I vaugly rememebr being told about an incident at school where a friend of mine's older sister (who in that family was eldest of four and was something of a serogate mum to the younger ones) had owned up to braking a school window which was actually broken by my friend This strange act of sisterly love came about after finding him in tears fearing that he would be caned. This incident happened before I arived at the school, but the suggestion was that she had agreed to be punished for the offence, knowing that she would be getting a hiding for it but would probably not get the cane as she was a girl.

Don't know what she got, or much more in the way of details, but the whole thing has stuck in my head since the mid sixties for some perverted reason!

What a strange tale! From whom did she expect to get the hiding - a teacher, a parent?

What do people understand by the expression ‘hiding’?

Throughout my school life I had no doubt that the headmaster had spanked her backside for breaking that window, however in recent years having read many posts on this forum and others in the past, I realise that it is quite unlikely. School spankings involving male teachers and female pupils seem to be as rare as hen's teeth. In the naivety of childhood however I didn't know that not having the overview that this site offers. To me the Headmaster would have belted the living daylights out of anyone who did anything as serious as braking a window. I never really contemplated the idea of him not beating her because she was a girl, only that the cane was for boys so she wouldn't get that but would probably have been spanked or slippered or given the ruler, which for some reason I imagined girls usually got.

The basis of my belief was the assumption that girls were spanked at school. I now know that was very unusual but what puzzles me is why I assumed that it wasn't. I mean if we had never seen it, and I never did, why would we assume it to be the case?...was it word of mouth, mythology? And why in our un-sexually developed state would any of us be spreading such myths?...unless of course sometimes it was true?

When I read your "half remembered tale", my first thought was that she took the blame because she wouldn't get hit and she knew her brother would get a serious beating.
However, here in the colonies, she would have gotten paddled. So her brother probably would have had to take his own medicine.

Possibly, he never said what she got, but he implied it when he said that 'she knew she would get a hiding but wouldn't get the cane.' To me that meant that the Headmaster smacked her bottom.
I honestly don't know if girls ever got their bottom's smacked at school, I just always assumed they did and in that case I always assumed she did, it's only now reading this forum that I've questioned it.

Why have you questioned it? In the Parental Consent thread I posted several pages of examples from the FRU site. What it shows is that bottom-slipperings were rife - common as muck. It's bottom-canings that were almost non-existent. This supports the quote 'she knew she would get a hiding but wouldn't get the cane.'

RangyStrider

I've only just stopped laughing at Rangy's suggestion that slipperings for girls were rife.

I have no doubt that a great many readers of this forum attended mixed (i.e. co-educational) secondary schools in Britain, so let me ask you:

How 'rife' was M/f slippering at your school?

I don't know about slippering of girls being 'rife', although I think it may have been more common than many people think. I've been trying to find out from reasonably reliable sources exactly how common corporal punishment of girls was in British schools. Back in 1952, the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales issued a report entitled A Survey of Rewards and Punishments in Schools. Unfortunately, quite deliberately, they failed to ask the basic question as to how often students as a whole were physically punished - they didn't want that information. However from the information in the report, we can get a minimum percentage as to how many children were physically punished at school

I don't want to go into all the mathematics unless people are interested - but here are the bottom line figures.

According to the information contained in that report, based on a survey across England and Wales conducted with 1434 teachers concerning a total of 44,490 students (and these large numbers were used to ensure a statistically significant result), we can safely conclude the following minimum percentages of children who experienced corporal punishment at school in England and Wales, over approximately a year (ie, less than a year) in 1949 (possibly 1950).

Over that period, the survey indicates that:

At least 5.74% of boys were caned.
At least 0.48% of girls were caned.

At least 7.56% of boys experienced a milder form of corporal punishment than caning (normally smacking or slippering).
At least 3.58% of girls experienced a milder form of coporal punishment than caning (normally smacking or slippering).

The caning of girls was significantly rarer than the caning of boys - but 1 in 200 girls across Britain each year, while rare, still indicates a large number of incidences - with approximately 2.5 million girls at school that year (and I need to check that number - I haven't yet confirmed it), a 1 in 200 rate would indicate 12,500 canings a year of girls across Britain each year.

As for slippering - indications are that while girls were subjected to less severe forms of corporal punishment than boys, the rate was still significant. 3.58% of girls being subjected to such punishment each year would indicate at least 90,000 incidents a year (assuming that 2.5 million figure is accurate).

I must stress these percentages are minimum percentages. The data available means that these percentages represent only some of the corporal punishment that went on in schools - and it's pretty much impossible to quantify precisely how much more than may have been. My gut feeling is that the overall numbers wouldn't have been that much higher than these minimum percentages, but they would have been at least slightly higher.

The data from which these calculations are made appears in A Survey of Rewards and Punishments in Schools: A Report by the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales, based on research carried out by M.E. Highfield, M.A., Ph.D., and A. Pinsent, M.B.E., M.A., B.Sc. It was published by Newnes Educational Publishing Co., Ltd. of London in 1952. Most data was obtained from pages 119 and 172.

"I've only just stopped laughing at Rangy's suggestion that slipperings for girls were rife."

It wasn't a suggestion. It was a conclusion based on a bucketful of examples culled from the FRU site, whose authenticity you didn't question at the time. You only questioned the one bottom-caning example to be found, and so did I.

"I have no doubt that a great many readers of this forum attended mixed (i.e. co-educational) secondary schools in Britain, so let me ask you:
How 'rife' was M/f slippering at your school?"

That question has already been answered in the most reliable place, the FRU site. A spanking site like this one is the last place to ask for anecdotal evidence, as you should know.

Reading your last few posts in various threads, I was struck by the number of assertions of yours that included the word "obviously". You use it nearly as often as David Eycke, who thinks he's the son of God. But, like him, you never (as they used to say on exam papers) show your working. How you arrived at your "obvious" conclusion is always a mystery.

Lower down in this thread, the rather professorial post by "Dean" on the 1952 survey, with its hesitant but reasonable conclusions, makes a stark contrast with your peremptory utterances. It's the difference between scepticism and dumb stupidity.

Rangy Strider

If a slice of bread is burnt coal-black on one side and left snow-white on the other, a statistician would say it was a perfect piece of toast.

When the stats say 3.58% of girls were caned, does that mean in a sample of 10,000 girls that 358 were caned or that one girl was caned 358 times? Either situation might produce the same statistic.

However, let's not concern ourselves with ancient and possibly spurious stats, let's stay in the very real flesh and blood world in which we all grew up.

I'm sure a great many of our our readers attended mixed secondary schools in the UK and they will know how many girls were caned/slippered at their schools.

The answer in almost every case is 'NONE'.

When the stats say 3.58% of girls were caned, does that mean in a sample of 10,000 girls that 358 were caned or that one girl was caned 358 times? Either situation might produce the same statistic.

Yes, it might. If that was all the information we have. However with this study, we have a lot of information about the methodology of the study, so the question can be answered quite easily.

The percentages I have given represent the proportion of individual girls (and boys in the case of the boys figures) who experienced corporal punishment on at least one occasion during the period surveyed. The percentage figure is not obtained by counting how many caning or other incidents of corporal punishment were administered and dividing by the number of girls. It was obtained by counting how many individual girls out of the sample had been caned or who had experienced other forms of corporal punishment, and then dividing by the total number of girls in the sample. That is explicit in the document and the methodology used is described in quite a bit of detail.

I don't know why I bother but in my N London Junior school in the 50s every single pupil, boy or girl got some form of CP at least once.
In my secondary school in the 60s every single boy got CP at some time or other.
I can confirm that in my class ever single girl got the slipper on one occasion ( because the whole class got it)
It is reasonable to assume that this may have happened in other classes.
I was told that during the girls PE lessons it was not unusual for the Gym mistress to slipper girls.
Caning of girls was rare but did happen, it was carried out by the senior mistress, very few times though.
Every girl friend I have had received CP ranging from caned or rulered hands, slippered bottoms and slappings in various places.
It was normal and unusual at that time and I am amazed that anyone can be so uninformed to state that girls did not get CP just because they did not see it.
On that basis no one has ever been shot because an individual has not seen someone shot. Or no one has ever been killed on the road because an individual has never witnesed it.
In other words Lotta, we are all aware of your wind up attitude, so perhaps you could desist and stop repeating your insulting lack of experince and thus encourage others to post without fear of ridicule.
Of course there are wind up merchants telling lies about CP, they come across so obviously in many cases, but so what they do no harm.

In my entire life, I have never heard anyone suggest that girls did not receive CP at school in the UK.

I myself have most certainly never suggested such a thing even though I am frequently credited with having made such an absurd suggestion.

For the million billionth time (approximately), let me remind this forum's readers that nobody in the world is suggesting girls did not receive CP at primary school. They most certainly did.

Also, nobody in the world is suggesting girls did not receive CP at secondary school. They most certainly did, albeit with a frequency very significantly lower than that with which boys received it.

Were girls ever slippered on the bum by male teachers?

Yes, but the practice was exceedingly rare compared with similar M/m punishments.

Were girls ever caned on the bum by male teachers?

Indeed they were - but I have never heard of a case where the man did not subsequently face criminal charges.

Ok so basically your just saying what we already know. We all know that boys were punished far more at school than girls. However that isn’t much of a factor for this case is it? It’s fairly obvious that the incident Henry is referring to was unusual, as this reported slippering or smacking of a girl by the headmaster sound like it is Henry’s solo experience of a girl being corporally punished at school. No-doubt he saw boys punished by the headmaster numerous time as we all did.

Having read this thread Lotta, what do you think happened to this girl? She knew she would get a hiding but that she wouldn't get the cane! Sounds to me fairly obvious that she got smacked/slippered as the comment was made in hindsight and refers to something, which she knew she was going to get, and then did. A hiding to me is also fairly clear, it refers to a smacked backside with either the hand or a slipper... don’t you agree?

So Lotta why in your post above do you say the word " none" regarding girls being slippered and caned?
As you are allways going on about proof, pray tell us all what instance of BB female caning resulted in criminal charges?
For many of us on this site, girls being caned etc by male teachers is a self witnesed fact and those of us at school in the 50s and 60s find it strange that anyone finds it so unusual.

I don't think I can usefully comment upon a half-remembered tale which someone half-remembers might have contained half a suggestion that something may or may not have half-happened.

This site is full of tales which range from true, through half-true to completely untrue and I merely make the simplest of simple suggestions - that we use our own experience to tell us what we know for a fact about CP in the schools we attended before we decide who's telling the truth and who isn't about what happened in schools we didn't attend.

Lotta at the risk of becoming as tedious as you.
Can you please explain why you said "none"
Can you please explain the incident(s)? regarding criminal charges etc.
Presicely, you cannot, therefore your posts are shown to be pointless unsubstanciated bunkum.
Like most that carp and moan you are condemned by your own nonsence.

Jack - the world's only surviving brain donor.

Jack; On this very page there is a thread titled
Get with it. Get Witham! Authored by our beloved and missed Gillian Brown. You will find that he was in fact prosecuted for just such a thing.

There are other cases on this site as well.

Are we talking only about secondary schools, or primary schools as well? I can't answer Lotta's challenge for the former, since I went to a boys' secondary school. At my primary school, only boys ever got caned or spanked, though it might have been unusual in that respect.

What I can say is that I've seen some punishment books for the 1950s and 1960s. These can sometimes be found in local record offices. (More recent ones are generally regarded as confidential.) The ones that I've seen for co-educational secondary schools invariably contain far more boys' names than girls' names. I wouldn't like to put a figure on it, but I would say the girl/boy ratio is rather lower than the roughly 1:10 figure that Dean cites - but his figures appear to cover all ages, whereas I was only looking at secondary schools. (Also, as the study he quotes relates to 1950, we should remember that most schools then were "elementary" schools, not really comparable with either primary or secondary schools in the system that developed in the 1950s as the 1944 Act gradually took effect, but probably more akin to primary schools in terms of ethos, even though their age range went up to the then school leaving age of, I think, 14.)

Schools varied a lot and one should be careful to remember that for every sweeping generalisation there is an unquantifiable number of exceptions. But on average, canings of girls, though they certainly did happen, were very considerably rarer than of boys and, as far as can be ascertained (information as to target area is often missing from the record), usually on the hand. (Not quite always, as we see from some widely quoted press reports -- but the fact that those cases got into the public domain in the first place, and that it always seems to be the same relatively few cases that get mentioned, would itself suggest that they were rather unusual.)

I don't think the anecdotal evidence on FRU really contradicts that generalisation, from what I've seen of it.

Everybody seems to agree that slipperings were more common than canings, and mostly not recorded, so the only evidence is anecdotal. I don't think one can conclude from the FRU evidence that slipperings of girls were 'rife', as they surely were for boys at many schools, but my subjective impression is that they may not have been as uncommon as all that. I suppose it all depends what you mean by 'rife'. Rangy Strider is right in the sense that it is possible to list a substantial number of such entries in absolute terms, but Lotta's point is presumably that they form a rather small percentage of the total number (many hundreds) of CP-related FRU entries.

I can remeber that in about 1966 the deputy head of my senior school, Miss Moore, storming on to the stage one morning at the start of assembly and angrily announcing that she had just caned two girls for fighting. I do not know if the punishment was on the hand or bottom and I never knew the girls involved.
As a 10 year old in junior school I saw my form master put his hand up girls skirts to spank them. The legal position in those days was that a male teacher had the same right to punish as a father and many fathers in those days took girl's knickers down for the strap.
Incidents of corporal punishment only reach the public domain when they are being complained about, hence the constant repetion of events such as the Helstone incident. In reality newspaper reports are only a tiny fraction of the many thousands of instances of CP. Niether do Punishment Books give a complete picture. In Britain only formal canings and strapings adminstered by the Head Teacher or appointed deputy are recorded. The vast majority of informal hand spanking, slippering, rulering etc. was never recorded. In the case of a school in which boys were caned but girls were only spanked or slippered there will be no formal record of female puishment.

Well I have looked back and I cannot find any instances of prosecution following a headmaster carrying out a bare bottom caning?
I am well aware of the Helston BB hairbrushing and the BB slippering at the girls home incident ( and lets be honest the mothers involvement was dodgy at least, fancy letting a man sliper your kids and lotion their botoms after.
There is no reference to a BB caning.
I of course stand to be corrected.
Lotta writes the word " none" which is clearly totally incorrect by his/her own posts then calls me a brain doner.
Proof that lotta is male as surely a female would not be so insulting in such a passe way.
I would say that at my junior school boys and girls got classroom punishments just about equally. Visists to the headmaster appeared to be rare for girls but i really am not sure.
At secondary school boys got CP probably about 10 times more than girls however i doubt if any lesson did not result in at least one CP incident, mostly boy slipperings.
Girls were just plain scared of getting whacked so tended to behave better. I also suspect that slipering a boy was easy as they were taken with an amount of bravado. slippering a girl entailed lots of crying and aggravation to the teacher concerned.
At my wifes convent school the headmaster caned boys and girls in equal numbers, usually on the hand. Mind you he was a real ******* apparently.
I still find it hard that some people find the prevelance of CP in the 50/60/70s so unbelievable.

There's more chance of George's surname being 'Clooney' than there is of Jack having a wife who went to convent school.

Got it!

I figured out how she manages to extract so much information without any facts - a Crystal Ball ! ! !

And it's obviously(!) a good one - seems to produce information fairly quickly. Some of the cheap and nasty kinds take several hours I understand...

Would you let us into the secret of where you found it, Lotta. Such a valuable find could be useful to the rest of us. Just think of the ease of posting without worrying about the real world... and the time saved by not needing to verify facts and...

One thing we know about corporal punishment for sure is that it is (was) extremely effective and that not many children went back for a second dose, at least not while the memory was fresh in their minds. Therefore I think that if 358 canings were administered to girls in a particular period we can safely assume that at least 340 different girls were involved. There may have been a handful of tough girls who could face a second caning but the vast majority would have stayed out of trouble after their first encounter with the cane.

If I am not mistaken, the figures in Dean's posting suggest that at least 5 schoolgirls in every 1000 were caned in 1949 and that at least 35 girls per 1000 were smacked with a ruler or some similarly less severe implement in the same year.

That might be entirely true but I really don't see how any non-paedophile could be excited by anything happening to children - which is what all schoolgirls were in 1949.

According to people who were there in 1949, it was not usual for 15-year-old girls to entertain themselves by skipping in the street. Those girls were entirely different creatures from the teenagers who went to school in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.

In 1949, a teenage girl was no more a woman than was a 10-year-old.

A few decades later, a teenage girl was as much a woman as a 25-year-old.

If we are not to be grossly misled by statistics, let us see figures for situations where the girls were the sorts of people we ourselves went to school with.

The line "According to people who were there in 1949, it was not usual for 15-year-old girls to entertain themselves by skipping in the street" should read:

"According to people who were there in 1949, it was not unusual for 15-year-old girls to entertain themselves by skipping in the street"

LOTTA

Good point, but wasn't the school leaving age still 14 in 1949?

I would add that statistics for illegitimate births climbed rapidly during the war & have continued upward ever since.

More pertinently, TEENAGE single mothers began to climb in numbers from 1947/8. Which does tend to suggest not all those 15 year olds were skipping-some were clearly doing something else beginning with S!!

The clinching point would have to be at what average age girls began their menstrual cycle in 1949,1959,1969 etc? Naturally, not a subject I specialise in, but the IMPRESSION I get is that when I was 12(1964), 1 in 100 girls had started; today, it appears to be 1 in 25 or so.

But what are the figures, folks?

"TEENAGE single mothers began to climb in numbers from 1947/8"

The number of births to teenage girls under 15 living in England and Wales numbered only 45 per year between 1948 and 1958. Given that abortion was not the easy option it was later to become, that figure suggests that relatively few such girls were having sex.

In 1996, the number of births and abortions to girls under 15 was 1400.

LOTTA

Teenage doesn't end at 15, but, fair enough, most girls of that age do seem to've been more interested in skipping than screwing in 1949. I still think the birthrate of 13-19 did rise all the time from 1947/8, but clearly the 15+ ones were behind this.

They hadn't even got idols-Johnny Ray wasn't even going then, let alone the Arctic Monkeys! Perhaps sex was on ration like everything else-no, Lotta, I think the average 15 year old was more of a child then, though 10 is a bit low-you lot are always supposed to be mentally sharper than us,too!

You can guess what I'd like to ask now about skipping ropes, but I'm too polite to do it on your post/answer!

Jack writes: "Girls were just plain scared of getting whacked so tended to behave better."

Surely girls always behaved (on average) far better than boys anyway, from the dawn of time until the last few years, in all recorded cultures. I think fear of getting whacked had little to do with it. It may be innate or it may be deep social conditioning, but how else would you account for the fact that juvenile delinquents have always been at least 90% boys?

My own politically incorrect view is that boys and girls just are rather different creatures. Adolescent boys, in particular, have always been a problem in society since at least Ancient Rome. Do read your history, folks. I think myself it's probably all to do with testosterone.

Well as my last post seems to have been deleted for some obscure reason I can only assume that Lotta is a creation of the group management whose purpose is beyond my donated brain.
Another one gives up.
Lotta 1(more) Posters 0

Jack,
Did you at any time see your reponse actually posted on this thread? If not, I would suggest that you were not logged in when you tried to post.

I have been a member here for quite some time and I have had some posts edited, but not deleted. At least I don't remember having any deleted. If any were, then they must have been too vulgar.

If your post was not too offensive, I think it was a bug of some sort or as I said before, you were not logged in.

Bob, Alaric quoted from my " lost " post, so it must have been there for a while.
Just call me Sherlock Holmes.
I merely said amongst other things that I could not see why lotta should think my wife being in a catholic convent school was unlikely ( all right a lie) as half the schools in London were Catholic in the 60s.
And my real name is Jack but not Clooney.
Sooner Lottas posts stop then the sooner this site has more real posters and info for those who want it.

I can confirm that I saw Jack's post, now that he mentions its content. Lotta's disbelief that Jack's wife could have attended a convent school struck me as odd at the time - I was wondering if perhaps Lotta thinks that convent schools just produced Nuns, and doesn't realise how they actually operated. I was wondering if the concept was more unusual in the UK than it was here, so I noted Jack's reply with some interest.

Now that you mention it, I do remember seeing that post. I just read through the entire thread and it's gone. If aleric hadn't quoted it, I would have forgotten all about it.

I don't remember exactly what was in that post, but I do know that the forum administrators are concerned about people who don't wish our happy circle well. So, they will delete anything that might cause the site to be shut down by Network 54.

Let's all try to keep our language clean just in case.

Bob, no swearing, no insults, just a comment that as half of the population of N London ( slight exageration) was Irish then half the schools were Catholic. Perhaps construed as rascist? I don't know.
BTW I am Irish myself and went to a Protty SM ( secondary modern not Sadism and Masocism) Wife was English and went to a Catholic primary and secondary.
I would personaly think it umusual for anyone male or female to have been at school in the 60s not to have got some kind of CP.
Plenty of caned female bottoms but I would guess very few bare, although the bare tops of the legs was fair game for extra sadistc nuns ( I was informed )

Jack,

It would be very interesting to hear the details of your wife’s experiences of corporal punishment at convent school.

Jack writes: "I would personaly think it umusual for anyone male or female to have been at school in the 60s not to have got some kind of CP."

I agree that is true for males (not by any means unheard of -- there were even a very few boys-only schools that never used any CP, and I'm not talking about the famous "progressive" liberal/Quaker/etc. private ones -- but certainly unusual). I think, on all the evidence I have ever seen or heard, it is absolutely not true for females. Just to take the FRU anecdotal evidence, there are loads of mixed and girls-only schools about which one never encounters the slightest hint of CP in the 1960s or indeed any other era, and that is borne out by some other sources such as autobiographies and various press articles over the years.

This is NOT to say that no girls ever received CP. As I've said before, I have seen plenty of documentary evidence that some did. But it is plainly just plumb wrong to try and suggest that the overall average level of CP for girls was ever anywhere remotely on a par with that for boys.

I do think that if one is going to hazard any generalisations about this sort of thing, one needs to have looked at a wide range of evidence from many different kinds of school, and certainly not just extrapolate from one's own experience. If I may say so yet again, people are much too ready to assume that their personal experience was typical of the whole system, and tend to fail to grasp just how diverse different schools were.

Perhaps I should have made clear that I was talking about England and Wales. There is some evidence that Jack's generalisation may have been true in Scotland.

I was only giving my own experinces and the experiences of women I have been close to, men that I have discussed the subject with and many relatives from different parts of England.

All of them have some tales to tell of CP, mostly at school.
It does appear that belting was administered regularly to both sexes in most of Scotland.

In Ireland it was rare in the Southern part, but got more usual as you went further North, perhaps influenced by the British presence in the six counties.
It was very common for Boys in Christian Brothers schools.
Less common for girls, perhaps because they tended to be better behaved when supervised.
A teacher friend of mine told me that there was no CP in any of the schols she taught in during her 35 years teaching. This was in S Ireland and in senior schools.
Cp was used mainly in primary schools in Ireland but was in general not used in secondary schools. The reason being that pupils were disciplined in non CP ways as they got older, ie detention and writing punishment essays.
Its obvious that my experiences my not be typical, there may have been lots of CP less schools.

I would suggest though that it was available in most all schools but not perhaps used too much in some.
What I do know is that it was regularly available and used in my schools and those of my contempories as stated above.

As for the fetish aspect of CP it has always seemed to me that those who got it tended not to find it a turn on. Those that did not get it tend to have an unrequited sense of missing out on something.
I may be wrong, perhaps its just my part donated brain doing overtime.