The prog last night on Radio 4 about Winston Churchills childhood
contained a graphic description of his being BB thrashed for having a pocket of sugar on the eccentric St.Georges'study 1875 ish held down by Roger Fry.
20 strokes on the bare it stated until the bum was a"mass of bleeding pulp"
Hmmmm anyone else hear it?

The many lovers of M/m who read these pages will surely want to hear the programme and they may do so by going, within the next few days, to

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/classroomstopower/pip/7tn38/

It was lengthy and scary.I found it difficult to square the vivid description though with that inflicted on an "8 year old Winston Churchill".
It was described as "a flogging far worse than the baddest of the bad in any Borstal or Reformatory in the land"which is saying something in 1885.
The head was also reported as having used "electric shock"punishment on pupils!(Though the prog went no further on this).
I feel there is some exxagerationm at play here boasting if you like to aggrandise Churchills legend?
It must have been a very thin cane for an 8 year old bum?
Barely thicker than a straw?
Eventually -it said-a kindly woman "discovered"scars and beating bruises marks "all over"Churchills'body hinting at even more diverse abuse-and so "had him removed"to another school (Harrow?).
I suppose this is the 1885 version of Social Workers in care!?
However given that the abuse was being meted out to many puipils I find it surprising that the same woman did not instigate an investigation at the school?Perhaps Reaserch Assistant there was one?
Some very strange things went on in the 1880s with houses of correction and the like.

A birch, other than that, the scene in the film "Young Winston" is more or less correct. An assembly at which boys were called to "step forward" then marched into the study for a birching.

Ronnie

The most gruesome account of birching at St George's Ascot, at the hands of Rev. Sneyd-Kynnersley, comes from Roger Fry (the quote is in the Ian Gibson book). Churchill's own rather less detailed description is also quoted there.

In the "Young Winston" film, Robert Hardy plays Sneyd-Kynnersley as merely stern and strict, not the crazed sadist claimed by Fry. As Scotty notes, the film shows him using a cane, but on the bare bottom; in reality it was the birch.

Given the often skewed social and moral values at loose in Victorian society young Winston could count himself lucky not to have been lobotomized or castrated for his misdeeds. The pseudo-science of eugenics was gaining its first and only hearing in society at that time. Eugenics was a forerunner to genetics but before the gene had been discovered. It observed how personality traits seemed to run in families concluded that some unidentified scientific process was at play there. It seemed to suggest that undesirable behavioural habits and character flaws could gradually be weeded out of society by controlling the breeding habits of undesirable elements - usually meaning the working classes and especially the criminal element. Churchill himself was an enthusiastic proponent of ideas of social control based on ideas from eugenics. As was Adolf Hitler. There's a little historical irony for you.

Anyway, **** Churchill. He might have won the war but he was still a **** and an unsavoury character. His heroic status in British history is mostly undeserved.