Fathers of large families saluted him as the protector of morality in the young and the unjust victim of ‘the sneers of the evil-doers’. Many envelopes containing money arrived at the newspaper office to defray Andrew’s legal expenses, one man announcing that he bad collected a shilling from each of seventy men after a few […]

He justified the severity of the punishment by recalling the parting advice Irving gave him before resigning as headmaster: ‘Andrew, don’t flog rashly, but when you do flog, flog well, that you may not be required to do it again.’ The court did not agree with this parting advice, nor with the energetic way in […]

Evidence in his defence was given by Howell Thomas, the school’s second master who had witnessed the flogging; by the Reverend Mr. Waugh and by E. E. Morris who was the new headmaster of Melbourne Grammar School; by Professor Irving who was now at Hawthorn Grammar School, and a medical practitioner. Irving told the court […]

It seems that Andrew lost his temper and hit the boy’s back and shoulder about 21 tunes with, a cane. The boy’s father got medical advice about his son’s bruises, and legal advice about his rights. A few days later Andrew had to appear in the Prahran Court on a charge of unlawful assault, a […]

  Waugh and Andrew made investigations and poked through lies or evasion until they found the culprits. They made them bring money to school to pay for the windows and, as punishment for telling lies, gave them the option of voluntarily leaving the school – it was not the same as expulsion, Andrew explained – […]

Wesley College. This history is older than the others I’ve used so far (from 1967), because I do not have access to a more recent history of Wesley, if one has been written. Professor Henry Martyn Andrew, Headmaster; Reverend James Swanston Waugh, President: “Andrew’s term as headmaster opened ominously. It seems that in February 1876 […]

‘Wesley College: The First Hundred Years’ by Geoffrey Blainey, James Morrisey and S.E.K. Hulme. It contains far less corporal punishment material than others , but there’s still some (not much though from a school whose old boys have often referred to their schoolmasters as ‘the men who tanned the hide of us’). Again, a particular […]