ChildAbuse & Neglecr. Vol. IS, up.

377-388,
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1991
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0 199 I Pergamon

INVISIBLE WOUNDS: CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

BRITISH SCHOOLS AS A FORM OF RITUAL

+ Bo
Press plc

IN

JONATHAN BENTHALL
Director, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, London

Abstract-This article examines a presumed historical association between corporal punishment and the British
ruling class, taking as data the elaborate forms of beating practiced at a well-known English fee-paying boarding
school in the 1950s and here documented in detail. Analogies with other forms of ritual studied by anthropologists are
considered, as well as the psychosexual dynamics of beating for both officiants and victims. The paper argues that
ritual corporal punishment must be seen in retrospect as a clear case of child abuse that is both physical and sexual.
Such rituals of authority, though virtually abolished in Britain, may well exist in a different form in present day
residential institutions for children in some Third World countries that have borrowed from now outdated European
practices.
Key Words-Corporal punishment, Boarding school, Psychosexual trauma, Rituals of authority.

IN BRITAIN, corporal punishment has been abolished in state schools, and its use in independent (fee-charging) schools, which are attended by some 7% of the population, has recently
been reduced to virtually nil. A tiny minority of independent schools continue to practice it
and are not in violation of the law. Schools in a number of other countries continue to beat
their pupils, but not in Europe.
The argument has been advanced that there was formerly a close connection between
corporal punishment and British cultural identity, or to be more precise, the cultural identity
of the British ruling class. While the practice continued, it was difficult to discuss dispassionately. Now that it has virtually died out, it can be reexamined more coolly, and we will
examine the arguments validity with the help of some detailed study of a historical example
of this particular variety of what Marcel Mauss (1936) called the techniques of the body.
Residential institutions for children have by no means died out, if one considers the whole
world, and corporal punishment is practiced in day schools as well as boarding schools; thus
the topic is of more than merely antiquarian interest. In 1979 there appeared a major collection of papers on corporal punishment in American education (Hyman & Wise, 1979) and in
the late 1980s it was estimated that 2 to 3 million acts of corporal punishment per year were
still carried out in the USA (Hyman, 1987).
There exist a number of popular histories of corporal punishment in general, one or two
with anthropological pretensions (Cooper, 1870; Scott, 1938; Van Yelyr, 194 1). A curiosity of
educational research (Mercurio, 1972) describes a semicovert study of corporal punishment
in a New Zealand boys school in 1969-70 by an American social researcher. This book treats
A version of this paper was first presented October IO,1989 at a conference on Mythologies and Rituals in Contemporary Europe at Radziejowice, Poland, organized by the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. That version pointed out that Poland had legally abolished corporal punishment in schools as long
ago as 1783, about 200 years before Britain.
Received for publication May 29, 1990; final revision received September 27, 1990; accepted November 10, 1990.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Jonathan Benthall, 50 Fitzroy St., London W 1P 5HS, UK.
377

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Jonathan Benthall

caning as an educational rite, but its interpretation tends towards a bland functionalism.
Mercurio quotes some attempts by the schoolmasters to justify caning which bear out others
interpretation of corporal punishment as a form of repressed sexual activity.
For present purposes it is enough merely to note the ferocity and ingenuity which used to
attend corporal punishment of victims of all ages, even in supposedly civilized societies, so
that it is often conceptually indistinguishable from torture. Britain was like many other countries in this respect, and of course in some Islamic countries even today corporal punishment
is still part of the penal code. Floggings in the British army and navy were extremely brutal
and continued until the end of the 19th century. Sobering to recall is that prison flogging in
England and Wales (with cat onine tails administered to the back, or the birch on the naked
buttocks) was only fully abolished in 1967, though it had gradually ceased to be practiced
some years before (Gibson, 1978, p. 167).

AN ENGLISH

PUBLIC SCHOOL IN THE

1950s

This paper presents some detailed retrospective ethnography on corporal punishment in a

well-known English public school during the middle to late 1950s based on our own personal
experience, and then the question is posed, how can corporal punishment be understood as a
ritual. (Public school is a term now falling out of use in Britain because of the confusion it
causes. In Britain the public schools are a category of well-established independent fee-paying
secondary schools, not in fact public in any normal sense. They are now increasingly known
as inde~ndent
schools, but this term was not current in the 1950s; and it also includes
independent primary schools known as prep[aratory] schools.)
The school described here, as regards corporal punishment, was typical of many other
mainstream public schools of this period. Any British public school in the 1950s which
abstained from corporal punishment would have thereby identified itself as committed to
progressive educational ideas. The mainstream public schools at that date set a high value
on tradition in this and in many other aspects of school life. For instance, the curriculum at
this school gave special prominence to Greek and Latin, taught in the traditional style with
emphasis, at the senior specialist level, on composition of Greek and Latin verse and prose by
the pupil in imitation of the classical masters. Two different kinds of football invented by the
school were (and still are) played there even though they have been adopted by no other
school.
Eton is a prestigious school founded in the 15th century. It is a secondary boarding school
for boys only, aged 13- 18, over a thousand in number, who spend about eight months of each
year at school and the remaining four months at their homes. The school is divided into
boarding houses, the oldest of which is known as College and accommodates 70 boys who
have won scholarships through an annual competitive examination. In the 1950s the Collegers were, with a few exceptions, no longer the poor scholars for whom King Henry VI had
originally founded the school; all had been trained for the examination by attendance at
fee-paying prep schools. Nonetheless, the Oppidans (all the boys other than Collegers) maintained for them, even in the 1950s a certain snobbish disdain based on the Collegers presumed social inferiority. Collegers wear gowns as well as the normal school uniform, a black
morning coat with stiff collar and white tie. The following account is written from the point of
view of a Colleger.
We shall enumerate the different varieties of corporal punishment that potentially awaited
a new boy during his average five-year career at the school, beginning with the least severe and
leading up to the most. These were all forms of legitimate, institutional punishment. No
reference is made to informal punishments, etc., which took place from time to time.

Invisible wounds

319

There were a number of noncorporal institutional punishments, in particular the copying

out of Latin hexameters, usually about 100 for a minor offense, or sometimes of Greek
hexameters from Homers Iliad, with or without accents. In the 1950s-as opposed to much
earlier periods in the history of the same school-a boy could very often go through the school
without suffering any corporal punishment. A number of other punishment options existed,
such as sending a boy to run to a specified place and return at a given time, keeping a boy back
at school for some hours when others went home on leave, or calling on a group of offenders
to carry out a useful task such as cleaning out a dirty squash court.
The Varieties of Corporal Punishment
Siphoning. This was a relatively mild form of beating, peculiar to College, carried out by the
captain of chamber or head of the first-year boys dormitory. The dormitory itself was a long
room divided into 15 partitioned stalls with wooden neo-Gothic arches, rather like a stable.
The captain or head had to ask permission of the housemaster, the master in College. The
punishment was usually given for unruliness. After supper but before College prayers, all
except the miscreant were sent to their stalls, but they could hear what was going on because
the partitions were not very high. The miscreant was summoned to a central common area
and told to bend over a round oak table. The captain of chamber then made sure that the tails
of the miscreants morning coat were not in the way, and drew a horizontal line with white
schoolroom chalk across the boys trousered bottom. He then aimed at the line several times
with a rubber siphon, actually the tube of a bunsen burner acquired from the science
laboratory. The strokes were few in number, and the punishment was not greatly feared,
although it could hurt. Appeal to the master in College against a siphoning was possible but
inadvisable. According to folklore, the rubber siphon was a relic from the days of hip-baths
filled by hand. Siphoning had no counterpart in the boarding houses other than College, and
was even affectionately regarded by many of the scholars as one of their distinctive traditions.
Beating by the captain of the school or a deputy. This was a more serious affair. At the same
time of day, before evening Prayers, the miscreant would be summoned to a reading room
which served as a common room for those ten senior Collegers who were members of the sixth
form. The ritual was conducted by the senior boy in College (captain of the school) or his
deputy (or a captain of football, cricket, etc., if the offense concerned had taken place on the
sports fields). Again, permission had to be obtained from the master in College, and appeal
was theoretically possible.
All boys other than the sixth formers and the miscreant were supposed to be working in
their rooms. Occasionally a cane was rattled along the doors of one of the long corridors by the
officiating sixth former, but this was an unusual act of flamboyance.
When the miscreant entered the reading room, he found all the sixth formers except the
officiant in armchairs reading (or pretending to read) magazines. The officiant subjected the
miscreant to a sustained rebuke which he ended by saying, Ive decided to beat you. Please
wait outside. The miscreant left the room, and while he waited outside, a folding chair was
set out in the middle of the room. The miscreant was then told to come in again, bend over the
chair, and grasp the horizontal bar at the back, leaving his trousered bottom extravagantly
exposed. He could see the officiant upside down. Again the officiant drew a small line with
chalk to assist his aim, but in this case the instrument was a rattan cane. These canes came in
various sizes, denoting the status of the user as did many sartorial details such as collars, ties,
caps, scarves, etc. Sixth formers had canes with ridges on them, whereas captains of houses
who were not sixth formers were allowed only a less painful kind without ridges. The captain
of the school, being ex officio a member of Pop (see below), was entitled to a cane with not

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Jonathan Benthall

only knobs but a crook at the end so that it could be used as a walking stick. Canes were
stocked and sold at the school barbers in the High Street, a smart establishment that had
another branch in Londons West End. The officiant flicked aside the tails of the victims
morning coat with his cane before beating him. The usual number of strokes was six, but this
was sometimes exceeded. Good form decreed that the victim not shriek or weep, if possible.
The victim occasionally padded his trousers with an extra pair or two of underpants, but
excessive padding was liable to be detected and the miscreant told to go outside and remove it.
During our last year, a friend, also in the sixth form and with advanced views for his time,
persuaded us that one should not tolerate corporal punishment insofar as it lay within ones
power to prevent it. Consequently, when the captain of the school arranged a beating and we
were both among the customary witnesses, we rose to our feet just as the rebuke was completed and said we would not allow the beating to proceed. The captain of the school, a
scholarly boy of weak character, flounced from the room in disgust at our disloyalty. As far as
memory serves, the punishment was not carried out.
In the boarding houses other than College, the captain of the house had equivalent powers
to the captain of the school, and the Library (house prefects) acted as witnesses in like manner
to the sixth form.
Birching flogging).

This was the immemorial form of punishment at Eton for which it was
famous. It was inflicted by the headmaster or the lower master (headmaster for the junior
two-fifths of the school) for serious disciplinary offenses, possibly as a prelude to expulsion. It
was embedded in an elaborate ritual.
Every weekday morning offending boys were summoned by the headmasters representative, one of the sixth formers appointed for a week at a time by rotation. The praepostor
went round the school and opened classroom doors without knocking, asking without waiting
for permission to speak, Is X in this division (class), sir? (a prescribed form of words). The
assistant master in charge of the class had to tolerate this intrusion, as the boy was an ambassador of higher authority. The boy went on, He is to see the headmaster at 12: 15.
At 12: 15 the headmaster sat in judgment in his own classroom, an imposing room decorated with a reproduction of an Athenian frieze and classical busts of old Etonian statesmen.
He was dressed in a black cassock and black gown, with stiff white collar and two white clerical
bands hanging down from it, indicating his high rank, which gave him a quasi-ecclesiastical
status even though he was not in holy orders. He sat behind a table, and two praepostors
summoned in the miscreants one by one. Usually they would be given a punishment such as a
Georgic (writing out Virgils first Georgic, about 500 lines of hexameters) or kept in for a day
at the end of term. Sometimes with lesser offenders the headmaster might get quite chatty and
talk to the boys about their families. But sometimes the headmaster uttered the dread words,
Im going to flog you. The boy then went downstairs to school yard, the schools symbolic
center, where a small crowd often gathered, or at least a number of people contrived to pass
by. The headmaster went into an ancient schoolroom (now a museum show piece), followed
by the two praepostors and the uniformed school messenger (one of whose other principal
functions was showing round tourists, whom he would presumably regale with anecdotes).
Then came the offender, who was obliged to kneel on an ancient flogging block, and the
messenger instructed him to drop your trousers. The boy lowered his trousers and underpants and knelt, the messenger standing closely over him. A praepostors duty was simply to
act as a witness, but according to folklore he was supposed to see that the headmaster did not
raise his arm above his shoulder. Some six strokes were administered. The instrument was not
a cane but a birch (a bundle of birch twigs tied at one end to form a handle). After delivering
the punishment, the headmaster left, walking majestically across the school yard to his house
in the cloisters, keeping to the flagstoned path rather than taking a short cut across the cobbles

Invisible wounds

381

as everyone else did. It was said that the cost of the birch was added to the offenders bill at the
end of term, since it could only be used once.
We once officiated in the minor role of praepostor, aware that we were witnessing an
anachronism that must soon be abolished. Some days later the lower master (who in this case
had carried out the flogging), a civilized and sophisticated man, saw us in the street and
crossed to apologize for having inflicted the experience on us. He said that flogging was not
painful, but was essentially a warning to the boy that he was at serious risk of expulsion. He
seemed embarrassed, as were we.
Birching continued regularly at Eton until 1960 and probably later. But in 1977, the then
headmaster, Michael McCrum, put on record that no boys had been birched since his arrival
in 1970 (Gibson, 1978).
Pop-tanning. This was the most feared form of punishment

since it was delivered not by a

middle-aged, cultivated schoolmaster but by an athletic young man of 17 or 18, subject to
little restraint on his severity. It was not common and was generally administered for serious
disciplinary offenses outside the boarding houses and also outside the academic domain, e.g.,
for smoking and drinking. Pop was the nickname of the Eton Society, an elite club of some
20 senior boys, largely self-elected for their athletic prowess, worldly prominence, or other
much appreciated qualities, with a few boys like the captain of the school appointed ex officio.
Pop had its own clubroom. Beating was carried out by the president of Pop. According to
folklore, in times past each member of Pop struck a blow.
The miscreant was summoned in writing by a note delivered by a fag (junior boy performing obligatory tasks for seniors such as running errands, making toast, etc., another tradition
later abolished at Eton). The miscreant was told to wear an old pair of trousers. We have no
direct experience of this ritual, whether as victim or witness, but it is recorded-and
was
always believed-that
the miscreant was made to put his head on a window sill with a sash
window closed over his shoulders and chest. In a book edited by two boys who had recently
left the school, Cheetham and Parfit (1964, p. 49) give not only a graphic description of
corporal punishment but also include a number of illustrations of birchings and canings,
including a medieval woodcut chosen as an endpaper. They defend corporal punishment and
claim that the power to beat is seldom abused at the school, but on the same page one reads
that pop-tanning is a frightening anachronism reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition, and
they recommend its abolition. Opposite is a drawing of two members of Pop grinning as a
younger boy, his head jammed in the window, is ferociously beaten by the president. In the
ritual of pop-tanning members of Pop sat in armchairs as witnesses. A pop-cane (see above)
was selected from a sheaf, and the president of Pop was allowed to beat really severely, even
brutally. The record of Cheetham and Part3 (1964) speaks of at least 15 strokes.
An informant who was once a member of Pop recalled one pop tanning in November 1957.
There was no meeting of Pop as a whole to discuss it beforehand. He thinks the recommendation would have been reached by the committee of six boys (of which he was not at the time a
member) before discussion with the headmaster. A senior Eton master writes in a personal
communication that Pop tanning was extremely rare. The headmaster was consulted beforehand, and so was the house master (to ensure that there were no medical circumstances that
would have made a beating inadvisable). It was very much a last resort after other punishments had proved ineffective. All members of Pop would have been likely to know of the boy
as a troublemaker and would have been aware that he was likely to be so disciplined though
only a few would have known the precipitating event. Pop tanning was never officially abolished, but M. W. McCrum, headmaster 1970-1980, ruled that it could only take place in his
presence, which not surprisingly put an end to it (Thomas Lyttelton and Francis Gardner,

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Jonathan Benthall

personal communications). The rarity of the punishment probably resulted in the description
and illustration in Cheetham and Par& ( 1964) being somewhat exaggerated.
Other forms of beating. Two other forms of beating were said to be on the menu in the late
1950s. One was eight-tanning, carried out by the captain of the boats and similar to pop-tanning, but to punish offenses committed on the river. We never heard directly of anyone being
eight-tanned, but were in dire fear of being eight-tanned when one day, coxing a four, we
fell asleep and narrowly missed ramming the school eight, which would have been a cardinal sin. After being sternly reprimanded by the captain of the boats, to our relief we were
merely fined half a crown. It is mentioned here because it demonstrates how different zones of
school life-the boarding house, the academic program, the sports program-had
their own
punitive authorities, although there was overlap between the different zones, and some serious offenses fell into the feared jurisdiction of Pop.
The second was screwing (the boys slang expression, which would not have been used
officially). This was occasionally carried out by housemasters, and was an ordinary caning on
trousered bottom, without witnesses. This was rare and also private, and therefore not so
evidently a ritual in the sense that the four principal varieties obviously were.

POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS
It is now some 20 years at least since corporal punishment of the kinds described above was
abolished at Eton. Corporal punishment in many other public schools too was severely curtailed around 1970, to be abolished completely in the mid to late 1980s. (Beating on the
bottom was more or less confined to boys schools. Beating in girls schools, and in state
schools for both sexes, was usually on the hand.) Possibly the ferocious beating scenes, based
apparently on Tonbridge School in 1949, in the feature film If(by Lindsay Anderson, first
screened in 1968), were the single most important force for reform, finally breaking down the
public schools devotion to these tribal traditions. Eton has now changed in many other ways
too, but in the 1950s these harsh practices coexisted with an educational regime that was in
many other ways quite liberal and enlightened. If the schools besetting fault at that time was
arrogance and snobbery, it was also more tolerant of individuality than many other schools.
While the 70 collegers were on the whole boys of high intelligence, their competitiveness was
somewhat at odds with the wider schools desire to place itself outside competition. In College,
wit and chutzpah were much admired. Bullying tended to be verbal rather than physical. One
scholar, now a well-known barrister, has said recently that never since has he lived in a
community of such high intellectual calibre. This may be an unusual opinion, but at least it
cannot be said that College in the 1950s was a microcosm of a fascist state, as some independent schools probably were in the past.
Corporal Punishment as Ritual qf Transition
Two authors, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (1977) and Ian Gibson (1978), help in understanding the data presented above. Gatho~e-Hardy
concludes his history of the public
schools with a chapter of public schools considered anthro~lo~cally.
He develops ideas
taken from Y. A. Cohen (1964) to argue that boarding schools operate an often agonizing rite
de passage which is essentially to extrude children from their families at an impressionable
and stressful age (usually about 8 in the British independent boarding system, which still
survives). Extrusion of male adolescents, deemed necessary for them to achieve adulthood, is

Invisible wounds

383

common in many societies studied by anthropologists, for instance in East Africa. Within this
wider context, specific rites de passage take shape in different institutions, but
. .they have a number of classic features: the rite must be presided over by older members of the tribe, it must
involve processes of indoctrination into the customs of the group, it must involve physical ordeals. To these wellknown elements Cohen was able to add refinements: the elders are of the childs kin group, all members undergo it,
the opposite sex is excluded, the rite is conducted in the group.

Gathome-Hardy ( 1977) goes on to suggest that we replace kin group by class group, for
everyone agrees that the English public schools have had the role of reproducing the upper
classes. His model applies perfectly to the painful ordeals which new boys and others were
forced to undergo in many schools. In College at Eton in the 1950s one may single out the
Wall Game, a particularly painful game for small boys who had to squat on all fours in a
strum and have their faced knuckled and the small of their backs kneed by larger boys
dressed in padded sacks, and the dangerous pursuit of walking over a high mantel piece in
Long Chamber from one side to the other. In some of the Oppidan houses a new boy could be
lamp-posted (i.e., several boys would enter his room at night when he was asleep and try to
shut him up in his folding bed). New boys were forced to commit to memory a great deal of
esoteric information about school slang, sporting colors, etc. with the threatened penalty of
dire punishment in the event of failure. By the 1950s these punishments had become light, but
they were not so in many other schools. Similar initiation rites are found in educational and
training institutions all over the world, one example being the hazing in American fraternities,
which is also carried out without adult supervision.
Gathorne-Hardy (1977) argues that pain and terror are essential to the conditioning process; and much anthropological evidence about whipping and scarification, and the requirement for victims not to admit they are in pain, can be adduced to support him (La Fontaine,
1985). But it is more debatable whether caning and birching fit the mode of rites of passage
exactly. Initiation rites, properly so-called, are mandatory rather than occasional. It is likely
that they were mandatory at an earlier time in the history of the public schools. For instance, it
is said that George III wanted his sons to be flogged like the sons of any private English
gentleman, if they deserve it. Samuel Johnson was severely whipped at school and attributed
his command of Latin to this inducement. Boswell(l934, p. 46) in his account of Johnsons
school days, indicates Samuel Johnson was strongly in favor of the corporal punishment of
boys. Late in his life he appeared to have engaged in obsessively self-punitive behavior which
included asking to be locked up and beaten by his close friend, Mrs. Thrale (see Quennell,
1972, p. 84).
Keate, headmaster of Eton from 1809 to 1834, is said to have sometimes flogged a hundred
boys in one evening. A Victorian chronicler of corporal punishment (Cooper, 1870) claims
that in Keates time there was not the least disgrace attached to a flogging; there might,
indeed, be some reproach in never having tasted birch, to avoid which lads have been known
to get themselves flogged on purpose (p. 434). Modem anthropologists are not satisfied with
the notion that a ritual can be a survival, but it seems likely that flogging in the 18th and
19th centuries was more of a classical initiation rite than it was in the 1950s.
Corporal Punishment as Erotic Flagellation
Whereas Gathorne-Hardy (1977) comments only in passing on corporal punishment, Ian
Gibson ( 1978) includes a chapter on Eton, the Birch, and Swinbume, and covers the whole
subject of corporal punishment in England with a wealth of detail. To summarize his argument, corporal punishment of the elaborated kind described above has a great deal in common with what goes on in flagellant brothels. Its prevalence derives ultimately from the

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Jonathan Benthail

overlap between sexual arousal and genital-anal pain-an overlap which is probably a physiological norm, though when it exceeds accepted limits it is defined pathologically as sadomasochism or algolagnia. The lower discipline, beating of the posterior, used to be a popular form of religious observance in monasteries, both inflicted by father superior and self-inflicted; and clerical schoolmasters were much to the fore in flogging. For instance when the
Rev. Cyril Alington (a notably devout man who later became Dean of Durham) became
headmaster of Eton in 1916, he restored the use of the birch on the bare bottom which his
predecessor had discontinued in favor of the cane on trousers (Ollard, 1982; p. 155). Erotic
flagellation came to be known as le vice anglais, particularly because of the quantities of
masochistic verse which the eminent poet Swinburne ( 1837- 1909) wrote about birching at
Eton; but as Gibson argues, it is more precisely associated with the culture of the English
upper classes as inculcated in public schools.
Gibson ( 1978) speculated on the exact relationship of punitive beating to erotic flagellation.
The boldest interpretation he cites is that of Desmond Morris {1963), who argues that rump
presentation is a way in which both male and female primates may appease an attacker,
Therefore beating is a form of pseudo copulation, the cane representing the erect phallus.
Gibson also argues for a close association between flagellation and homosexuality, for both
involve sexual excitation of the anal area. Homosexuality, along the continuum from active
to sublimated to repressed, is of course likely to be common in single sex boarding schools;
more so in the 1950s than now, for then visits home were much less frequent.
Gibsons ( 1978) main thesis seems compelling because so much evidence, in addition to
that copiously provided in his book, bears it out. For instance, Dahl, the well-known novelist
and childrens author, writes in his account of his boyhood ( 1984) of the then headmaster of
Repton, Geoffrey Fisher (later to become Archbishop of Canterbury), who according to
Dahls informant, would make boys kneel on his sofa with their trousers o@, and then punctuate filling his pipe and a lecture about wrongdoing with some 10 strokes of a cane, after
which he would provide the boy with a sponge, a basin, and a small clean towel to wipe away
the blood. Such material might be dismissed as adolescent fantasy, except that it recurs with
tedious regularity in memoirs by alumni of British boarding schools in pre-1960s. For example, a Times Literary ~~1~~1~~~~~
reviewer, Reading ( 1990), writes of an autobiography by
Richard Adams, a novelist, as follows:
At his prep school, Harris Hill. Adams apparently encountered the tn&zgr of cold baths, kindness, and cruelty
customary in such institutions. Notable here is an account of the perverted Mr. Morris, who. on the occasion of
public spankations would draw up a bench close to where the hapless, trouserless victims were to be whacked,
leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together with the air of a connoisseur who was not going
to miss anything.

Also, Connolly (1938). in a well-known memoir of life in College at Eton, includes an

account of being beaten.
Librarians would not be surmised by the connections argued here, for books on corporal
punishment and allied subjects are often set aside in the same reserved sections of libraries as
are thought appropriate for books of pornography. In the London Library, a private subscription library, the librarian reports that this is to prevent the books from being stolen, not from
being read by members.
Our own largely first hand accounts of Eton beating in the 1950s bear Gibson out. The
siphon and the white chalk are the kind of erotic details which occur in ~agellant fantasies.
Screwing, the school slang for beating by a housemaster, is explicit enough. Bending over
chairs with maximum rump display, under the guillotinelike sash window, or on a block
which recalls the traditional executioner, provides the posture and the props to complement
the surrogate orgasm of the act of flagellation itself.

Invisible wounds

385

Finally, we must record our own reactions as a victim and as a witness of beatings. Gibson
(1978) argues that the sexuality of many former public school boys may have been traumatized for life by beating; and this has also been claimed in various memoirs of Eton, for
instance that by Harold Acton (1970). To be a victim was unpleasant; but it also stirred
fantasies of reprisal and power, with the possibility of eventually acquiring it as one rose in
seniority. Whereas the captain of the school (and hence, the head of college) rose to the office
entirely through academic prowess and hence was sometimes quite ill at ease with his disciplinary duties, the captains of the other houses and the president of Pop were either elected by
their peers or appointed by masters. In either case, their physical powers over the persons of
younger boys must have normally been acquired through internalizing the dominant values
of the school.
To be a witness was to be sexually intrigued in a disturbing way. In an epigraph to his book,
Gibson ( 1978) quoted Sir Laurence Olivier as he put the matter very lucidly in a letter to the
Observerin 1965, The first time a schoolmaster ordered me to take my trousers down I knew
it was not from any doubt that he could punish me efficiently enough with them up. What is
astounding, but fully documented by Gibson, is how adamantly the supporters of beating
continued to defend the practice, and how respectable were those in authority who carried it
out and authorized it. The birching headmaster of Eton in the 1950s was also a noted humanitarian and liberal, and a man of personal charm and magnanimity.
Freud and the other psychoanalysts were clear on the subject of flagellation. The Cadogan
Report ( 1938, pp. 32-33) on judicial flogging reviewed the evidence of British psychoanalysts
who argue its association with sadism, sexual perversion, and scapegoating; but it discounted
the evidence:
We are unable to base any practical recommendations on the views expressed to us on behalf of the psycho-analysts;
and we feel obliged to add that none of the witnesses who has actual experience of supervising the administration of
corporal punishment has ever observed any overt signs indicating that either the victim or the person administering
the punishment was deriving from it any masochistic or sadistic satisfaction.

Freuds classic paper (1955) on beating fantasies had been published as long ago as 19 19,
but psychoanalysis was late in becoming widely accepted in Britain, and its mainly Jewish
origins did not help. In any case, Freudian theory upholds the likelihood that deeply entrenched forms of surrogate sexual satisfaction will be ruthlessly denied by the unconscious
censor. This seems to be what happened in the British public school milieux. There is a moral
for anthropologists: Insider interpretations of rituals of this kind should never be relied on to
reveal the latent meaning as well as the manifest content.

Ritual of Authority
If we put together Gathome-Hardy
(1977) and Gibson (1978) and reflect on the Eton
1950s data, it is clear that we have a ritual of authority, not exactly one of transition, for
imposition of the rites has become sporadic and arbitrary. Comparison with West African
secret societies such as the Poro (Cohen 198 1; La Fontaine, 1985) may be appropriate. Pop
was not a secret society in the sense of having a secret membership list, but its elections were
held privately, meetings were private, and no boy except a member of the society or a victim
was allowed to enter the clubroom. One might even adduce the notion of the culture of
terror which Michael Taussig ( 1984) used to characterize some Latin American states today,
and which has been borrowed by others to characterize white Australian policy towards
Aborigines, and the crack economy in Spanish Harlem (cf., Bourgois, 1989). The analogy
between public schools and prison camps or totalitarian states should not be overdone, but it

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Jonathan Benthall

is one that has often occurred to the schoolboys themselves, and is given some support by the
work of Goffman (196 1) and others on institutionalization.
The flogging practiced in prisons and the armed forces in Britain was, of course, much more
brutal than that practiced in schools. It was also exported to the Empire, whose British
officials the public schools did so much to prepare. However, corporal punishment is a very
widespread phenomenon, and it would be a mistake to claim too much for the association
with English identity without comparative investigation. It would be necessary to compare
corporal punishment in the state schools of Britain-more
often carried out on boys hands
rather than their bottoms-and
corporal punishment under other countries education system, for instance in Germany where it appears to have been equally salient. (A Moroccan
colleague reports that during her childhood in Morocco in the 1960s and early 1970s boys in
a state school were caned on their feet-held up in a sitting posture-and
girls on their hands,
sometimes for extra effect on the knuckles rather than the palm.) Such comparison could
yield insights into ways in which adult maleness was imprinted in these different nations; and
perhaps there is a connection with an orientation towards war such as characterized both
Britain and Germany in their respective geopolitical settings. (An anonymous reviewer contributed this suggestion. The same reviewer suggested that the social Darwinists ideology of
survival of the fittest may have helped make corporal punishment acceptable to Victorian
educational reformers.)
Psychological Efects of Corporal Punishment
Corporal punishment has also some of the features of expiatory sacrifice, which it shares
with judicial executions. Though no living being is killed at a flogging, blood is drawn. The
welts at Eton were sometimes displayed to the victims friends as an act of bravado.
More important perhaps than the symbolic wounds, the title of Bruno Bettelheims book
on initiation rites among Australian Aborigines and others ( 1955) were the invisible wounds
on the psyche, which did not always heal when the welts did. Gibson (1978) argues that these
were in some cases severe and lifelong. Psychoanalytic interpretations are nearly always speculative and sometimes far fetched, but at the very least it is clear that at an all male boarding
school caning and birching had a great deal to do with feminization of deviant behavior and
implicit downgrading of women, as well as with homosexuality.
This raises questions beyond the scope of the present paper. There is no evidence that Eton,
which is a fairly large school, produced a disproportionate number of confirmed homosexuals
or compulsive flagellants compared to their incidence in the population at large. According to
many psychologists, homosexuality is not always a permanent orientation but is frequently
just a phase, the narcissistic phase, in normal development. Even in cases of lifetime practicing homosexuality by males, there is often no specific association with anal sexual behavior. Early difficulties in relating emotionally to women are more likely to be decisive. For a
classic statement of this view, see Freud ( 1957) or as Wollheim ( 197 1, p. 20 1) summarizes it,
. . .a boy may subdue, and yet prolong, his excessive love for his mother by identifying
himself with his mother and then loving boys as she loved him. Nor would one expect to find
a direct correlation between the experience of beating or being beaten and homosexual behavior; for overt homosexual behavior at Eton was subject to strong prohibitions, including the
ultimate penalty of expulsion from the school, despite a great deal of sporadic gossip and
histrionics, whereas beating was, as we have seen, legitimated and ritualized.
Beating probably caused most psychological harm to those boys who were predisposed or
vulnerable because of earlier childhood experiences. An individuals adults sexual orientation and behavior are molded by many imponderable factors, some no doubt genetic. In any
case our mention of psychological wounds introduces assumptions about health and normality which may be part of our cultural baggage rather than scientifically based.

Invisible wounds

381

This said, there is a recent research literature on the psychological effects of corporal punishment on the victim. Hyman (1987) summarizes a weight of evidence that it teaches aggressive behavior and can also elicit nightmares and other classic symptoms of post-traumatic
stress syndrome. B. F. Skinners behaviorist psychology ( 1974) was critical of all punishment
of children, but of corporal punishment in particular. As regards child abuse in general, an
impressive body of clinical evidence from child psychotherapists (Shengold, 1989) indicates
that it frequently leads to a childs taking on him/herself a burden of guilt (in order to cling to
an idealized image of love and nurture) which can last for a whole life unless the disorder is
diagnosed and successfully treated.
A Personal Note
The present article contains as much autobiography as observation. A colleague to whom I
showed a draft, who was at the same school with me, says he is surprised how much of the
detail I remember. In fact, I was sent at the age of 5 to a boarding school in an English spa town
run by a family of Jehovahs Witnesses, my parents being then in India. (Boarding children
out in this way was customary among British expatriates, popular knowledge of child psychology being still rudimentary in the 1940s.) It was part of the schools folklore, presumably
exaggerated, that the headmistress would strip the children entirely naked before spanking
them. Then the bachelor headmaster of my next school used to take boys over his knee and
spank them as a game-a practice we naturally copied among ourselves-except
that on one
such occasion when he was doing this, he changed his tune in mid-stroke and told me I had
done very wrong and he was in earnest. No doubt I was especially ready to be impressed and
awed by the richness and variety of flagellant ritual at Eton, which some fellow pupils may
hardly have noticed.
CONCLUSION
Physical abuse of children came into the news in Britain in the 1960s and sexual abuse of
children in the 1980s. The British ruling classes were subjected to a nice combination of the
two over a long period, allied with the tradition of noble values, muscular Christianity, and
devotion to the nation which made up the ideology of public schools. Flogging on the bare
bottom had something of the expensive aristocratic cachet of caviar or white truffles (cf.,
Levi-Strauss, 1969). Bullying, both physical and mental, remains a problem in many schools,
but the panoply of beatings that Eton boasted in the 1950s both raw and padded, has no
parallel today.
But can we be so sure? If such practices were normal at educational establishments which
were otherwise, for their time, liberal and enlightened, it is very possible that comparable
rituals of authority have developed in the many residential institutions for children which
exist in Third World countries, such as orphanages, childrens homes, and penal homes,
many of them originally modeled on now outdated European practice.
Acknowledgement-I am grateful to Peter Carson, Jean La Fontaine, Richard Tapper, Nicholas Wade and my wife,
Zamira Benthall, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their comments on earlier drafts ofthis paper, though none
has responsibility for any errors.

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R&m@---Get article explore les suppods liens historiques entre les punitions corporelles et la dasse sociale
rkgnante en Grande-Bretagne, en se basant sur des don&es relatant les chkiments quon inffigeait dans les kc&es
r&sidentielles pri&es, durant les an&es SO.On se penche sur tes comparaisons quont faites les ant~ropologues entre
ces chgtiments et dautres types de rituels, ainsi que la dynamique psychosexuelle qui anime ces mauvais traitements,
tant du cotC des officiants que des victimes. Larticle postule que ces rituels de punitions corporelles, en rktrospective,
sont effectivement de mauvais traitements physiques et sexuels envers les enfants. II est possible que de tels rituels de
la part des auto&&s de ces Ccoles, bien que virtuellement abolis en Grande-Bretagne, persistent sous une forme
differente dans des institutions residentielles de certains pays du tiers monde qui sinspirent de pratiques europeennes
p&m&es.
Resumen-Este
articulo examina una supuesta asociaci6n hist6rica entre el castigo corporal y la clase dominante
b&mica, ba&ndose en las variadas formas de golpizas practicadas en un intemado privado en 10saAos dei 1950 que
se comentan en detalle. Se estudian las semejanzas con otras formas de rituales estudiadas por 10s antr&logos,
asi
coma la din&mica psico-sexual de la golpiza tanto para el oficiante coma para las victimas. Se defiende que el castigo
corporal ritualista debe verse en retrospectiva coma un case claro de abuso al menor que es tanto fisico coma sexual.
Estos rituales de autoridad, aunque virtualmente eliminados en Gran Bretafia, pueden existir en formas diferentes en
el presente en internados para nifios en algunos paises de1 Tercer Mundo que han copiado estas pr;icticas europeas ya
pasadas de moda.