Bend over, BOY!

Some of our readers’ stories of corporal punishment at school are straight out of The Beano and The Bash Street Kids.

Expecting a thrashing, a nine-year-old Steven Diack of Hove, East Sussex, thought he’d outwitted his teacher.

“I got caught sliding down the wooden staircase rail and was told to go to see Mr Cross,” says Steven.

“I knew what was coming so I managed to borrow several pairs of PE shorts to wear under my trousers. As he approached me with his cane, I was feeling very smug. Then he said, ‘Hold out your hand’.”

But another time, Steven recalls when his school’s headmaster went too far.

“I was caught having a fight in the playground and we were both dragged to the headmaster’s office by our ears.

“He went and retrieved a size 12 plimsoll.”

The headmaster then said the immortal line to young Steven: “Bend over, boy.”

“He hit me 12 times with the slipper, leaping off his feet – hitting me very hard.”

The poor lad ran home and showed his mum all his yellow and black bruises.

“Mum was furious and went to the school to confront him,“says Steven. “Then she reported him to the Local Education Authority and he was banned from teaching.”

Meanwhile, in Tony Garthwaite’s religious school, pupils discovered that footie is sometimes close to divinity.

“I was in my last year at an all-boy Catholic grammar school in Bolton in 1970,” remembers Tony. “The deputy head was the

very strict Father Tubrett.” That year Leeds United played Manchester United in an FA Cup semi-final replay at Bolton Wanderers’ Burnden Park.

“The tickets went on sale, and the forecourt of Burnden Park was filled to capacity with scores of different school uniforms,”

explains Tony.

The following day at assembly, a list of 100 boys’ names were read out and they were told to line up outside the deputy’s office.

But as Tony waited his turn, he heard the thwacks of the cane, but no one came back out of the office.

“My turn came and I saw Father Tubrett standing there, cane in hand. He asked, ‘Did you go to get a ticket yesterday?’

“I told him, ‘Yes, Father’. He then asked, ‘Did you get me one?’ I was confused, and said, ‘No, Father’.” Father Tubrett then proceeded to whack a phone directory on his desk three times!

“He told me, ‘Right, out you go by the fire escape, and do not speak to anyone till you get to class or you will be back for some real punishment!’”

Father Tubrett’s strangely lenient behaviour was the talk of the schoolyard.

“No one could believe that he was human after all,” writes Tony, and he adds: “I never did find out if he got a ticket.”

God does indeed move in mysterious ways… Did you ever get the slipper or cane at school? Then email your misdeeds to siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk