Notebook
To beat or not to beat: that has been the question of the week. It arose first after the closure of a Church of England school to Toxteth, Liverpool, where children aged °Illy nine or ten had enjoyed a two-week Orgy of destruction and terrorised their teachers. According to the Chairman of the Liverpool Education Committee, Mr Michael Storey, one cause of the collapse of discipline at the school was parental outrage over corporal punishment. Some parents claimed there was too much caning and had intimidated the teachers, he said. While the debate continued, the European Court in Strasbourg ruled that children should not be beaten in British schools without their Parents' permission. As the ruling is binding on the British Government, it will pro- bably lead in the end to the total abolition of beating, for it would clearly be impossi- ble in a school like the one in Toxteth to have two classes of pupil, the beatable and the unbeatable. Whether or not it is desirable that the European Court of Human Rights should be able to dictate changes in British law and practice is an Issue on which Mr Enoch Powell, among others, feels strongly. But I think beating should be abolished anyway. Its supporters argue that it is a quick and effective form of punishment, easy to administer and instant- ly forgotten. (Dr Rhodes Boyson, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education, and a former headmaster, tells how he used to invite boys to play ping- PI3og with him immediately after beating "em, which I find a little creepy.) But the trouble with beating, apart from the risk of corrupting the person who carries it out, Is that its effects on the victim are so un- predictable. Hardened school thugs may be beaten repeatedly and will not behave any better as a result; they may come to regard .beating as just a routine feature of school life. But other types of boy, the more sen- sitive kind, can feel deeply humiliated and be filled with a misery and resentment far beyond the intention of the punishment. They can, indeed, be scarred for life.
Those who need further persuasion should go and see a new play which °Pened in London this week. Another country by Julian Mitchell. It is about life at an English public shool in the Thirties. The "ero, a homosexual schoolboy, is modelled On Guy Burgess. It is after he has been given six of the best — you hear the thwacks off stage, I am glad to say — that he decides he is g°Ing to become a spy. There is more to the Play, of course, than that. It is a chilling por- trayal of the miseries suffered in public schools by any kind of misfit. The action is,
perhaps, a little slow. But the characters of some of the prefects are instantly recognisable to anyone who has been at a public school. It is an evening of nostalgic melancholy, enlivened by a brilliant perfor- mance of the Guy Burgess character by an actor I had never heard of called Rupert Everett.
Mr Kenneth Rose of the Sunday Telegraph revealed in his column last Sunday that the Dean of Windsor, the Rt Rev Michael Mann, has written `to all the Knights of the Garter, who hold their an- nual service in the [St George's] chapel, asking whether each would present an oak tree from his estates'. The object of this ap- peal was to assemble a sufficient quantity of good timber to provide for any future repairs to the chapel. This was rather a good wheeze, and ten members of the Order have, says Mr Rose, already felled an oak and sent it to Windsor. But was it not a little insensitive of the Dean to write to all 24 Knights with this grandiose request? Alas, in these times even Knights of the Garter cannot be relied upon to have large country estates covered with oak trees. I wonder, for example, how Sir Har- old Wilson felt when he opened his letter.
It was a curious performance by Mrs That- cher this week, 'letting it be known', as politicians somehow manage to do without apparently saying anything, that she was furious about the visit by 12 England cricketers to South Africa, and then next day talking about it in the House of Com- mons without showing any signs of anger at all. But there was no reason for her ever to have been angry, or indeed to have express- ed any views on the question. Nobody argues that the players should have been prevented from playing in South Africa. It is agreed that they have acted perfectly within their rights. But they are condemned for 'deception' and for 'greed'. These criticisms are unfair. If the players were to get out of England alive, deception there had to be. And is it greed for a sportsman to sell his skills to the highest bidder when he knows that his earning capacity has such a short life? It is not even possible to claim that by going to South Africa these cricketers are bolstering apartheid. As John Woodcock pointed out in The Times this week, it should not be forgotten that, following a row in 1970 over the banning of Basil d'Oliveira from South Africa, the South African Cricket Association has made major efforts to end racial segrega- tion in the sport. 'By 1979,' wrote Mr Woodcock, 'they had achieved enough for a fact-finding commission visiting South Africa under the auspices of the Interna- tional Cricket Conference to recommend that a strong multi-racial team be sent there at the first opportunity.' Nothing has been done to implement this recommendation. On the contrary, the pressure has been in- creased on individual players to refuse in- vitations from South Africa. This pressure has been accompanied by threats that they may be banned from selection for England. Even if the action of these 12 players does turn out to be harmful to the game, we should not blame them. Individual rights are more important than anything.
It is a pity to have to write about this sort of thing at all. The 'apartheid-and- sport' controversy is one of the longest run- ning and most boring stories in journalism. It also ebbs and flows like the tide. Last year, for example, both halves of Ireland were put into a frenzy because the Irish Rugby Union was sending a team to South Africa. As Richard West reported in the Spectator at the time, both Protestant and Catholic churchmen, trade unions in both north and south, and indeed the President of the Irish Republic himself, Mr Patrick Hillery, were vociferous in their denuncia- tions. There was even a torchlight proces- sion through Dublin. But a year later the Irish rugby team wins the triple crown, and the island unites in its euphoria. The team, it appears, can do nothing wrong. Everybody has forgotten the outrage that was so widely felt a year earlier — everyone, that is, except Mr Hillery who boycotts the match against Scotland. And by doing so, he makes himself a national laughing stock.
The exciting news from Australia is that a deadly snake, known as a 'western taipan', has had to undergo six operations and has been brought to the point of death because it was bitten by a mouse. It swallowed the mouse in revenge, but the mouse nevertheless died triumphant. This is a story to gladden the hearts of all under- dogs, or undermice. It is also a warning to those who regard mice as inoffensive little animals. They quite often bite people, and they can give you rabies. Given the chance, animals will behave in the most unexpected ways. A friend once shot a pheasant which fell in a lake and was promptly snapped up by a pike and never seen again. The incident provoked a correspondence in The Field which revealed a rich variety of oddities in animal behaviour.
Alexander Chancellor
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