Didn't you find your chairs in school hard after a dose of the slipper?

It's a lovely picture you have found, and judging by the skirts (those were the days!) all those girls would have been to school in the days when a dose of the slipper would be quite a familiar event.

At my grammar school, many classrooms didn't have desks with chairs - they had those close-coupled desks, the flat tilt seats of which were made of the hardest wood know to mankind, and designed entirely to augment the effectiveness of the slipper and cane.

@GailCob Yes, we had those. I remember when we were about 10 a boy coming into the class in floods of tears after a caning. The boy next to him gave him his school cap to sit one, which would have helped a bit.

@JoBlak They were uncomfortable at the best of times - designed to ensure we never had the slightest desire to take a short nap while being taught the passive pluperfect or some other life-enhancing knowledge. And - in an almost literal sense - torture if you were returning from a visit to the Principal's study and a meeting with the cane.

As many others have testified in these various school punishment groups, a traditional plimsoll, applied with force (maximum prejudice, as the saying goes) can leave a pupil's bottom extraordinarily sore and tender for quite a while after the punishment itself. The big difference after a caning is that the painful tenderness on sitting lasts vastly longer.

@GailCob so you have gotten the cane?

Yes. When I was at school in the UK, corporal punishment was still widely used, and in the secondary school I attended, the administered the cane for any serious offence. It's hard to believe in the modern day, but it was simply accepted as 'the right way' to discipline rule breakers in school.

@GailCob They should bring it back