Room 2D

Story (?) from Blushes 1 with a visual appearance by Alan Bell himself I believe. The following letter, addressed to the department of the Home Office responsible for Approved and Industrial Schools, formed part of a report submitted by the then Chief Inspector of Approved Schools in Warwickshire, which as an insight into the conditions obtaining in such establishments is illuminating; as an exposition of the kind of double-think with which the administrators of approved schools — or one of them at least — approached the matter of corporal punishment, it is, to say the least, revealing. For anyone interested in verifying the authenticity of the document, it may be found under the reference: HO 45/14545 at the Public Record Office. Kenilworth Training School Model Rules Chief Inspector of Reformatories (C.P. in girls under 16) Minutes In May last there was a serious revolt on the part of the girls at this Reformatory

From the highly sought after Phoenix 14, with superb illustrations by Hans Braun. In the span of history, until relatively recently, a beating was given across the bare flesh, and dress had a significance limited to the procedures and drama of its removal. Before the great change, the chances were that a victim would be crudely stripped and flogged without more ado, but, if dress played any part at all, it was as an agent of humiliation rather than as a layer of protection: a soldier was the more shamed by being stripped of his full-dress uniform and, by the same token, many a principal of a girls’ school would choose an occasion when the girls were in their ‘Sunday Best’ to take out one of their numbers for the enforced exposure that preceded a bare bottom birching. The ‘great change’ was scarcely more than a hundred years ago — in the middle of the nineteenth century — when a supposed Victorian morality, and an even more suspe