Spare the rod.....

I am still going through the Northwich Guardian looking for mentions of our Palins.  There are quite a few articles that mention where a Palin has won an award for best flowers, best pie or something at school.  I have also come across articles where a Palin has been fined for being drunk or for swearing.  There was even a charge for not having a licence for a dog!


I admit I don't pay too much attention to these minor offences, because if we were honest with one another, we would all probably be fined today for swearing.  I believe minor offences do not really define a character or who the person was, unless of course there are many repeated offences.

I came across an article today in the Northwich Guardian November 16, 1904 where a young lad was caught and charged for stealing.  Again I would not normally post this; one because he was young, two because it was a minor offence and three he may not have actually have done the stealing!

I am going to post this because of  what the magistrate deemed  the punishment should be.

I was raised by parents that believed in "Spare the rod, Spoil the child".  If we misbehaved then we could almost be certain there was a wooden spoon with our name on it! (My siblings and I learned real quick not to misbehave!)   I never thought I would see it used as corporal punishment handed down by a magistrate!

Sure enough there is an actual Wikipedia page about birching.  There it states "Judicial birching in 20th-century Britain was used much more often as a fairly minor punishment for male juveniles, typically for petty larceny, than as a serious penalty for adult men. This was applied to boys aged up to 14 in England and Wales, and up to 16 in Scotland. In this juvenile version, the birch was much lighter and smaller, and the birch was administered privately by a policeman, usually immediately after the magistrate's court hearing, either in a room in the court building or at the nearest police station.

In the United Kingdom, birching as a judicial penalty, in both its juvenile and adult versions, was abolished in 1948, but it was retained until 1962 as a punishment for violent breaches of prison discipline. The Isle of Man (a small island between Britain and Ireland with its own legal system as a British Crown dependency) caused a good deal of controversy by continuing to birch young offenders until 1976. The birch was also used on offending teenage boys until the mid-1960s on the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey."

Oh, the things we learn.....

You can find John Palin in the tree here.