Robert Kirby
Loose cannon
I must admit that corporal punishment is hardly an ideal theme for a Christmas edition. In other circumstances I wouldn’t choose something as unpleasant as the horrible practice of beating and often injuring young people with specially prepared flails. It’s just that these reflections on the educative benefits of ferocious assault on young boys has a happy ending.
What has brought this subject to mind is, of course, the publicity recently given to the prowess with the traditional instrument of schoolroom torture, the Malacca cane, of Jacques Sellschop, currently CEO of the cellphone monster, MTN.
Sellschop or Jacques the Whipper as he well might already be known was by all accounts a cane virtuoso in his days as a deputy headmaster at Greenside High School in Johannesburg. In a letter a week or so ago in the Mail & Guardian, a beating by Sellschop was described as one of the most traumatic experiences in the life of someone who was later to survive several months of solitary confinement and other ”assorted brutalities” in John Vorster Square police station.
Reading about Sellschop brought streaming back to me some grim memories of my days at a boarding school in the Natal Midlands where, shortly after my father had died, I had been dispatched, as a rather difficult sub-teenager of 11.
From the moment I arrived there, marched from the train station in crocodile file up a freezing road, I hated that school. I feared its institutional indifference, its frigid classrooms and dormitories and, within days, certain members of its staff. Most dreaded of these was the headmaster, a man called Peter Binns nicknamed Ploddy who reserved unto himself the ultimate in disciplinary coercion, the regular canings he carried out and quite obviously greatly enjoyed.
When it came to physical abuse Ploddy was the most psychologically competent at the school, but not far behind him was one of the teachers, a large gaunt man called Knoesen. I don’t remember his first name, rather the surviving images are of the vicious small brutalities of his classroom tactics.
Knoesen’s disapproval was instantaneous, often taking the form of an emphatic shot with the edge of a ruler on the back of the errant pupil’s hand, or a sometimes bloodletting pinch of the upper arm. Knoesen had enormous bony hands tipped with massive fingernails; one of his tariff pinches would render a shilling-sized haematoma that lasted for weeks.
I am not suggesting that the school was a Dickensian workhouse, though surviving high winters in shorts and blazers might often have persuaded the comparison. A lasting memory is of rows of shivering boys lined up against a brick wall trying to absorb the pallid warmth of a mid-morning sun. Our low- ceilinged classroom in an old corrugated-iron house was bitter, served only by a small pot-bellied stove.
Not one to stay a bitter course, I ran away from the school on several occasions, duly to be ”recaptured”, either by family or even police and promptly delivered back to the school and Ploddy’s honed displeasure. I once spent nearly a week hiding out in a Zulu kraal, taken in by a mother, fed and kept from sight.
Binns’s delight in corporal punishment was an exercise in sadism. He always made the most of it, announcing the evening’s ”cuts” at school lunchtime. ”Calder, Graham: four cuts; Stone, John: two cuts”. If you were on that awful list it rather spoilt the rest of the day. That the Binns technique was effective was to be seen in the correlation between his lunchtime announcements and the boys who vanished ”over the koppie” that afternoon.
Time and preparation for punishment was as nasty. Cuts were given after the evening meal and those due for punishment had to change into pyjamas and dressing gowns and line up outside a small room in which all the boys’ mackintoshes were hung.
You would stand there in a state of terror, wincing as the whistle and snap of Ploddy’s cane came through the door, each stroke a minute or so apart. Then the door would burst open and a white-faced boy would half run out of the place, trying like hell not to let tears take over and getting out of sight to where he would be able to rub his backside. Neither rubbing nor sob was tolerated by Ploddy. Either could earn an extra cut or two.
Once inside that awful room a boy would receive the Binns malice at its finest. First he would make a deal out of choosing which cane he would use for you. Three of these thin, curved yellow things stood in a metal rack, their ends in a well of linseed oil. Having chosen one, Ploddy would nod and the boy would have to bend down, grasp his ankles and stick his head into the hanging mackintoshes. Using the cane Ploddy, himself, lifted the dressing gown, folding it on to the boy’s back.
”And do you remember why you are here to be caned?” He would lightly tap the boy’s backside, protected now by no more than thin pyjama material. Then would come a short explanation of your misdemeanour and, if Ploddy was in a good mood, the first of the cuts. He could stretch this out if he felt like it. Another short lecture on wrong and right would be proffered between each stroke while the threat of the cane was emphasised with its little taps and strokings. Four cuts could take six minutes. There remains no doubt in my mind that the sessions were principally to allow Ploddy to get his foul rocks off. We had our head in the macs, we didn’t know what else he was doing back there.
There are parts of me which still believe in the surly dictum of Finley Peter Dunne or as he published, under the name ”Mr Dooley”. His is the line used, like a biblical injunction, by all corporal punishers: ”Spare the rod and spoil the child.” But I don’t think being whipped ever did me much good. It did teach me to be devious so that I didn’t get caught the next time, and in the event that I was, it encouraged me to lie like a flatfish as a way of eluding a possible thrashing.
The opposite approach to the rod is, of course, the leery practice of ”counselling”, as American a concoction as you could wish for and one that inspires far more in the way of deceit than any amount of creative mendacity in the schoolboy desperately trying to avoid the Malacca’s bite.
Far the worst thing about corporal punishment is that it so conveniently offers opportunity to those of its prosecutors who would use the occasion to nourish aberrant sexual agendas. There is no doubt that the carnal needs of the cane-wielder are often serviced along with the discipline, and I believe that anyone who makes an art out of inflicting pain on defenceless youngsters is automatically suspect of that.
The running away finally bore fruit and I was moved to a day school, Clifton Preparatory, in Durban. With the move came the first prompting, the first true influence that my education would have on my later life and it came in the form of a genial and truly select human being in a new headmaster, Tim Sutcliffe. And this is where at last this story becomes pleasant.
Sutcliffe and his wife, Yolande d’Hotman, were household names in Durban. They regularly acted in radio plays produced by what was then called the A Programme, a largely local and regional service of the SABC. I thank Sutcliffe for having set me on my road, as it were, with his teaching and his wonderful end-of-term novel readings. He’d arrange things so that the last two days of school were left clear. In a beautiful resonant voice he would read the boys an adventure novel, quite a feat at about six hours a day.
The whippings in the boarding school had obviously not had their intended remedial effect and one day at Clifton I went too far and was duly packed off to see Sutcliffe, carrying with me a note from the teacher requesting that I be given a tanning. In his office Sutcliffe read the note, raised himself up in a sort of mock rage, pushed me over the back of a large sofa and delivered four short and, by the Binns standard, rather pathetic strokes.
”Now get out of here, you abominable little shit,” he murmured. No lecture, no prissy moralising. I got out and walking back to the classroom I didn’t even have to rub. It was at that moment that I fell into an ecstatic mixture of love and hero worship for Tim Sutcliffe. He and two others of his ilk, the benign and memorable figures of Lionel Theobald and the mighty Bill Payn at Durban High School, still continue to instruct those who were lucky enough to have been in their patches. Some corporal punishment works.
It was not the end of being abused. At the same Durban High School I felt the cadet baton ministrations of head prefects and then was recipient of the galled savagery of Christian Brothers College Catholic priests with their whalebone and leather straps. Oh well, I suppose it kept one or two away from the next short spiritual step: no-holds-barred paedophilia, an established favourite of that particular clergy.
When they die and, in their own beliefs, are judged by Him in whose name they did these things, I have this ardent hope that the pious black-frocked hypocrites will share with Ploddy Binns, Mr Dooley and all the rest of them a grate in the unhappiest regions of hell.
Merry Xmas.