A PHYSICAL EDUCATION: John Lucas considers Jonathan Taylor’s perceptive and accessible discussion of the causes and consequences of authorised cruelty in schools and beyond
A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons
Jonathan Taylor
Goldsmiths Press, 2024
ISBN: 9781915983145
232pp £23.00
‘Punish,’ the O.E.D. says, means ‘cause an offender to suffer for an offence.’ And ‘punishment’? ‘The action or instance of a punishing.’ In November, 1944, when I was seven, I was punished for the offence of being unable to eat my school dinner. The punishment required that I stood on my chair in the school dinner-room while the school head teacher whacked me with his cane three times on each of my open hands.
I was not the only one to be so punished. As I remember, two girls and a further boy were also caned. And we all were told that our refusal to eat our dinner was an especial disgrace, given that in order to bring us our food, brave British sailors had crossed the Atlantic, risking their lives at a time when the seas were bristling with U boats. Our crime was made even more heinous by the fact that the food we had rejected centred on boiled swede which, if eaten, would make us fit and healthy, hence able to repel German soldiers who were still determined to invade our shores.
The headmaster who told us all this was, I think, called Hyams. He was a foul-smelling, rheumy-eyed sadist who died not long afterward – though not before I’d come to discover that the swedes we’d rejected – stringy, lumpy, tasting like rancid wall-paper – were grown in Farmer Record’s fields which abutted the school and that they were gathered by Land Army women who brought them in daily basketsful to the kitchen of the village’s Grove Road Junior School where Hyams presided. No need to cross so much as a road for that.
A week or so after his death, a memorial service for Hyams was held in the parish church. There, his widow assured us all that her late husband had loved his school and all pupils who attended it, and we mumbled prayers for his soul’s repose. After which, I ran home, undressed, stood in the bath and sang gleefully as I scrubbed myself down with cold water. And then, many years later, the memory of that day still active, I wrote a poem, ‘Mission Accomplished,’ celebrating the fancy that my loathing of the old bastard could be likened to a German fighter pilot screaming down on his enemy, reducing him to a mess of ‘watery swede, and gristled, blood-nicked meat.’ (For anyone interested. The poem can be found in my New & Selected, A World Perhaps.)
Hysterical, perhaps, but even now I can summon up memories of days when knots of young children stood in the school yard trying to wring our hands free of the pain inflicted on them by what we knew was unjust chastisement, many if not most of us in tears, others hunched in sullen hatred of Hyams and his cane. I’m not here to suggest that Grove Road Junior in 1944 was akin to Dotheboys Hall of a hundred years earlier, though nor were the two utterly dissimilar. What I do know is that throughout the 20th century change was slow to come to the majority of state schools – senior as well as junior – where corporal punishment was not merely licensed, but taken for granted. And I take pride in the discovery I made at the very beginning of this century, that my maternal grandfather, ‘Hod’ Kelly, who in 1916 became a junior school headmaster of St Stephen’s at London’s Shepherds Bush, at once banned members of staff from using corporal punishment on pupils attending the school. And the ban went with Hod, wherever he took up a headship. Hence, the title of my biography of Hod, The Good That We Do, which I take from a remark of Dickens, that ‘The good that we do, and the virtues that we show, and particularly the children that we rear, survive us through the long and unknown perspectives of time.’ (Commercial Travellers’ Schools.)
Jonathan Taylor’s superb new book inevitably has much to say of interest about The Inimitable; and Dickens’s accounts of bullying – in educational, social, and domestic circumstances – are bound to alert readers to the obtuse idiocy of all those Leavisian acolytes who, themselves scarcely out of short trousers, used to reassure each other that there was nothing in Dickens’s writings for ‘the mature critical mind,’ and that the greatest novelist in the language had no higher purpose in life than that of ‘entertainment.’ Read Taylor on the physical squabbles between Pip and Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, I want to say, if you need a sophisticated understanding of what Taylor calls ‘Sex Ed’, and free yourselves from the belief that Lawrence offers a/the definitive account of what is probably better not called homo-eroticism. Read what he has to say about Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield etc, and be impressed not merely by Dickens’s understanding of what can lie beneath bullying but by Taylor’s own insights and inferences.
These are of wide extent. Throughout A Physical Education, Taylor provides illuminating accounts of any number of literary texts. He writes with commendable insight, for example, about Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Animal Farm, Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, the Harry Potter books, The Catcher in the Rye. He also considers educational tracts and philosophical treatises – he is excellent on Lacan and Derrida for example (though more generous to the former than I could hope to be) – and all, it seems, without losing track of his main purpose, which, as his sub-title makes plain, is to probe the contentious issues of ‘Bullying, Discipline, & Other Lessons.’
A review can’t hope to deal adequately with a book of this range, intensity, and aplomb, as well as the occasional non-indulgent dips into autobiography, though I assuredly want to recommend it to as wide a readership as possible. This is what ought to be meant by ‘accessible,’ this is what lack of pretension combined with learning ought to mean. But though I can’t begin to cover the range of Taylor’s work, one chapter in particular requires detailed comment. Chapter Seven, ‘Politics’, is headed by a quotation from The Twelve Caesars, attributed to Suetonius. ‘After Tiberius came Caligula.’ Taylor begins the chapter by reporting that ‘It was always my intention, towards the end of this book, to write about Prof Caligula, and what happened to me when she was my boss – to tell the story of the most sustained, vicious bullying I have experienced ….’ And so he does.
It happens that I know the bully Taylor has in mind, and although I had some years earlier left the educational institution he came to teach at, I can entirely concur with his account of and analysis the person he writes about. I have never met anyone else at all like her, although Crabbe’s account of the dark, immeasurable pleasure Peter Grimes took in having as his apprentice a ‘feeling being subject to his power’, goes a long way toward recognising the psychopathic control in which some are – what? Gripped, in which they delight, by which they are subsumed?
Still, having said that, I find myself wondering whether it’s correct to identify Professor Caligula’s behaviour, demeanour– call it what you will – as ‘psychopathic.’? But what other term will do? ‘Demented?’ No, I don’t think so. ‘Evil?’ But Crabbe, that good Anglican, avoids the word. Apply it to Iago, if you will; but surely we no longer believe in motiveless evil? Still, I suppose motives can always be wheeled up in an attempt to ‘justify’ behaviour that is otherwise inexplicable, conduct which is, for want of an alternative term, truly demented. Prof Caligula probably justified or at least would, if challenged, have explained her treatment of Jonathan Taylor as the understandable response of an outraged feminist to a typical – outrageous – male. In which case it may help to refer to the dictionary definition of the psychopathic personality: ‘an antisocial personality characterised by the failure to develop any sense of moral responsibility and the capability of performing violent or antisocial acts.’
It hardly seems worth saying that this isn’t outraged feminism. Prof Caligula on more than one occasion chose to turn a woman she had previously made a great show of loving into Public Enemy Number One. I have especially in mind a mature woman student I knew well and greatly admired who was working on a PhD thesis for which PC and I acted as shared supervisors, though I was by then employed at a different institution, a local university where the young woman had herself been newly appointed to a lectureship. One afternoon when we were due to be discussing the progress of her work – which was excellent – she arrived at my office in tears. Why? I learned that earlier in the day she had been to see PC for what she had supposed would be a routine tutorial, only to be confronted by her part-supervisor who wished to make plain that from now on PC was renouncing any intention to continue in her role as supervisor. The young woman had, it seemed, deeply offended PC by accepting the teaching post which she, PC, had intended should be filled by PCs partner. As a result PC wanted no more to do with her. She could go hang.
Never mind that the partner was unqualified to fill the post. Never mind that the person appointed was not merely ideally suited for the job on offer, but that she was a thoroughly nice, modest, talented person, who deserved to be offered the appointment and who was already proving to be an ideal choice, popular with students, conscientious, a much-liked colleague. The fact of the matter was that she had gone against PC’s plans and wishes, and could now regard herself as cast into the outer darkness. Had she not applied for the post, PCs partner would without doubt have been appointed. So at least Prof Caligula insisted, though what power she thought she had to influence the appointment committee seemed to me entirely nebulous. Anyway, that wasn’t really to the point. All that mattered was the thwarting of PC’s plans. Do that, and expect no mercy.
There is a very sad postscript to this. Not many months later, the appointee was diagnosed with what proved to be terminal ovarian cancer. PC was at neither funeral nor memorial occasion. Of course not. Her cruelty to others, her self-rightous glee – was it? – at witnessing their discomfiture, her ruthless contempt for her victims, were of all a piece. And with this went ostentatious displays of magnanimity and/or comforting. I once witnessed her pulling a woman student to her breast in order to offer succour, as she did so glancing around to make sure her behaviour didn’t go unnoticed. ‘See.’ the gesture and glance said, ‘I’m all heart.’ (As a friend of mine, who also witnessed the moment, whispered to me, ‘Pass the sick bucket.’)
And yet, assuming PC’s behaviour to be prompted by her being on the psychopathic spectrum, we perhaps have no alternative but to accept such behaviour as genuine, though I doubt whether the author of A Physical Education would much care one way or the other. Nor should he. The damage Professor Caligula did to others was considerable and sometimes lasting. When in 1819 the Duke of Wellington called Castlereagh into his Cabinet office in order to tell him ‘I feel bound to inform you that you are out of your mind,’ Castlereagh, so the story goes, having replied ‘If you say so, it must be so,’ went outside and immediately cut his own throat. Wellington would hardly have cared, any more than he did when the Duke of Pembroke, riding beside him at Waterloo, reported aghast ‘By Jove, my leg’s been shot off.’ ‘By Jove, so it has,’ Wellington agreed.
It is the nature of the psychopathic personality to be unaware of, or at all events indifferent to, the suffering of others. In this wholly excellent book, Jonathan Taylor inevitably reports on much that might be thought of as calculated sadism, as well as other forms of behaviour that bullying either permits or encourages. He also includes a number of photographs of himself as infant and young boy, including some which hint at or as good as declare the vulnerable innocence of any child before the power of bullying has become an inextricable part of our experience. And all this is enclosed in an utterly compelling account of a subject that is inevitably and – unavoidably – of interest to us all.
May 10 2025
A PHYSICAL EDUCATION
A PHYSICAL EDUCATION: John Lucas considers Jonathan Taylor’s perceptive and accessible discussion of the causes and consequences of authorised cruelty in schools and beyond
‘Punish,’ the O.E.D. says, means ‘cause an offender to suffer for an offence.’ And ‘punishment’? ‘The action or instance of a punishing.’ In November, 1944, when I was seven, I was punished for the offence of being unable to eat my school dinner. The punishment required that I stood on my chair in the school dinner-room while the school head teacher whacked me with his cane three times on each of my open hands.
I was not the only one to be so punished. As I remember, two girls and a further boy were also caned. And we all were told that our refusal to eat our dinner was an especial disgrace, given that in order to bring us our food, brave British sailors had crossed the Atlantic, risking their lives at a time when the seas were bristling with U boats. Our crime was made even more heinous by the fact that the food we had rejected centred on boiled swede which, if eaten, would make us fit and healthy, hence able to repel German soldiers who were still determined to invade our shores.
The headmaster who told us all this was, I think, called Hyams. He was a foul-smelling, rheumy-eyed sadist who died not long afterward – though not before I’d come to discover that the swedes we’d rejected – stringy, lumpy, tasting like rancid wall-paper – were grown in Farmer Record’s fields which abutted the school and that they were gathered by Land Army women who brought them in daily basketsful to the kitchen of the village’s Grove Road Junior School where Hyams presided. No need to cross so much as a road for that.
A week or so after his death, a memorial service for Hyams was held in the parish church. There, his widow assured us all that her late husband had loved his school and all pupils who attended it, and we mumbled prayers for his soul’s repose. After which, I ran home, undressed, stood in the bath and sang gleefully as I scrubbed myself down with cold water. And then, many years later, the memory of that day still active, I wrote a poem, ‘Mission Accomplished,’ celebrating the fancy that my loathing of the old bastard could be likened to a German fighter pilot screaming down on his enemy, reducing him to a mess of ‘watery swede, and gristled, blood-nicked meat.’ (For anyone interested. The poem can be found in my New & Selected, A World Perhaps.)
Hysterical, perhaps, but even now I can summon up memories of days when knots of young children stood in the school yard trying to wring our hands free of the pain inflicted on them by what we knew was unjust chastisement, many if not most of us in tears, others hunched in sullen hatred of Hyams and his cane. I’m not here to suggest that Grove Road Junior in 1944 was akin to Dotheboys Hall of a hundred years earlier, though nor were the two utterly dissimilar. What I do know is that throughout the 20th century change was slow to come to the majority of state schools – senior as well as junior – where corporal punishment was not merely licensed, but taken for granted. And I take pride in the discovery I made at the very beginning of this century, that my maternal grandfather, ‘Hod’ Kelly, who in 1916 became a junior school headmaster of St Stephen’s at London’s Shepherds Bush, at once banned members of staff from using corporal punishment on pupils attending the school. And the ban went with Hod, wherever he took up a headship. Hence, the title of my biography of Hod, The Good That We Do, which I take from a remark of Dickens, that ‘The good that we do, and the virtues that we show, and particularly the children that we rear, survive us through the long and unknown perspectives of time.’ (Commercial Travellers’ Schools.)
Jonathan Taylor’s superb new book inevitably has much to say of interest about The Inimitable; and Dickens’s accounts of bullying – in educational, social, and domestic circumstances – are bound to alert readers to the obtuse idiocy of all those Leavisian acolytes who, themselves scarcely out of short trousers, used to reassure each other that there was nothing in Dickens’s writings for ‘the mature critical mind,’ and that the greatest novelist in the language had no higher purpose in life than that of ‘entertainment.’ Read Taylor on the physical squabbles between Pip and Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, I want to say, if you need a sophisticated understanding of what Taylor calls ‘Sex Ed’, and free yourselves from the belief that Lawrence offers a/the definitive account of what is probably better not called homo-eroticism. Read what he has to say about Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield etc, and be impressed not merely by Dickens’s understanding of what can lie beneath bullying but by Taylor’s own insights and inferences.
These are of wide extent. Throughout A Physical Education, Taylor provides illuminating accounts of any number of literary texts. He writes with commendable insight, for example, about Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Animal Farm, Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, the Harry Potter books, The Catcher in the Rye. He also considers educational tracts and philosophical treatises – he is excellent on Lacan and Derrida for example (though more generous to the former than I could hope to be) – and all, it seems, without losing track of his main purpose, which, as his sub-title makes plain, is to probe the contentious issues of ‘Bullying, Discipline, & Other Lessons.’
A review can’t hope to deal adequately with a book of this range, intensity, and aplomb, as well as the occasional non-indulgent dips into autobiography, though I assuredly want to recommend it to as wide a readership as possible. This is what ought to be meant by ‘accessible,’ this is what lack of pretension combined with learning ought to mean. But though I can’t begin to cover the range of Taylor’s work, one chapter in particular requires detailed comment. Chapter Seven, ‘Politics’, is headed by a quotation from The Twelve Caesars, attributed to Suetonius. ‘After Tiberius came Caligula.’ Taylor begins the chapter by reporting that ‘It was always my intention, towards the end of this book, to write about Prof Caligula, and what happened to me when she was my boss – to tell the story of the most sustained, vicious bullying I have experienced ….’ And so he does.
It happens that I know the bully Taylor has in mind, and although I had some years earlier left the educational institution he came to teach at, I can entirely concur with his account of and analysis the person he writes about. I have never met anyone else at all like her, although Crabbe’s account of the dark, immeasurable pleasure Peter Grimes took in having as his apprentice a ‘feeling being subject to his power’, goes a long way toward recognising the psychopathic control in which some are – what? Gripped, in which they delight, by which they are subsumed?
Still, having said that, I find myself wondering whether it’s correct to identify Professor Caligula’s behaviour, demeanour– call it what you will – as ‘psychopathic.’? But what other term will do? ‘Demented?’ No, I don’t think so. ‘Evil?’ But Crabbe, that good Anglican, avoids the word. Apply it to Iago, if you will; but surely we no longer believe in motiveless evil? Still, I suppose motives can always be wheeled up in an attempt to ‘justify’ behaviour that is otherwise inexplicable, conduct which is, for want of an alternative term, truly demented. Prof Caligula probably justified or at least would, if challenged, have explained her treatment of Jonathan Taylor as the understandable response of an outraged feminist to a typical – outrageous – male. In which case it may help to refer to the dictionary definition of the psychopathic personality: ‘an antisocial personality characterised by the failure to develop any sense of moral responsibility and the capability of performing violent or antisocial acts.’
It hardly seems worth saying that this isn’t outraged feminism. Prof Caligula on more than one occasion chose to turn a woman she had previously made a great show of loving into Public Enemy Number One. I have especially in mind a mature woman student I knew well and greatly admired who was working on a PhD thesis for which PC and I acted as shared supervisors, though I was by then employed at a different institution, a local university where the young woman had herself been newly appointed to a lectureship. One afternoon when we were due to be discussing the progress of her work – which was excellent – she arrived at my office in tears. Why? I learned that earlier in the day she had been to see PC for what she had supposed would be a routine tutorial, only to be confronted by her part-supervisor who wished to make plain that from now on PC was renouncing any intention to continue in her role as supervisor. The young woman had, it seemed, deeply offended PC by accepting the teaching post which she, PC, had intended should be filled by PCs partner. As a result PC wanted no more to do with her. She could go hang.
Never mind that the partner was unqualified to fill the post. Never mind that the person appointed was not merely ideally suited for the job on offer, but that she was a thoroughly nice, modest, talented person, who deserved to be offered the appointment and who was already proving to be an ideal choice, popular with students, conscientious, a much-liked colleague. The fact of the matter was that she had gone against PC’s plans and wishes, and could now regard herself as cast into the outer darkness. Had she not applied for the post, PCs partner would without doubt have been appointed. So at least Prof Caligula insisted, though what power she thought she had to influence the appointment committee seemed to me entirely nebulous. Anyway, that wasn’t really to the point. All that mattered was the thwarting of PC’s plans. Do that, and expect no mercy.
There is a very sad postscript to this. Not many months later, the appointee was diagnosed with what proved to be terminal ovarian cancer. PC was at neither funeral nor memorial occasion. Of course not. Her cruelty to others, her self-rightous glee – was it? – at witnessing their discomfiture, her ruthless contempt for her victims, were of all a piece. And with this went ostentatious displays of magnanimity and/or comforting. I once witnessed her pulling a woman student to her breast in order to offer succour, as she did so glancing around to make sure her behaviour didn’t go unnoticed. ‘See.’ the gesture and glance said, ‘I’m all heart.’ (As a friend of mine, who also witnessed the moment, whispered to me, ‘Pass the sick bucket.’)
And yet, assuming PC’s behaviour to be prompted by her being on the psychopathic spectrum, we perhaps have no alternative but to accept such behaviour as genuine, though I doubt whether the author of A Physical Education would much care one way or the other. Nor should he. The damage Professor Caligula did to others was considerable and sometimes lasting. When in 1819 the Duke of Wellington called Castlereagh into his Cabinet office in order to tell him ‘I feel bound to inform you that you are out of your mind,’ Castlereagh, so the story goes, having replied ‘If you say so, it must be so,’ went outside and immediately cut his own throat. Wellington would hardly have cared, any more than he did when the Duke of Pembroke, riding beside him at Waterloo, reported aghast ‘By Jove, my leg’s been shot off.’ ‘By Jove, so it has,’ Wellington agreed.
It is the nature of the psychopathic personality to be unaware of, or at all events indifferent to, the suffering of others. In this wholly excellent book, Jonathan Taylor inevitably reports on much that might be thought of as calculated sadism, as well as other forms of behaviour that bullying either permits or encourages. He also includes a number of photographs of himself as infant and young boy, including some which hint at or as good as declare the vulnerable innocence of any child before the power of bullying has become an inextricable part of our experience. And all this is enclosed in an utterly compelling account of a subject that is inevitably and – unavoidably – of interest to us all.