Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Peter Freeman, George Thomas and the NUT President who caned 199 innocent schoolboys

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Let's begin this story with Peter Freeman.

Freeman won Brecon and Radnor for Labour at the 1929 general election, but lost it two years later after Ramsey MacDonald's formation of a National Government split the party.

He returned to the Commons as MP for Newport in 1945, having beaten Roy Jenkins to the Labour nomination, and represented the seat until his death in 1956.

In 2004 Mike Bloksome published a biography of Freeman under the title The Green Casanova. The blurb on Amazon describes its subject as:

arms manufacturer, cigar producer, international tennis player, MP, theosophist, animal rights and green issues campaigner - and ladies' man of renown!

An article about the biography on Wales Online said of Freeman:

In the 1930s, '40s and '50s, he was considered too extremist to be ministerial material. Now his views on animal rights, pacifism and banning capital punishment would be considered progressive or orthodox. 

It turns out Freeman was also an opponent of corporal punishment and a champion of children's rights, though any reasonable person would be alarmed at a case he brought up in the Commons in 1954:

The Leicester Mail for 20 July 1954 reported his intentions:

Caned 200 boys: MP's question 

Mr. Peter Freeman, Labour MP for Newport, is to question the Minister of Education (Miss Florence Horsbrugh) on Thursday about the punishing of 199 innocent schoolboys. 

He will ask "whether her attention has been called to the action of Mr. Oliver Whitfield, of the Secondary Modern School, Durham, who caned 200 boys became he was unable to discover a misdemeanour alleged to have been made by one of them: whether such mass corporal punishment cf children has her approval: and whether she will issue instructions for the dismissal of this headmaster for punishing 199 innocent boys."

And ask it he did on 29 July 1954.

In reply, Florence Horsburgh said:

I have seen reports of the incident in the Press. Disciplinary matters of this kind are within the discretion of the headmaster and of the local education authority, and I would not wish to intervene. In any case, I have no 668power to require the dismissal of the headmaster.

That did not satisfy Freeman who asked a supplementary:

Is the right hon. Lady aware of the statements made by the Home Secretary on this question of punishment a few days ago, when he said: "the two requirements of natural justice that have gone back to the beginning of civilisation are that a person who may be punished should know what the complaint is against him and that he should be given an opportunity to meet it. That is the basis of the rule of law throughout the ages."
Was either of those conditions fulfilled in the case of any one of these 200 children? Is this not a gross abuse of the ordinary custom of justice which is being denied to these children and has not the right hon. Lady the responsibility of safeguarding their rights? What action does she intend to take to prevent this gross abuse of justice?

Despite his eloquence, Horsburgh gave much the same answer.

Then someone else on the Labour benches rose:

Is the Minister aware that the parents in this district are not complaining, and that it would be an advantage if my hon. Friend the Member for Newport (Mr. Peter Freeman) would leave the teaching profession alone for a while? [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] Is the Minister further aware that the discipline of this school can only suffer from the publicity given to a Question of this sort?

That MP was George Thomas, the future secretary of state for Wales and Commons speaker.

If you had shares in Thomas, I hope you sold them, because in recent years his reputation has plummeted. 

In 2017, the journalist Martin Shipton published a biography, Political Chameleon: In Search of George Thomas. Among its revelations is that Thomas somehow dodged the call up in the second world war and that he met Stalin as a new Labour MP after 1945. Yet he ended his life as a supporter of Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party - a precursor of Ukip.

Thomas's enthusiasm for the caning of innocent schoolboys may make more sense if you listen to his appearance on the Desolation Radio podcast around the time his book was published. He say that when he was a teacher, Thomas had a reputation for brutality.

You may even remember that in 2014, seventeen years after Thomas's death, a man came forward to say he had been raped by Thomas when he was aged about nine.

But Thomas's attitude in that Commons exchange is probably best explained by the fact that he was an official of the National Union of Teachers before he became an MP. You can hear the deafening clang of a profession closing ranks as he speaks. Complaints of individual injustice have little chance against that.

We should not forget that, with the single exception of some Evangelical Christians, the teaching unions were the last people to oppose the abolition of corporal punishment in schools.

And what of Oliver Whitfield, the headmaster? Here's the Daily Mirror for 13 September 1954:

169 bravos for `caning master' 

Headmaster Mr. Oliver Whitfield has received 180 letters from different parts of the world since he caned 200 boys because not one of them would own up that he made a rude drawing on the school wall. 

"And all but eleven of the letters told me I did right," Mr. Whitfield, who is head of the Usworth (Co. Durham) secondary modern school, said yesterday. 

I'm not surprised he received letters - the subject has its enthusiasts - but surely this was the end of his time in the limelight and he then returned to obscurity?

Not a bit of it. Fast forward to 1966 and the Newcastle Journal for 14 April:

Teachers' president a skilled leader

Today the last words will be spoken by the nation's teachers at their annual conference at Eastbourne.

Although he would probably be the last one to admit it, Mr Oliver Whitfield, President of the National Union of Teachers who was born and bred in County Durham has contributed In great measure to its success.

Already his skilled leadership is making itself felt and it is a pretty safe bet that posterity will have cause to remember him as one of the union's great presidents.

Posterity turned out to have better things to do, but if you go to the Wikipedia page for the National Union of Teachers you will find that Whitfield was indeed elected president of the union for 1966-7.

I was going to end by pointing the moral that the social reforms of the Sixties were desperately needed. But we should remember that corporal punishment was not outlawed until 1986 and in all private schools until 2003.

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