A Guide To The Correction Of Young Gentlemen

Front matter

BANNED AND BURNED IN 1924

- AGUIDETO.

THE CORRECTION OF YOUNG GENTLEMEN

Introduction To The 1991 Reprint

HE HISTORY OF A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen is a tale of

survival by purest chance against all the odds. Few books can have had

such an unpromising start in life. First produced, if not precisely published, in 1924—in a private edition limited to 100 copies, dark green morocco bindings with over thirty hand-drawn illustrations’—not a single copy had been sold or distributed to customers before the entire consignment, together with much else, was seized by police in a raid on the privately-owned printing works belonging to eccentric dilettante publisher Gerald Percival Hamer. This was situated in the converted stables of a manor house in Etchingham, East Sussex, the estate belonging to Hamer and inherited by him from his father.

The raid, which appears to have been based on “information received”, took place on October 5th, 1924, and succeeded in netting, in addition to all 100 copies of A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen (plus the printer’s proofs and all plates), several thousand other “forbidden” volumes, including part of the stock of the recently deceased Charles Carrington, erotic publisher of Paris, with whom the Guide appears to hold no other connection. It is certainly the type of volume he would have been delighted to publish, but Carrington died in 1922 and it cannot have been written before 1923 at the earliest, for reasons to be explained shortly.

Following the judgement—and the sentences—the Court ordered all the erotic material seized from Hamer’s house to be burned; and this, so far as is known, was done. In this auto-da-fé of the self-righteous—so typical of its era— much perished that is irreclaimable, including the Guide, singled out for particular opprobrium by the Judge™ in his summing-up, which was reported at considerable length in the newspapers. So ferocious were his remarks that it was commonly believed that the prisoners received, between them, an extra five years’ prison because of this one item of evidence.

Yet, as the reader will discover for him- or herself, there is nothing that could be called strictly obscene within the pages of this small volume. Forbidden

* According to evidence given at the trial of Hamer and Norris. ** Mr Justice Ticehurst, later Lord Justice Woodhelves (d. 1940).

I words and gross terminology—that is, the usual sorts of gross terminology—are conspicuous only by their absence. It is written in a serious tone, and with a fair style; and nominally appears to treat upon a subject about which the public has always had a curious, prurient and hypocritical fascination: the corporal punishment of juveniles, specifically boys.

On the face of it, A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen is a manual designed to assist women to terrorise and oppress any immature males under their jurisdiction—it is nothing more or less than a Corporal Punishment Cookbook, not the first of this genre but possibly the most single-minded ever composed, and if its apparent purpose were to be taken at face value, such would indeed be a moral crime deserving strong censure, if no worse. Today we take it as read that to beat children “for their own good” is probably harmful, and may even be wicked; and all the signs are that one day soon it may even become illegal, as it already has in Sweden. The Publishers do not wish to enter the lists of this argument upon either side; what cannot be disputed is that Flagellationism exists, as a long-known and well-defined sphere of sexual activity; and that throughout most of its documented history it has drawn its imagery almost exclusively-——Sacher-Masoch apart—from childhood™.

Today, the most visibly practised form of what may more broadly be termed Disciplinism is more strongly drawn from other sources, not particularly (at least, not prominently) juvenile: a blend of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, equestrianism and The Rocky Horror Show, as much fashion as fetish, and, overall, strongly American in tone. But until quite recently, certainly for British people, it was otherwise (and may well still be the case). The Mother Country version of the Discipline euvre is resonant with memories from school and home: the swishy cane, the maternal slipper, the smell of chalk-dust and fear, bending over, bare bottoms, and so on. Historically—and until very recently—the lives of British children have been so saturated with the culture of corporal punishment, that in this country at least such an image-set is not only-understandable, it is, or was, inevitable. In such a culture—which perhaps reached its apogee between 1850 and, say, 1939—it is, we suppose, just possible that an obsessive and grotesquely naive personality might conceive that a manual for would-be boy-floggers would be a serious contribution to the canon of pedagogical knowledge.

Even a cursory reading of this book will make it clear that the Guidewas — actually—and even archly—written with no such end in view. It is certainly a manual instructing in the philosophies and techniques of corporal punishment, but the intended “subjects” of the treatment are quite obviously adult males:

* With Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s being the most well-known instance. A propos, Sigmund Freud’s most famous essay on the pathology (in his view) of this partiality is titled A Child is being beaten.

II

INTRODUCTION TO THE 1991 REPRINT clients of those professional ladies who were in business centuries ago (as Cleland’s Fanny Hill autheticates), are today known as Dominatrices, and who administer, in exchange for currency of the realm in moderately large quantities, short-term disciplinary régimes of similar (if less refined and attenuated) sorts as those commended and described within the Guide. A code has been employed— but an obvious one. The author makes it explicitly clear, over and over again—particularly i in Chapter Two—who are.the real subjects of the dissertation: it simply cannot be mistaken.

That said, for some reason the defence lawyers in the trial failed to bring most of the key exculpatory passages to the attention of the Court; and with the clear conviction of the Judge that the Guide was what it said it was—and his subsequent strong direction along these lines to the jurymen—it all went badly for the defendants. Particularly harmful were the illustrations: simple, even naive, many (though not all) of them bear the hallmarks of Hamer’s various known styles (though he denied their authorship), but what proved especially damning was that they depicted juvenile males in the various humiliating or flagellationary situations. In a prominent place at the end of the Foreword, the author makes it clear that this is purely to serve the underlying child-based imagery which lies at the core of much of the Flagellant fantasy—and not because children are the intended targets or victims. But the Judge chose to disbelieve, and so directed the jury. Hamer was convicted on all the specimen charges against him, and was sentenced to a total of eleven years’ penal servitude (he was released after seven years and died in 1937). James Henry Norris, a general dealer, of Hendon, was convicted of two charges of knowingly offering for sale indecent or obscene material (under the 1899 Act), and was awarded three years’ prison. That dealt with the illustrator, publisher, printer, binder, warehouseman and distributor (Hamer was all of these), and an unfortunate trader in erotica who happened to be present at the time of the raid and. who otherwise might not have been apprehended at all.

However the author of A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen was never brought to trial. He—it was assumed the authorship was male—was never identified; and not too vigorously pursued. Already the police had a cast-iron case, the prosecution went splendidly, and the chief defendant, the wretched Hamer, received an exemplary sentence. It was a satisfactory ending, from the point of view of Authority.

AT THE TIME Hamer and Norris were standing in the dock, the author and originator of A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen was already in jail: in Holloway Prison for women, to be specific, serving a sentence of four years for a paps string of public-morality convictions. Alice Kerr-Sutherland (1870-1939) ran an elegant and flourishing flagellation brothel in St James Street between the years 1915-20, catering exclusively for aristocratic and wealthy cognoscenti (it is thought George, Marquis of Milford Haven and elder brother of the late Earl Mountbatten, was one of her most regular visitors). Alas, one of her titled clientele betrayed her, and she was convicted of various disorderly-house crimes (the severity of the sentence was due to its being her third such conviction). She was known to be a close associate of Hamer, and for various reasons—including other extant examples of her style—it is now believed that authorship of the Guide may reasonably be attributed to her.

Alice Kerr-Sutherland was, in many ways, a close British contemporary of the Viennese Edith Cadivec, whose conviction for child-brothel crimes related to flagellation was a sensation of the early ’20s. Miss Kerr-Sutherland was never formally convicted of any such crimes, but nevertheless unlike most professional dominatrices of the period she had come to her craft via the real thing—in other words, she appears to have worked for many years as a genuine governess to genuine children, in genuine households and genuine institutions. She seems to have made the cross-over in about 1900-04, and such was her skill and her ferocity as a lady disciplinarian (one can only speculate how she developed such levels of refinement; perhaps the Guide is “truer” than one imagines—at least, a true reflection of the nature of Alice Kerr-Sutherland’s obsession, if not her actual experiences as a pedagogue) that from the first she prospered, if that is the | term.

Her sudden abandonent of the profession of (real) Governess may be connected with her manner of leaving her last position: for an eight-month period starting in November 1898 she served as Assistant Matron in the St Mary Capel Home for Orphans, Nuneaton, Bedfordshire. In August of the following year she resigned under a cloud; and the Nuneaton Advertiser of the day refers, in the briefest possible manner, to allegations of “harsh punishment”. However nothing more was said of the matter. The next we hear of her is ten years later, at the time of her first conviction, in 1908, for running a disorderly house in Bristol (oddly enough, in Clifton Terrace, only a few doors away from where Mrs Walter Smith, the notorious “girl-flogger of Clifton”, operated during the ”60s of the previous century). On that occasion (the Bristol Evening Herald reported) a serving captain in a famous regiment of fusiliers was found in her apartment, kneeling strapped to a bench, with his trousers removed and the marks of physical chastisement clearly visible on his posterior.

She is known to have been an associate of Hamer’s because in 1912 they are both named as directors of a small publishing company called Dolomite Press

IV Introduction To The 1991 Reprint

(why it was so called is not known). But the real reason for connecting her with the authorship of the Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen is based on other examples of her writing style—on this very subject—which have survived. For some years Alice Kerr-Sutherland appears to have been genuinely confused about the nature of her real profession; at all events, while she was practising as a prostitute in Bristol, she was simultaneously. advertising in quite respectable scholastic periodicals, as a specialist in the correction of disruptive or unacceptable behaviour in boys. In an odd reprise of the way Mrs Walter Smith -was finally exposed to public notoriety, a popular magazine—ohn Bull—sent for her “prospectus” and published it. It exists to this day, despite the destruction, by Zeppelin in 1917, of much of the John Bull archive. The subject matter is virtually identical. The philosophy (minus the mysticism, which appears to have been added later, possibly as a result of Hamer’s influence—he had been a friend of Sir Richard Burton in his youth) is also the same: boys must be thrashed and shamed if they are to grow up to be men. Even much of the phraseology is unchanged. It was probably as a result of this exposé in John Bull that Kerr-Sutherland’s Clifton establishment was raided. At all events an examination of both documents can leave the impartial observer in no doubt: the same hand, and mind, conceived both. Alice Kerr-Sutherland is the authoress of A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen, though Hamer probably illustrated it, and the publication of it as a collector’s volume was almost certainly his idea. He was an eroticist unashamed, and a cynic, but there is every evidence that she meant it—almost.

After her release from prison she emigrated to the Dominion (as it was then) of South Africa. She never married, and, as far as is known, had no children of her own.

ALL THIS BEING SO, and every one of the copies of the Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen being accounted for, what is the provenance of the volume you now hold? We wish we knew. It came into our possession under curious circumstances (which we are bound not to reveal) over two years ago, in 1989. There are only two possible explanations for the continued existence of a book that was supposed to have been obliterated in 1924 (not even the British Museum possesses a copy): one is that more than 100 copies were in fact run off Hamer’s presses—it would not be the first time that this has happened with a supposedly “limited” edition—or (and this was our supplier’s theory), it was purloined by one of the jurymen at the 1928 trial. The story we have been told is that one of the members of that jury was, by profession, a conjurer; he was also a connoisseur of flagellation and, instantly recognising the Guide as a classic of its type—when it was passed around the jury for the first time—determined to effect a substitute, presumably by manufacturing a passable lookalike (at least from the outside), and giving this back to the Clerk of the Court instead of the genuine volume on a later jury viewing, while the real Guide was quietly pocketed. If this is true—it does not seem impossible, only unlikely—the devious juryman must have been the last normally to examine evidence, since had the dummy been passed to another jury member the subterfuge must have been detected. It is a charming story, but on the whole we prefer our theory of an illicit extra few copies printed: it would have been so much easier; and here, as in so much else, Occam’s Razor™™ must apply.

In many ways A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen is a forerunner of Terence Sellers’ The Correct Sadist, with which it stands serious comparison. From the point of view of the connoisseur of Traditional Flagellation, it is a more complete and certainly more dedicated work. The styles are not to be compared—how could they be, with more than fifty years between them?—but while Ms. Sellers undertakes (and largely succeeds) to define the partnership between masochist and sadist (as she terms them) in candid, descriptive, even poetic language, A Guide to the Correction of Young Gentlemen is far less highfalutin, less poetic certainly, but contains, in its obsessiveness and in the old-fashioned precision of its style, an intellect equally concentrated, and—to those influenced by such expressions of opinion—equally stirring.

For this 1991 reprint we have entirely re-typeset the book (some pages of our master copy have been damaged by damp); but we have adhered to the original page sizing, and of course we have restored and used the original . illustrations, which, naive—even childish—though they are, possess a certain power, and harmonise exquisitely with the text passages they illustrate. The sympathy on this subject between author and illustrator is clear and impressive. What was the relationship between Kerr-Sutherland and Hamer? We cannot say with certainty, but we note that the drawings are credited to “a Former Pupil”, so perhaps we may at least make an educated guess.

THE PUBLISHERS wx “Fi ypotheses are not to be multiplied without necessity.”

VI A Guide To ‘the Correction

OF YOUNG GENTLEMEN

FOREWORD because of strong reasons to the contrary. I admire the male virtues of courage,

honesty, inventiveness, optimism and single-mindedness, but I have come to believe that such qualities, on which the future of the Empire depends—as they have always depended and never more so than during the recent terrible years— are falling into scarcity, with all the peril to our race and culture that such an event forbodes.

| have written this Guide, not because I dislike or despise the male sex, but

The reason for this—in my opinion—disastrous slide, is that people are forgetting how to bring up young males. The nonsense talked about sex equality serves to muddy many pools, and obscure many once invincible truths; and the growing insistence on treating girls as boys has so far produced, as any but a fool might have foreseen, the treatment of boys as girls: that is, with excessive (for most boys) leniency. Females being, by and large, far more mature than males of the same age, at any stage of their lives until the thirtieth year or thereabouts, they respond readily to appeals to their intelligence and sense of decency. With a few exceptions, girls do not need physical rigour in their upbringing; strictness, yes, but not—as a rule—corporeal correction. Not so with males.

Young gentlemen respond to régimes based on Spartan principles, provided they realise it is intended for their own good—no boy of spirit will suffer bullying gladly or without resentment. I am not a bully, nor do I propose régimes based exclusively on fear. Boys, perhaps even more than girls, respond to love with great and touching effect, and the loving course should always be the first chosen. But if it fails, as with boys and their culture it so often will, then other measures should be taken without hesitation. I refer to punishment; more specifically, to the Rod in its many forms, in my opinion as necessary a part of a young gentleman’s upbringing as plentiful food, a good deal of sleep, healthy exercise, a sound religious teaching, and hard work.

The use of the Rod enjoys an extensive literature, but to my knowledge no practical guide has yet been written for the female who has charge of young men, who cares for their future development of character—and yet knows next to nothing of what is involved in applying a physical punishment. Women tend to shy away, if not wholly from physical discipline, then from its use on boys older than about ten. Beyond that age (the feeling seems to be) boys are too large and manlike to be managed in this way and the task had better be left to men—as it almost always is, often with poor results. The truth is that most youths react unsatisfactorily to being beaten by older males, and more unsatisfactorily still to being beaten by males not much older than themselves. Even when a reasonable disparity of ages is present, in contemplating the image of the schoolmaster chastising his pupil one has a sense of two males locked in combat—not a punishment, but a duel. It is purely an affair of strength, taking most of its symbolism from the rude and unrefined example of Nature. The Master—the reigning bull—thrashes ever. harder in his increasing determination to make the culprit—the youthful challenger—cry; the object of this, in turn, being to demoralise the challenger and so remove the likelihood of a second challenge. The culprit, on the other hand, bites his lip, grits his teeth, clenches his muscles and holds his breath in order not to afford his Master this ultimate victory. By mot weeping, he keeps the spirit of the challenge alive. Both modes of behaviour lead to extremes of punishment, and while the capacity to endure is certainly enhanced, often into heroic dimensions, no other discernible improvement to the character is recorded.

It is a very different state of affairs when a youth is whipped by a female. The argument that physical strength is a séwe gua non is shewn to be specious, for females have far less strength than males. Yet any female, if she knows what she is doing, has confidence in the moral correctness of her actions and is not without a store of courage of her own, can bring a youth to a state of genuine, freely-weeping penitence with the expenditure of about half the physical effort required by a man to achieve a comparable end (if indeed he is able to do so at all without descending into brutality). She achieves this because of her greater sensitivity to character, nuance and atmosphere, to her keener awareness of the properties of shame, and above all to the simple fact that she is a woman. Being a woman, she is generally able to make the affair one of sorrowful confrontation, reluctant but resolute decision, quiet command and inexorable, measured execution. Within a properly calculated atmosphere—which involves attention to detail that few schoolmasters I have known would dream of considering—she can administer punishments far more finely attuned to the complex equation formed by the exact quality of the offence and the character and history of the delinquent. Being more appropriate and precisely pitched, like the violin note that makes the crystal sing on the sideboard, these punishments do their work more efficiently. They have a reformative effect.

A second, and frequently-quoted, reason for female hesitation to administer corporal punishment to males, even when it is plainly needed, is the question of propriety. Can it be right for a woman to command a male of maybe sixteen years of age (or older) to strip in her presence? Even to strip him herself? My answer is that of course it is right. We women have charge of all human life from its earliest

FOREWORD stages, and during that time we have to perform many deeds that might be considered ignoble, even indecent; it is our destiny and our responsibility. There is nothing an unclothed male of any age can display that any but the most sheltered maiden lady cannot have seen before—in any case, having seen what there is to see on more than a few occasions, it loses whatever salacious interest it might be supposed to have and becomes merely another appurtenance of the body. Exposure of the buttocks, and of the private parts, is a matter of shame, certainly—the culprit’s, not yours—and it should be freely exploited whenever appropriate. We are, after all, i /oco parentis. The third reason for hesitation is the fear, among some females, that a strapping youth will be physically too much for her to handle should the spell of dominance be broken and the notion of mutiny come into his head. This fear has some merit, and later on in this Guide I have supplied various remedies for these particular situations. | shall add this: a Governess who gives her commands as if she expects to be obeyed, will be obeyed—ninety-nine times out of a hundred. The other time she can make herself be obeyed.

Using this Guide as a work of reference and also as a tutorial, any woman can discover virtually all she needs to know in order to apply a well-tailored régime of discipline and occasional corporal punishment to any male placed under her care. She is his Mistress in all things, and makes herself such, so that before long her word becomes his command (or should), and to please her, to anticipate her will, a matter of overwhelming importance. She achieves this by a judicious mixture of love and praise, where merited, and admonishment and punishment, also where merited. She rewards honesty, cleanliness, gallantry and repentance. She punishes dishonesty, dirtiness, laziness, cowardice, obduracy and especially recidivism. She bestows holidays and prizes in return for hard work diligently executed—and imposes penances of various weights when her clearly defiried standards are not met. She kisses often—and smacks no less often. She must be like a Demiurge, dispensing Justice; and if it is weighted overall towards the severe side, this is only in the interests of discipline, and provided it is consistent all but a few boys instinctively accept it.

Those to whom she will administer this cine whose lives she will wholly rule, may be any age at all, since for complicated reasons—discussed in the second chapter—many males are not able to sustain the maturity of character which enables them successfully to manage their affairs, without occasional reminders of the fate that traditionally befalls bad boys. However, although all ages may be involved, I have in this Guide followed a convention: the scenes that illustrate its pages plainly shew adolescent culprits. I have arranged this because it is as a naughty boy of fourteen years or less that you must perceive your pupil at all times—and, no less importantly, how he must be made to see himself.

The Authoress

XI

Chapter One The Triple Goddess

T IS SALD THAT THE Great Goddess of ancient times was worshipped in three

aspects: Maiden, Mother and Crone. Each of these corresponded, Sir James

Frazer tells us!, to a recognised phase of the moon—waxing, full and waning— and was additionally a primitive acknowledgement of the Mediterranean fertility cycle with its three seasons: spring, summer and winter. One may also observe that the number of the Fates (Gree) was also three, and that from earliest times there were considered to be three states of existence: Heaven, Earth and the Underworld (Purgatory is an early medizval invention).

Closer to our own doorsteps, the native myths of the British islands—dating from the Bronze Age, it is now thought—also stress the mystical Trinity, to the virtual exclusion of all other magic numbers save nine (three times three): the three precious objects that must be won; the three great tasks to be completed by some mighty warrior; the three fruits which must be placed in the magic cauldron; and so on?. British myth openly acknowledges the Great Goddess in all three of her ancient aspects—Bronwen the maiden, Arianrhod the Matron, and the terrifying hag Cerridwen, incarnated under another of her names, Morgan or Morrigan, in Sir Thomas Malory’s Mort d’Arthur. In Macbeth, the number of the witches on the blasted heath is also three, and one is a maiden, one a matron and the third a beldame.

The most widely-known exemplar today of the ancient world’s tritheism is of course Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the threefold face of God according to Christian doctrine, though not to Jews or Mahommedans. However it is maintained, by some, that the real Holy Trinity of the great western religion has never

1. The Golden Bough

2. The word triad comes into our language from ancient Welsh tradition, and originally meant a bardic poem concerning “Three Things”. Even more interestingly, ancient Welsh law permits a man to chastise his wife with a birch-rod, providing he administers three strokes only—no more, no less.

truly been the triply-aspected male}, but Father, Mother and Child, with the Mother most often invoked by worshippers and the Father well-nigh invisible*. The same authorities also claim that this represents but a stage in a long drawn-out reversion to the original all-female trinity that held sway throughout the Pelasgian world before the Greeks came to Greece.

The marked mystical—or, to use the correct word, magical—symbolism of the triply-aspected Goddess is entirely reflected in the three distinct “faces” of Aphrodite Philomastrix, Our Lady of the Scourge. I call these the Nurse, the Mistress and the Dame. The real definitions are a good deal broader than the simple titles might suggest, and correspond in some ways to the system of “dream archetypes” that Professor Jung has so interestingly set forth in his recentlypublished works.

The superior Governess will recognise that she contains within herself all three Personalities, and should be able to deploy the appropriate one in every circumstance. An understanding, not only of the magical tripartite principle, but of the Personalities themselves, is therefore essential.

Let me define the three Aspects more closely.

~ Tar NURSE

The Nurse is young, pretty and frequently good-humoured; but, rather arbitrarily, can alter her mood in a moment; from jolly play-parmer and confidante into a perilous Queen of the Nursery—often, in the prosess, taking her subjects entirely at unawares. She is perhaps not yet utterly confident of her power, and cannot suppress the small half-smile of pure satisfaction which appears whenever she finds herself exercising ultimate authority with complete and unchallenged success. She is really too young and pretty easily to appear stern; but nonetheless she tries and sometimes succeeds. Perhaps in the realisation that hers is the least openly frightening of the three Aspects, she compensates by chastising as hard as any, in her own style, and in her own setting. When provoked, she can be no less merciless than the Dame.

She is indeed none other than that Paphian Venus said, in some legends, to

3. Now thought to be transmogrifications of the major Gods of the ancient Hindoos, imported over perhaps a millennium into the Mediterranean world whence comes our own culture, by way of Greece, where they were known as Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades

4, While of questionable validity when applied to northern (Protestant) Europe, the theory clearly holds within the Latin countries, and also in Ireland, where the older form of Christianity persists, at least in the southern part.

THE NURSE have invented corporal punishment. Here is a favourite theme of many painters down the centuries: the icily calm young woman with the chubby, naked boy across her lap, struggling as he undergoes a brisk chastisement. Sometimes Cupid’s immortal mother uses the palm of her fair hand; in other depictions her instrument of correction is a small birch-rod, reflecting that variant of the story which says that, at the crucial moment, a hand (whose?) appeared from Heaven proffering the plangent twigs already neatly bunched and tied. This Arcadian vision is precisely echoed in an nearly equal number of paintings, supposedly of a religious nature, in which, while Venus has been replaced by the Virgin, and Cupid by the Infant Jesus, every other detail is the same.