LOG-BOOK OF THE PENGE PENAL INSTITUTE
Those of you who have read the Headmistress Diaries on this website will know that we left the redoubtable Miss Blackstock in 1953, the time when she resigned as headmistress, married a Mr Rodwell and moved south of the river. I speculated that she may well have been the same Mrs Rodwell whose name appears in the register of employees of the Penge Penal Institute in the late 1950s. Mrs Rodwell was an SCO, or Senior Correction Officer, and in the days when it was almost universally accepted that nothing did juvenile delinquents more good than a sound thrashing, the skills she had learnt at her old school must have stood her in good stead.
I have across a log-book of the long-defunct Penge Penal Institute in the local library and cautiously concluded that the entries signed SCO Rodwell, spanning several years, may well be the work of our old friend Miss Blackstock. I will be introducing a selection of them here, starting with this eye-opening entry from 1958.