The cane and the Bunsen burner tube. That'll teach you....(2)

The angels will just have to wait a little longer. I did not really expect to return to memories of punishments dished out at school, but an opportunity came to me on a plate (I was going to say it came to me in a stroke, but thought better of it).

The plate was served by Mike Amos, son of Shildon, Northern Echo columnist extraordinaire (or "that overachiever out of Albert St" if you prefer the impertinent dissenting opinion offered on these pages by one "Bassy"), tireless servant of the Northern League, godfather to my elder daughter and the man who taught me a fair amount of whatever I know about journalism.

Mike, in common with most people I knew growing up in Shildon, went to Timothy Hackworth Junior and Infant School. Well, that's more or less what it was meant to be called - there may have been a "mixed" in the title, too - but it was Tin Tacks to us lot.

And at Tin Tacks, the cane was such a common feature of everyday life, as it was at schools throughout the country in those days, that it must have been quite difficult to have your primary education there and never be on the receiving end. Keep a look out for comments, though, since my big sister will doubtless pop up to correct my memory again and claim that her entire class emerged unscathed from its Tin Tacks years.

A caning at Tin Tacks would mean anything from one to six strokes on the hand/s. It stung, but in truth the threat of being punished in this way can hardly be said to have clouded our formative years, reducing helpless little children to cowering wretches.

Beyond primary school, of course, at grammar or secondary modern schools, corporal punishment took on a wholly different meaning , as I described in the first instalment of The cane and the Bunsen burner tube. That'll teach you....(2).

But even though I recall being caned on numerous occasions at Tin Tacks, I remember only one of those punishments in any detail. I said in the earlier posting that fear of the cane was, for most of us, nowhere near as deep as the fear of having the event recorded in the dreaded punishment book. It is strange that this should have been so; the book was merely intended to serve as the official record, and I imagine Durham County Education Authority regulations required each and every instance of the cane's use to be listed. But our teachers used it as an additional aspect of Crime and Punishment; to be ordered to "go and fetch the cane AND the punishment book" from the headmistress's office meant that this was to be a caning for a relatively serious matter. The teacher's act of inserting, in the book, the bare details of the punishment - pupil/class/offence/number of strokes/own name or initials - somehow made the child's disgrace complete.

That, at any rate, is how I remember my Tin Tacks schooling. And that is where Mike Amos, or specifically an e-mail that arrived from him this morning, comes in. This is what he wrote:

I went to a little open evening at Tin Tacks last night, in advance of the centenary in 2010, and was reading the punishment book with great interest. It began in 1959, the year after I left, but a number of names of the castigated were very familiar. I couldn't see C Randall but P Randall features several times. Worst of all, P Sixsmith was whacked both for 'chewing a straw' and 'fencing with rulers'. Do you think that we should knock around with a reprobate like that?

Indeed I do not. I shall need to revise my seating arrangements at the Stadium of Light. Perhaps I should also order him to stay away from any milestone birthday party that may be approaching; it goes without saying that the right people at work in Abu Dhabi should know that I wish to receive no more parcels from home containing the Sunderland Echo "pink". And to think it was Pete Sixsmith's mum who said he shouldn't mix with me because I was the bad influence.

Say what you like about the shortcomings of my academic career or the wrongs I have committed in life.

I swear I have never, and I mean never, chewed a straw or fenced with rulers. At any rate, that's my story and I am sticking to it, though I fully expect Pete Sixsmith to issue a writ for libel, claiming that the P stands for his brother Phil.

But Mike's anecdote contained another scrap of information, this one of great importance to me.

The caning I do remember occurred, of all places, on the school playing field. A relatively unfamiliar teacher had plonked our class by a tree; I no longer recall what lesson it was, who the teacher was or the nature of my misdemeanour.

But I have never forgotten that she had taken us to the field armed with not only the cane but the punishment book. For half a century, my thoughts have occasionally returned to that day, and to the possibility that my naughtiness and its consequences were duly recorded. I think that was what the teacher intended. And, while I did not see her write anything in the book, I have always gloomily assumed that with a couple of vicious strokes of her pen, she ruined my school record, condemning me to perpetual shame.

And now I feel like someone who has finally won a battle to clear himself of a terrible crime he never committed. I may have held out my hands for scores of strokes of the cane between starting at Tin Tacks and leaving, but I have it from Mike Amos that my reputation is intact: that I breezed, after all, through primary education without once getting my name in the punishment book.

Comments

[Bill Taylor]

As usual, you leave us with more questions than answers?
Was this a drinking straw that Pete chewed or the sort that farm labourers used to stick in their mouths at hiring fairs to indicate their availability for employment?
If the former, had he already employed it to suck down his mid-morning 1/3-pint of milk or was it new and unused (and thus a far culpable offence, straws not growing on trees, you know)?
If the latter, was he looking for agricultural work? And did he find it?
Where (and when) will your "milestone" birthday party be held?
County policy or not, I don't recall Cockton Hill Junio Mixed (which I graced with my presence while you were at Tin Tacks) ever recording corporal punishment in a book. And I was beaten on a fairly regular basis there, both formally and informally. The unofficial (I presume) policy when you sent to the head's office for a thrashing was to first keep you standing at his door for 10 or 15 minutes, presumably as an awful warning to others.
There was one dreadful teacher who, if he happened by, invariably would stop to enact in pantomime what was coming. I think he must have derived some perverted pleasure from this.
The beatings were never that bad, certainly not in comparison with the casual violence meted out by many of the staff at King James I Grammar.

[Gary]

As someone with more than a passing interest in Timothy Hackworth School, I was disturbed to read your comments about pillars (some unkindly say pillocks) of our community and there reprobate past. Who would have thought Mike Amos, Peter Sixsmith and friends were juvenile delinquents, and look how they turned out . Their parents must have gone grey early, with all the strife.

The school has turned out some good 'uns over the years, as well as some journalists. Notorious all...

Spare the cane and save the child, may be the present day chant, but in the old days when right was right and wrong was wrong, people grew up to add something to society not take it away.

Well done Tin Tac relics you have done well.

Gary (school governor, who darn’t use his real name, in case the teachers get the cane out)

[Gary]

I was uhhmmmmm taught at Timothy Hackworth School and do know the difference between there and their, my spell checker does not...

[Bill Taylor]

That's more than Colin knew when he left their (or, as he would have put it, there) hallowed halls.....

[Pete Sixsmith]

And now, the secret isout. Yes, I was a pre teen straw chewer.I did it because it was the thing to do at that time. A group of us would meet in secret, outside the shed at the bottom of the playground and exchange straws. Sometimes we would put them in our pockets and take them home where we could chew them in the privacy of our inside (in my case) or outside toilets. But once the need to chew the straw got too great we would risk doing it in class.Mr Jackson must have seen me diving into my desk to grab a quick chew of the straw to help get me through another interminable lesson of Singing Together on the radio. I freely admit that without the drinking straws to chew on, my concentration levels would have sunk even lower and I would have been unable to join in the umpteenth chorus of "Turn the Glasses Over".

From there it was an easy step to Fencing with Rulers.

I blame the liberal 60's and the Tory government of Harold MacMillan for encouraging youngsters to experiment with ruler fights. The liberal establishment could have done a lot more to prevent people in my class from fencing with rulers and it would have prevented many of us from ending up in dead end jobs like teachers, doctors and journalists if they had.
Thank God I never succumbed to the real hard stuff like Giving Someone a Chinese Burn or Using Blotting Paper in a Wasteful Manner.

[keith]

Fencing with rulers? Tame stuff. At my primary school, it was the teacher who had the ruler ... and used the edge to administer corporal punishment. None of your softie punishment book nonsense there. Needless to say, I took it like a man ... I'm pretty sure I only cried for two days.

[Bill Taylor]

Tin Tacks pupils were notoriously effete; noted for it throughout the district. Had Cockton Hill possessed a punishment book, it would have been for the adminstration rather than the recording of beatings: "Six strokes with the punishment book, recalcitrant youth, and may god have mercy on your (r)soul....."

[Malcolm Armsteen]

This Sixsmith looks a Bad Lot to me. I expect he spent his life in Prison.

[spelling game]

As someone with more than a passing interest in Timothy Hackworth School, I was disturbed to read your comments about pillars (some unkindly say pillocks) of our community and there reprobate past. Who would have thought Mike Amos, Peter Sixsmith and friends were juvenile delinquents, and look how they turned out . Their parents must have gone grey early, with all the strife.