School, best days of your life, providing you ducked those flying board rubbers

As he disappeared out through the classroom door into the corridor, we knew what was coming.

Seconds later he hurtled back into the room, quite possibly breaking the sound barrier, and with unerring accuracy crashed a gym pump with a ribbed sole on to the backside of the errant schoolboy, who had been told to bend over in front of the teacher's desk to await his punishment.

One day, for reasons I've long since forgotten, he whacked the whole class. As it was done in alphabetical order, he'd run out of steam a bit by the time he got to the "Ps", but it still brought a sharp intake of breath from the recipient.

Poor Abbott didn't sit down for two days.

Ah, the joys of grammar school all those years ago, when teachers could crack you with a pump or ruler, smack you with a cane or fling anything within easy reach, usually a piece of chalk or even a board rubber, at you with impunity.

Corporal punishment in Britain's schools was finally abolished 18 years ago this week and arguments for and against have raged ever since.

However, what does emerge from the generations that endured it, is most believe it should be re-introduced. If only so today's scholars can suffer the same as they did.

A quick tour around the Worcester News' building produced some interesting tales from those of a certain age. In the pre-press department, Mick Reynolds recounted colourful stories about his time at Stanley Road School, Worcester, where at one time or another he was whacked by six different teachers.

I proffered the suggestion that he must have been a really naughty boy. "No," he said, "I just got bad publicity."

On one occasion Mick received a crack across the hand with a cane from the delightfully named Miss Muffett for making an ink blot on his exercise book.

"And I knew her ever so well. I lived near her and used to sweep her steps for her," he complained. "She actually said 'This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you', but I bet it didn't."

Fellow journalist Kathy Don went to a convent school where she says "the jam spoon" was the traditional form of punishment.

"They used to smack you across the palm of the hand with a wooden jam spoon," she said. "I know one teacher also used drum sticks and another had a leather strap. You only had to whisper in class to get the jam spoon."

The punishments were meted out by staff teachers, leading Kathy to utter the memorable phrase, "I was never hit by a nun."

Clive Message, also in pre-press, spent his schooldays trying to avoid flying board rubbers. "Wherever they hit you, they left a great white mark," he said.

But columnist John Phillpott recalled the time one of his classmates called Liddington forgot to duck and the projectile smacked into his head, felling him like a shot pheasant. The master immediately rushed over full of remorse and the stricken Liddington eventually recovered. Today a civil action would probably follow. Different days indeed.

Rose Williams, who works in planning, remembers being hit across the back of the legs with a ruler by one teacher at Christopher Whitehead Girls' in Worcester, "Not for any particular reason. She just took a dislike to me. I never knew why." Her colleague Margo Rothwell suffered the painful punishment of being hit on the hand with the edge, not just the flat, of a ruler for making a minor mistake in laying out her maths work "even though I got all the sums right".

It seems you didn't have to do much to incur the wrath of some teachers - a whispered secret here, a mis-spelt word there, or in the case of receptionist Bev Churchill wearing red knickers instead of blue for games.

But the universal opinion was that it did you good.

Margo said: "Kids today don't have any respect for anything. It would do them good to be a bit wary and stop them being so cocky. They're only like it because they know teachers can't touch them. It would be a different story if there was a cane in the teacher's desk drawer."