Poole Community

From 1940-1945 my schooling was at Henry Harbin School (now Poole High School). The headmaster then was local historian Mr H P Smith.

It was a well run, disciplined school where boys were segregated from girls – meaning no distractions from the opposite sex! Teachers’ tools of punishment were bamboo cane, chalk board rubber, measuring rule, slipper or anything else they could lay their hands on. One teacher specialised in flicking the backs of your ears if he caught you talking to a classmate during lessons. Detention with 500 to a 1000 lines was a more likely punishment from the kinder tutors, but most preferred the cane as it was swift and positive. The handicap for pupils was having to continue to work with painfully stinging hands, for instance dipping the pen into the inkwell and trying to write.

Teachers who didn’t have the resolve to use the cane would send a boy to the headmaster who would administer it.

Having been caned on numerous occasions I will tell you of a few:

Mr Albert Sharp, who was my teacher, entered the classroom and called us to attention.

“Good morning boys,” he said and I replied from behind my desk lid “Good morning Bert”.

I was called to the front and had two strokes of the cane for ‘insolence’. What a way to start the day.

The next time, I was chasing a pupil around the classroom during dinner break and the duty tutor was the science master, Mr ‘Milky’ Hartnell. Now this teacher was noted for his accuracy when caning. He had a long thin bamboo and he would line up your hand with precision and rise right up onto his toes and dispense with lightning speed. At first you thought he’d missed, until you felt your hand slowly catching on fire (very painful).

On one occasion, I was caned by the headmaster for back chatting a prefect when I thought he was wrong.

Then, one morning when entering the school corridor in the required single file column, we passed the hall and a sudden urge found me nipping in and bouncing down the parallel bars. To my horror, H P Smith was stood watching and, this time, I got two strokes on each hand (four of the best, we used to say).

The most severe caning I ever suffered was administered by Mr ‘Podgy’ Hillier, the woodwork master. Myself and another pupil, Raymond, started throwing wood shavings at each other, quickly getting more boisterous. Suddenly, Mr Hillier appeared and we had sawdust and wood shavings in our hair so we knew what to expect. Six strokes of the cane, this time on one hand. It was so painful!

Back at our benches, we watched our hands swell. Raymond’s suffering was worse as the master was cross-eyed and, by mistake, twice hit Raymond’s wrist – he cried that day! ‘Podgy’ came to our benches later.

“You two don’t seem to be making much progress.” Surprise, surprise!

We never told our parents, they would conclude we deserved it! My, how times have changed!