, rather than the safe place provided by nature, is in my view a very perverse, inhumane and dangerous punishment. It requires two helpers to hold the feet up with a bar, as shown here. Allegedly found at a grammar school in Kent, this punishment cane is 33 inches long. The label (see close-up) shows that it comes from Felpham Bazaar in Bognor Regis, a.k.a. the Bognor Cane Company, prop. Eric Huntingdon -- see this April 1981 news item. This maybe should have gone in my "CP in advertising" section, but in this case the paddle is itself the advertisement -- for the Chicago school furniture company named on it, who presumably distributed samples of this jokey "Board of education" free to schools. I am not sure whether it was of the right dimensions for serious CP use or whether it was just a sort of novelty toy item. My hunch would be the latter. The graphic design has a 1960s look about it.