Miss Blackstockís Diaries:
Living in a building that was a boysí school for more than a hundred years, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1970s, I have often thought that, if these walls could talk, they would have some extraordinary stories to tell ñ most of them ending with thwacking sounds, hot tears and a very sore bottom.
Imagine my surprise, and delight, when I came across a moth-eaten old diary in a cupboard in my flat. The entries mainly date from the 1950s and 1960s and, judging by the content, were written by the woman who was headmistress at the time ñ Miss Marjorie Blackstock M.A. (Oxon), according to my researches.
She must have been a remarkable lady, not just to have been made head of an all-boys secondary school, but to be entrusted with disciplinary responsibilities that would normally have fallen to a male teacher.
Most of her diary entries are about the day-to-day business of the school and will have little interest for users of this site. But there are some I would like to share, if only because they capture the attitudes of the time ñ and what some would call the kinks of the time ñ so faithfully. The diary makes abundantly clear that the redoubtable Miss Blackstock not only used corporal punishment, which was pretty much universal practice at the time, but deployed the strap, cane and other implements of chastisement with the utmost relish.
As and when I have time off from my own disciplinary duties, I will be transcribing some of the more eye-opening diary entries on this page.
To be continued.….