When I attending secondary school, we would occasionally hear or sometimes see a group of kids being belted in the hallway. I remember one kid in our class who got excited everytime this activity took place. I remember whenever a teacher either turned his or her back on the class or was out of the room, this clown would stand up and look out of the classroom windows to watch the kids getting belted.

To me, there was something unhealthy with this activity, but he really got excited about it. It was like a magnet to him. One particular day we were in a classroom opposite the classroom of a particular teacher who was notorious for hallway beltings.

We were in class about 15 minutes when we heard a commotion out in the hallway. Like a rocket, this kid Paul shoots up out of his seat to look out of the windows, but his view was obstructed so he decided to stand on his chair.

The teacher, Mr Ross was hardly in the classroom. He always made excuses to go into the back room and we figured he had a stack of Playboys in there which kept him occupied for most of the lesson.

Paul was standing on the chair and giving us some commentary as to what was happening in the hallway, when all of a sudden Mr Ross walked back into the room.

He shouted to Paul to get off the chair and to get out the front of the class. Old Ross gave 4 strokes for looking out the window. Ross disappears back into the back room and Paul is shaking and blowing on his hands. We all laughed at the sight of him and teased him about copping it himself. We thought this would have cured Paul of his bizaar interest but it didn't.

I don't see anything bizarre or unhealthy in Paul's interest. It seems perfectly normal to me. The truly weird thing is that the rest of you did not share his interest.

What a disgusting little boy!

He should have been made to attend one of those school assemblies (the sort they had in Wembley) and marched up on to the stage, there to be stripped to the waist (from both ends) and held down over a table by two prefects, with all the women looking at him, and then given as many strokes of the birch as it would take to make the blood run down to his ankles by the headmaster/headmistress.

That would have stopped him being a peeper.

I think it's perfectly normal to enjoy watching other boys being whacked. I know that I and all my friends at school got a thrill out of watching another boy bend over and take a good healthy slippering from a prefect or master.

We admired the form of the boy being punished, how well he adopted the position, straight legs, fingers touching toes, how well he stayed perfectly still through his punishment, taking those fiercesome whacks to his bottom without flinching or making a sound, and then when he stood up afterwards how he walked back to his seat bravely without rubbing his bottom or shedding a tear.

And we admired the performance of the master or prefect wielding the plimsoll. How good his swing was. How athletically he put all of his strength and weight behind swinging the plimsoll at maximum speed into that upturned bottom. How good his aim was - did he manage to catch that sweet spot at the bottom of the buttocks that we all knew from personal experience was where it would sting the most. And how good the sound of the slipper meeting the bottom was - a good hard thwack that resounded halfway around the school.

It was as good as watching any sporting performance. And of couse we all imagined what it would feel like to be the boy being slippered today, the short sharp sting of the slipper striking our bottoms and that tingling, warm afterglow that lasted a few minutes. And we thought about how one day we might become prefects too and be able to swing a slipper and whack younger boy's bottoms. What's not to like?

Happy Days.

I'm not sure if it was "perfectly normal" for boys to enjoy watching other boys being whacked, mainly because of the fact that it could well have been them on the receiving end instead, but there was always interest in it - at my seondary school any time someone was "sent up" for a dose of the cane classmates always wanted to know how many they got. It might have been normal if there was satisfaction in seeing someone get what they deserved, but I can't remember ever feeling that way myself.
It may have been different for girls who happened to observe such a ritual, however!

Kin has his/her facts wrong. The only things we know for certain about Wembley is that girls used to be slippered there in green knickers and that it is impossible to build a football stadium there on time and without a huge overspend. Anything else is pure conjecture.

Alan S

I might as well bore you to tears re Wembley.

Wembley was built in 1923 & on the site of Sir Edward Watkin's(chairman of many railways) Wembley Tower, which was going to make Gustave Eiffel's Parisienne effort look puny. Work commenced in 1899.

Unfortunately, after significant planning delays & Sir Edward Watkin's death, the monster soared by 1907, to a staggering first stage of 168 foot. And stayed there until blown up in 1922 to make way for Wembley Stadium.

Even more unfortunately, 4 onlookers were killed by flying debris in Wembley Park, where the tower was sited. Still, at least Paul's spectator sport was less dangerous, unless you had a Chemistry teacher like one of ours who incinerated the main Chem Lab, several satchels,many pencil-cases but no boys, by dropping the full jar of magnesium!

There's more to all this than you think, but don't ask me what!

Kin is obviously up on his/her forum history because I believe the reference to Wembly was about the stories Fran of Wembly used to write about on this forum. Specifically a caning in front of the school assembly.

Geoff, thanks for your posting which I believe was right on the mark. We had a Post Mortum whenever someone was strapped which took place after class. Most of the girls in the class were sympathic to the victim and believed CP was not warranted in most cases.

Some teachers enjoyed using CP, others used it as a last resort. There were some male and female teachers who believed the most effective way to control a class was to beat the living daylights out of them.

Most girls in my class were appalled in having to witness CP in the classroom. Of course there were always one or two in every class that did enjoy the specticle. I suppose that's the reason why there are so many BDSM parlors run by females around the place.

Black Ferret, how are you? Good to see the people came to their senses and built a Sports stadium in place of an over sized ornament. Something practical and usefull that doesn't need dusting off. The city of Melbourne once had a sculpture nicknamed the Yellow Peril. A million dollars for a piece of scrap metal.

The Australian Government in all its wisdom, bought a painting called Blue Poles: a painting of fnely painted horizontal lines all in different colours. To me it looked like the canvas an artist uses when cleaning the paint off his brushes. It was on display for a wile but had to be taken down because it was flaking. Another million plus dollars of the tax payers money used to purchase this masterpiece which could be seen on any child care centre arts and crafts tables around the country.

I have been watching for some time the general fascination with fran's posting many moons ago about her meeting with the slipper at copland school.

From her description and my knowledge of the teacher from Copland school I believe it was a true account of what happened. I have found that Lotta's postings, whilst often amusing have hounded geninue reports of what many of us experianced first hand in the 60's at school. I did not attend Copland school myself but many of my friends did and I have heard from them many first hand( not right hand) reports of their experainces from this teacher at the school. My own school in Wembley was not much different really and most of the teachers were all armed with slippers which they used with frequent pleasure on any boy in the class who was misbehaving. Nearly all the punishments were in front on the class bent over with the class loving every moment of it.

I was on the recieving end of countless slipperings, none of which ever got anywhere near being recorded in a punishment book. I never personally managed to see a girl getting the slipper but I heard many reports from girls at my school that their female PE teacher was nearly as keen as the boys teacher with the use of the slipper.

MIKE

They could have saved a bomb by hiring anyone on the dole with a name like Kryswicki or Politowicz & given them a can of spray paint each-azure,turquoise,navy etc.

That's plus an extra AUS$20 each & a bloody great blank wall & order 'em to spray on it to their heart's content.

There's BLUE POLES for ya at half-the-price maximum!

We had a headmaster's noticeboard, where he posted details of who'd been whacked & what for, but no details of number of strokes.

My one entry on the role of dishonour:-


McCook of 4N has been beaten for smoking.


Steve

Call me Naive, call me stupid, silly or jusrt plain eccentric (a word borrowed from you lovely English people) and you're probably right in regards to my next question. In my own defence, re my stupidity, I put it down to my diabetes. One minute I'm up, the next I'm down...Makes for much more than boring life. I'm in whimsical mode at the moment so I am going to ask this question.


Slippers! I keep reading about teachers with slippers. As an Australian, I have never come across teachers with slippers. My question therefore, is this...

Were the teachers who had slippers wearing pygamas amd dressing gowns at the time?

Steve, did Mc Cook of 4N ever thank you for advertising his misery on his behalf? I hope so. It would be rude if he didn't, especailly after you went to all that trouble for him.

Mike - I think it's been covered before here, but the "slipper" that was used so frequently in English schools was in fact a rubber soled gym shoe known in England as a "plimsoll". It was much heavier than a typical bedroom or carpet slipper but more flexible than modern sneakers or running shoes. We wore plimsolls for gym and every room at the school seemed to have a couple of lost plimsolls kicking around, not to mention any plimsolls kept my masters or prefects specifically for use as punishment tools.

So if it was decided that a boy need to have his bottom smacked there was always a plimsoll handy to use. The plimsoll was held by the heel and swung hard and fast so that the centre of the rubber sole made contact with the boy's bottom. It made a very satisfying thwacking sound and, in the hands of an expert, could deliver a sting that lasted a few minutes.

I've no idea why it was called a slipper. In fact in my school although the instrument of punishment was called a slipper, the actual act of punishment was called a "codding". I've no idea where that name came from either.

Originally, a slipper was a light shoe intended and designed for wearing indoors. They are likely to have had a leather sole. This was before the widespread paving of the outdoors. Outdoor shoes needed to be rugged and were likely to be soiled. It is likely that these slippers were used to punish and to good effect.

Later, when rubber became available and Plimsolls were invented they seemed to have replaced slippers, in schools at least, as the main disciplinary tool. The genuine Plimsoll has a dense rubber sole a few mm thick and is completely without padding or shock-absorbing properties. It undoubtedly had real sting.

The modern sneaker, and certainly sports shoes, have soles designed to provide shock absorption to cushion the foot when it impacts on the ground. The same protection is afforded to the ground, and bad boys bottoms (Newton's law applies). Swats from the modern sneaker are likely to be much less effective than those from a real Plimsoll.

MIKE


The plimsoll is our equivalent of your sandshoe.

Here's a net history-sorry it don't cover the CP take up, but at least we have some help here with dating it.

My own guess would be 1930's for take up at school. I've never seen any mention of it in Billy Bunter, which was mainly pre WW1, and've not met anyone who was at school before 1930 who remembered anything bar cane or birch.

Retired Headmaster George might have a better idea than me re the dates, as I think he was educated in the 1930's?


The Plimsoll

The most revolutionary sporting shoe has been the plimsoll. Its origins are linked to the 19th century railways and the new habit of working class city people taking annual trips to the seaside. In the 1860s when people visited the seashores their old working boots seemed out of character and a new lightweight, cheap shoe was introduced in its stead. These were called sand shoes. At first the cotton canvas topped shoe had a sole made from leather, jute or rope. These were flimsy and wore out quickly. When the New Liverpool Rubber Company developed a light shoe, which combined a cotton canvas top to a rubber sole, the sand shoe had come of age. Still vulnerable to separation a thin rubber band was wrapped around the whole shoe trapping the join between the canvas and rubber sole. The more robust sand shoe was called a plimsoll because it resembled the new white plimsoll lines on ships (1876). Plimsolls wore well, were cool in the summer and dried quickly after becoming wet. One particular attractive feature of the robust plimsoll was it washing and painted with chalkwhite. This gave the outward appearance of a more expensive tennis and croquet shoe. White plimsolls were popular with Victorian promenaders and as the middle classes sought more and more leisure activities in the form of sport, the plimsoll evolved into many forms. By the early 1880s cinder and grass courts were in use and rubber soled plimsolls were used extensively. Sole patterns were added and patented to add grip and court adhesion. Croquet and tennis could be performed better with the grip of the rubber sole and without destroying the lawn. The rubber soled shoe helped take the jar out of a left hook and soften the landing of a long jumper. The new canvas rubbers were eminently suited to yachts and dinghying. Men and women wore the shoes. The military services ordered them in their ten of thousands and had them suitably coloured in house styles. Schools took to the plimsoll and had their pupils wear them for compulsory sports. Plimsolls were found with Scott on his Antarctic expedition as well as at the first Paris Olympics. As time passed the plimsoll was further developed to meet requirements of both major and minor popular sports. A simple rubber strip of the plimsoll was adapted to stop the big toe nail appearing through the canvas. This also stopped the weakest part of the upper from abrasion in those sports where the foot was dragged for balance. The hockey boot incorporated moulded studs into the rubber sole. The cycle shoe was easily adapted to speed running by the application of metal spikes to the area of the sole under the ball of the foot. Spikes gradually grew longer and longer until they were approximately two inches long. These could be adjusted to suit the ground conditions. When foam rubber was invented insocks were applied to the shoes adding to the comfort. Later when in the 50s man made fibres became available the plimsoll and sneaker merged to become the trainer shoe. The development of synthetics materials had a profound effect on the sports shoe. Hard, durable nylon soles provided lightweight, flexible and capable of supporting studs for football and spikes for athletics. Cellular foams increased the fit and comfort. The trainer had a two colour finish, low heel, rippled sole without an instep. It was used by the athletes as warm up and training footwear and first made its appearance at the Melbourne Olympics , 1956. The use of contrasting colours for reinforcement areas gave the training shoe its distinctive difference. Since then the trainer has became a fashion item and worn by all in society and certainly not restricted to sports persons.

And the teachers in my schools, both male and female had their own personal plimsole.
Usually worn smooth and very stingy!
And thanks for thst because without the slipper/plimsole we would have got caned instead.

Hi Steve and Dave, thanks for your repiies. I gusee I didn't miss anything by not schooled in England. My schools used a strap or feather duster as in the case of the Catholic school I attended-a popular choice of God's Stormtroopers, bieng applied to the hands. I have often wondered whether this contributed to my Carpal Tunnel in both hands or not.

Steve, the term Sand shoe is one I haven't heard of for many years. I remember these sand shoes, or Runners as they were called here being made of canvas; white in colour and having a shinny white rubber overlay for a toe cap. They faded out in the sixties making way for the Dunlop Volley Tennis Shoe. Later on came an array of coloured shoes and then came the Joggers and Track shoes.

When I joined the Airforce in 1977, five years after I was distarged from National Service with the Army ( I must have been a glutton for punishment) I was issued with a PE uniform as part of my kit. This uniform consisted of a singlet similar to the one made famous by Paul Macurio in the movie Ballroom Dancing, a pair of 1958 Dunlop Runners, or Sand shoes as you term them: The date of manufacture was stamped inside the shoes and a pair of Bombay Bloomers-brown shorts, Circa 1943. I still have the kit after all these years.

I don't know whether I had long shorts or short longs, I'm still pondering on that.

I was issued better shorts in the Army but still copped the same running shoes.

MIKE

You better get that kit on e-bay!

It could seriously have nostalgia value, especially if datable from 1943! And if it's in condition, you never know.

Yep, those sandshoes ARE the equivalent on what we thought in the 60's was a modern plimsoll-older style ones were black, and had a plastic moulding around the rim of the toe area, with no large plastic toecap guard on top.


Steve

Hello Mimi. I see the logic very clearly. Although never having been caned or slippered, I think the latter would be a much better choice than the former.

An interesting comment you made about male and female teachers ahving their own personal ones. It was similar with our teachers and their straps. They made their own. I suppose I'm glad we didn't have the internet in those days because I think the tawse companies in Scotland may have had a roaring export trade.

I would imagine that the slippers and plimsoles were probably for an old pair the teachers had hanging around in the wardrobe. I would also think the female teachers slippers would have been smaller in size,(unless you had a female version of America's Big Foot) thus coverage to the target would be less, but even so, all I can say is; I'm glad it was you, and not me on the receiving end.....Yeeoouch!

At my school, those teachers who used the slipper borrowed them from pupils' gym kit. I remember one teacher who decided after a few weeks that the big gym shoe borrowed from one lad, didn't have enough spring in it. So he borrowed a smaller, more flexible one, from another boy. He maintained that smaller ones hurt more, especially if they sprang on the point of impact, and also, a smaller one meant more concentrated, intense pain. Many of us agreed with that, from bitter experience.

Looking back it now seems a little strange about teachers slipper aquisition.
Did they have swapping or bartering sessions in the staff room?
There were always lost or dumped ( when worn out and perfect for whacking) ones in the PE store.
Did the sadistic Welsh PE teacher have a side line in slippers. He was a bit of a heel and always put his sole into work .
Some female teachers would tend to send boys to the nearest male teacher for the slipper. Believe me that was worse than getting the whack itself.
I recall a student teacher who was implored by the class to do the deed herself rather than send lads to a male teacher.
We all offered our plimsoles and there was a rather weird ( and funny at the time)disscussion with her as to which one to use. She got quite flustered and obviously turned on by the whole thing.
Now I know that this is not going to believed by certain posters on this site but in those days CP was the norm and it was both used and discussed freely.
In some instances particularly at my junior school it was not unusual to have to take off one of your own plimsoles to be whacked with it during the PE lesson.
Mind you this particular teacher would also use a plimsole as a starting method. IE get ready, get set, go! Go being a whack across the backside to get you running up to a vaulting horse etc. Weird now but accepted then.
Its amazing we did not turn out kinky ( twitches face)

Mimi, my twisted sense of humour had me laughing when I read your post. I could imagime a teachers lounge and a conversation of "If you show me yours, I'll show you mine".


We occasionally had student teachers at our primary school and secondary schools. Student teachers were given the oportunity of taking the classes for different subjects. I assume they were assessed on their performance by the classroom teachers.

Student teachers very rarely had any discipline problems in classrooms. Most were enthusiastic and it showed when they took the class over to teach a particular subject. I only remember one incident if you could call it that, involving a student teacher with my class.

Our teacher was absent for three days and the Headmaster asked her to take the class unsupervised. The kids were having fun with her and she held a ruler in her hands warning us about misbehaving.

The non verbal communication must have worked because the class did settle down. She threatened some class members a couple of times again whenever they got high spirited. She seemed to enjoy the little power game because whenever she picked up the ruler, she had a broad smile on her face.

I never saw any student teachers inflict CP on students so I gathered they were either too hesitant to, or they weren't sanctioned to us CP because of their status. I have teachers in my family but I've never asked them about their experiences when they were in training.

My Brother-in-law had a sister who while in training visited my school and actually taught my class while she was there. The awkward part of it was she is only six years older than I, and it was hard to have to address her as Miss in class. Fortunately, she never told anyone we knew each other and that saved me from a ribbing by my classmates.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that student teachers were not allowed to administer corporal punishment. We had one rather ineffectual male student teacher in my last year at primary school. He handed out all kinds of impositions, lines etc. for every trivial offence and all of us kids ignored them. At the end of the term we all had a number of these punishments outstanding and he started hassling us to finish them. Some of us boys found a plimsoll and asked him to give us whacks on our bottoms instead. He got very flustered and embarrased but he wouldn't do it.

I know of a boy who was always getting into some sort of trouble during his school years. He accumulated an amount of detentions and lines etc, but refused to do them. CP was used at the school in those days and I think he had his fair share of that as well. He got to the stage where he wouldn't attend detention or write lines etc. By the time they realised he wasn't attending detentions or writing lines and whatever else they had him do, he reached school leaving age.

The school he attended was a high school, two years old and only had one wing of classrooms with doors at each end of the passageway.

The day after he officially left school, and no doubt to the delight of the teaching staff, he returned and rode his horse through the hallway of the school as a parting gesture. I don't think the school took any action over his little jaunt.

I never heard of a girl being caned on the bottom, and at junior schools in our area, boys were usually caned on the hand. It may have been a council regulation that this was the prescribed procedure in junior schools, or with boys. I had one on each hand once, but when a new headmaster I had in junior school said that hand caning was dangerous, and used the slipper instead. Classroom teachers used the slipper over trousers, but a headmaster's slippering was over gym shorts without underpants. It hurt much more than the cane, and I cried like a baby.

Two years later, I was found out after a rather irresponsible prank in secondary school. My misdemeanour cost my bottom dearly, and those wallops from the junior school headmaster's slipper were rabbit kisses compared with the 'six of the best' I received.

I never remember any girl receiving corporal punishment.

I went to a school in Australia in the 1980s - a snobby private school in Melbourne. The slipper was used there, so it wasn't totally unknown in Australia. We had a system of reds and blues - you got reds for bad behaviour and blues for good behaviour. If you got five reds in a day (which wasn't easy to do - getting one or two wasn't hard but you had to be really bad to get five) you could receive corporal punishment which was normally a spanking or a slippering, but could be the cane - the cane was very rare though, they used it to scare us into behaving though.

Ollie, your post has jogged my memory of a story my friend told me about 36 years ago. He was a day student at Ivanhoe Grammer and he told me about the borders being subject to CP where a slipper was used. He was a student there for six years during the mid sixties and early seventies to give you an idea of the period we were at school. I met this guy in Primary, so I have known him a long time.

In your post, you said you went to school in the eighties. I was at school during the sixties and I had never heard of a cane being used in a Victorian school at that time. I know it was used in NSW, QLD. I worked with a lot of people from these states when I was in the Airforce and remember them telling me some of their old school tales.

One other thing also. They never said the cane was used anywhere other than the hands. I guess we were lucky to be educated in Victoria.

I went to Melbourne Grammar - the red and blue system I described was actually in use at Grimwade House, their primary school in Caulfield (and still is in use there from what my cousin tells me, except they now get detentions if they get too many reds).

The strap was used in state schools in Victoria - I'm pretty sure that was the rule for state schools and for Catholic schools - but private schools were allowed to do what they liked and I know quite a lot of the snobby private schools used the cane. Besides MGS, I know for a fact it was being used at Scotch, Haileybury, Mentone Grammar, and Peninsula Grammar during the 1980s, having had friends at all those schools at about the same time I was going through MGS, and even into the 1990s at at least some of them. And there's a lot of schools I don't know about personally but I would guess that most of the APS schools were still using it for at least some of the 1980s, and probably a lot of the AGS schools as well.

Hi Ollie, I just read your last post and I admire you for posting your school-something a lot of others aren't prepared to do. Speaking of Catholic schools, I attended a Catholic Primary called St Gabrielles in Reservoir. I was taught by Nuns and Lay teachers during my time there. A lot of the Nuns used a strap on both male and female students as did the the lay teachers. One had the nickname of Thrasher Bourke, the irony was, she entered the convent to become one of God's Stormtroopers-a Nun. We were all glad at the time because we would be long gone should she return as a Sister there.

Some of the Nuns used a feather duster and I suppose in a technical sense it was similar to a cane. The feather dusters had Bamboo handles in those days and was given across the hands and the back of the legs. Try a dose of that on a cold day when you are in shorts as we were all year round. I'm sure shorts were made a regulation part of the unbiform for this very reason. To this very day, I get a shiver down my spine when I see a Nun.

Ollie, just on another topic, can you enlighten me on whether Melbourne Grammer still has a Reserve Rgiment there? During my Federal paid holiday in National Service, I was sharing quarters at Pucapunyal with a couple of guys from Melbourne Grammer. I don't remember why they were there but I remember one being around 19 years old at the time and they were on a course. I kept thinking he was fairly old to still be at school, two years older than most who had completed their Matriculation studies. I know they told me that they were in the Reserves to try and escape National Service which some people did do at the time.

I remember one of the guys was Jewish and we were coming home on leave one Friday afternoon and he was worried about the sun going down as it was the start of his Sabbath and he was not supposed to be riding any kind of transport. He would have had a long walk from Seymour to Caulfield. I gusess we shouldn't have done it, but we kept him on board until we reached Melbourne.

Well, I was at Grimwade from 1979 to 1987 - prep to Form II (year 8) and we had a bit of corporal punishment there, but honestly not too much. We had the red system and if you managed to get five reds in a single day - and to do that you really had to be really bad - you could get one red easily enough - talking in class could get you a red, asking to go to the toilet could get you a red, but getting one or even two wasn't serious - once you got three, you started to be in big trouble - and getting five - probably most people got a red once a week, but five in one day - it probably happened five or ten times a year at most in an entire class. If it happened though that's when you knew you were likely to get some sort of painful punishment - a spanking when you were junior, the slipper when you were senior - the cane was there in theory, and I know a couple of people who got it but it didn't happen often.

But besides the reds though, we did have some teachers who used to hand out summary justice sometimes - a smack on the backside or the back of the legs (and we were in shorts all year around) normally with their hand, sometimes with a ruler. We were going co-ed while I was there, and in theory, the girls got the same punishments as the boys but they got it a lot more rarely, and it wasn't just because they did get in trouble less. You could also get instantly punished for a really serious offence without them worrying about how many reds you had.

I probably got smacked in one way or another, half a dozen times while I was there, but never got the cane.

We were lucky in terms of our teachers. I really think they were all nice. They did use corporal punishment, but I think for most of them they used it because that was what the parents expected at those types of schools back then and the parents were paying a lot of money to get what they wanted.

At the senior school, the cane was a little bit more common and I did get caned there - on three occasions. Once in Year 9, twice (within a week of each other - it was actually two connected things) in Year 11. But it really still wasn't that common - my caning in Year 9 was reasonably routine - the two I got in Year 11 were not - I came within an inch of being expelled and the second caning was an alternative to that.

In terms of army units - MGS certainly still has a Cadet unit that is affiliated with the Melbourne University Regiment of the Army Reserve and I know a lot of members of the cadets end up in the Melbourne University Regiment, and from what my stepfather tells me, it used to be fairly common for an Upper Sixth boy at the school to be in both at once if they were militarily minded. It used to be fairly common (up until about 1970, I think) for boys to do a second Sixth Form year at the school before going to university, so they could fill leadership roles - Prefects, sports captains, things like that. So these boys may have been doing something like that - especially if it had the added bonus of trying to keep out of the army. I suppose what would surprise me is that the school would have let them get away with that - you're always supposed to do your duty.

As for the trick you played on that fellow - well, if he was an observant Jew at MGS, I'd say he'd have unfortunately dealt with far worse than that. Quite serious anti-Semitism was a feature of the school for a long time. By the time I was there, I think they'd stamped it out, but they were still really sensitive about it. The first time one of my classmates got caned - in Grade Five, and that was unusual, it was for knocking the skull cap off a boy from a local Jewish school - there was nothing racist in what he did at all, he was just playing a silly trick on a kid we caught the tram with

Thanks for the reply Ollie and the information I asked about in my previous email. I can identify with what you say about knocking caps off heads etc. This was typical schoolboy fun, although at the Catholic school I attended the Nuns had a different view.

I'm afraid I can't share your thoughts about teachers as my thoughts are quite different. I had mostly female teachers in my time althought there were a few male teachers. There is a saying that describes my educators quite well: Those who can....Do. Those who can't.... Teach!