Eric A. Wildman: The Man Who Sold Canes to Schools and Got Caned by the Pupils

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Eric A. Wildman smiling beside a bundle of canes under the headline The Man Who Sold Canes to Schools and Got Caned by the Pupils

In post-war Britain, one young Londoner decided the country's real problem was that children weren't being hit enough. Eric Arthur Wildman didn't just say so. He built a business around it, selling canes, birches, straps and tawses by the hundred, marching through London in a schoolmaster's gown and lecturing anyone who'd listen on the correct way to thrash a teenager.

Then in November 1948 a headmaster in Staffordshire invited him to give a talk, paid his train fare and set him up for one of the most satisfying comeuppances in British history. Within five years Wildman would also be in court, his offices emptied by the police and his pamphlets branded obscene. Here's the full, strange story.

Quick Answers

Who was Eric A. Wildman? A London cane manufacturer and campaigner who founded the National Society for the Retention of Corporal Punishment in the late 1940s.
When was he born? 20 May 1921, in Walthamstow. He died in May 1990.
What's he famous for? Being pinned down and caned with his own cane by pupils at Horsley Hall school, near Eccleshall in Staffordshire, on 24 November 1948.
What happened to him afterwards? Police raided his offices in 1953 and he was fined £500 for publishing obscene libels.

Who Was Eric Wildman?

Wildman was born in Walthamstow in May 1921 and, by most accounts, spent the Second World War in the Merchant Navy. When he was demobbed he went into selling leather goods. His own lawyers later explained what happened next: the leather turned into straps, the straps turned into a cause and the cause turned into the Corpun Educational Organisation.

Eric Wildman in an academic gown holding an armful of canes beside a placard reading Abolish the Birch and Crime Increases

By April 1947 the Daily Mirror had already found him. A Mirrorpix photo from that month shows a fresh-faced Wildman with his stock, captioned as the man supplying canes and birches to schools. The paper reported him claiming more than 100 schools as customers, and later that year, during a national cane shortage, the figure had apparently grown to 300, with orders supposedly going as far as Uganda, Malaya, Palestine and Persia. Whether anyone ever verified those numbers is another matter.

He wasn't short of grand titles, either. Wildman was president of the National Society for the Retention of Corporal Punishment in Schools, organiser of the League for the Retention of Corporal Punishment and editor of a fortnightly review called The Retentionist. The Vintage News reckons he was probably the society's only member.

Inside the Corpun Business

The most vivid description of Wildman's operation comes from the writer Gervas d'Olbert, whose 1956 book Chastisement Across the Ages gave him a whole section. The excerpt preserved by World Corporal Punishment Research paints a picture of an office with duplicating machines humming, card indexes neatly filed and walls hung with every punitive instrument you can think of, in an assortment of shapes, weights and colours.

Canes, straps and belts did most of the trade, but his speciality was the tawse, the split leather strap long used in Scottish classrooms. Products were sold in person and by post, and the marketing sorted children into categories like the strapping age and the caning age. There was even a resident housemaster on hand to give free advice to parents during the school holidays.

Publicity was where Wildman really put the effort in. He pinned yellow Corpun cards to London noticeboards with a photo of himself puffing on a pipe, wrote letters to local papers (one went to the Richmond and Twickenham Times in 1951) and hired sandwich-board men to parade his slogans through the streets. One board warned that if you abolished the birch, crime would go up. Another asked parents, bluntly, whether their children needed beating.

He also had a habit of upsetting the neighbours. His first premises near Oxford Circus didn't last long once the landlord and fellow tenants saw the attention it brought. Kensington was next, until the sandwich men got him moved on again, and he ended up on City Road, in what d'Olbert called a less residential district.

Schoolgirls in uniform at an outdoor protest holding a hand-painted sign reading No to the Cane

His lectures, held at places like Caxton Hall in Westminster, tended to attract supporters and opponents in roughly equal measure and often ended in uproar. He'd turn up in cap, gown and mortar-board, yet d'Olbert found the talks themselves crushingly dull.

The Trap at Horsley Hall

Horsley Hall was a small private school near Eccleshall in Staffordshire, run on progressive, self-expression lines by a bearded 28-year-old headmaster called Robert Copping. Copping hated corporal punishment. Nobody at Horsley Hall was caned. But he managed to persuade Wildman that the school was perfectly happy with the idea, and invited him up to give a talk on discipline. He even covered the train fare, which d'Olbert puts at £2.

On the evening of 24 November 1948 Wildman stood in front of the pupils with a selection of his products. TIME magazine's report has him recommending a 30-inch Dragon Smoky Malacca for boys of 15 and over, which he called "a very pliant and punishing cane". When someone asked how many strokes he'd suggest, he gave the classic answer: six of the best.

Eric Wildman held on the floor by Horsley Hall pupils in 1948, canes scattered around him below a board reading Corporal Punishment Story

That was the cue. Copping gave a signal and the boys rushed him, threw him to the floor and held him down while one of them picked up the Dragon Smoky Malacca and gave him exactly what he'd prescribed. The press reports gathered by World Corporal Punishment Research don't agree on the details. The Evening Sentinel said around 28 pupils were involved and that the boy wielding the cane was 16. The Daily Dispatch said 25 children aged between six and 16, with the girls cheering. TIME went with about 20 boys, while the Associated Press caption on the photo that went round the world put the tally at seven strokes rather than six.

Whatever the exact count, Copping made no secret of who was behind it. He told the Daily Mirror, "I had been planning it for months." He also said he'd love Wildman to sue, since the boys had only done what Wildman himself recommended for children, and he floated the idea of setting up a children's trade union against corporal punishment.

Schoolboys grabbing Eric Wildman as a cane is raised above the scrum during his 1948 lecture at Horsley Hall

Wildman, meanwhile, left without his canes, which the pupils happily carried round the school as trophies. He went to the police in Stafford to report an assault, then to hospital, where he was given something for shock and, if d'Olbert is to be believed, the matron laughed at him. TIME reported nine visible weals and Wildman complaining that he'd never been so humiliated in his life.

The story went everywhere. Newspapers ran headlines along the lines of caning man caned, the picture of him being wrestled to the ground was syndicated to papers across America and even turned up in Poland. Wildman threatened legal action but never followed through, and d'Olbert says it was the last public lecture he ever gave.

Four Vans Full of Evidence

If Horsley Hall made him a laughing stock, what came next made him a criminal. Wildman's pamphlets had titles like Modern Methods of Home Discipline, Modern Miss Delinquent and Punishment Posture for Girls, and some came with illustrations. The authorities had started to wonder who exactly was reading them.

In January 1953 police raided the City Road premises with a search warrant. Over about three hours they cleared out everything except the furniture, filling four vans with literature and every punitive implement in the place. Wildman reportedly said nothing beyond the fact that he'd be speaking to his lawyers. He then carried on posting out pamphlets even after the summons arrived, which prompted a second raid and the seizure of more material, including photographs.

He was charged with publishing obscene libel, the old common-law offence used against dodgy books and pictures before the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 replaced it. If you've read our piece on Horace Roye, the photographer who beat obscenity laws twice, you'll know how unpredictable those cases could be. Wildman wasn't so lucky. The Vintage News says he pleaded guilty to 17 counts.

The Trial and the Messiah Line

The case came to court in May 1953 after being postponed twice. The prosecution argued that the pamphlets were obscene and that at least part of the business was about something other than education. Prefaces written by clergymen for some of the booklets didn't help much.

Man in glasses posing with a cane raised over a woman bent across his knee in a staged black and white photograph

His defence went for sympathy. Wildman, his lawyers said, had suffered accidents that affected his brain and left him fanatical but sincere. He was a religious man who taught Sunday school and believed he was doing God's work.

The magistrate wasn't buying the halo. He reportedly considered a £1,000 fine before being told Wildman couldn't pay it, and settled on £500 within six months or a year in prison. D'Olbert's account records the magistrate telling him, "He must learn that he is not the world's Messiah in this matter."

The fine wasn't the worst of it. Wildman's young adopted daughter was taken out of his care and an almost finished adoption of a second child was cancelled. What the authorities thought of a man selling Punishment Posture for Girls raising a little girl at home doesn't take much imagination.

What Happened to Eric Wildman Later?

After 1953 he kept his head down, but he didn't stop. Wildman carried on selling canes by mail order for around another 20 years, and a footnote by the researcher C. Farrell notes he was still in the London phone book in the mid-1970s, listed as a supplier of tutelage supplies.

Most retellings stop there, but his canes turned up in one more scandal. In 1967 the Home Office investigated Court Lees Approved School in South Godstone, Surrey, after a teacher sent photographs of boys' bruised backsides to the press. The Gibbens Report found the headmaster had caned boys with excessive severity and that, since 1961, the school had been using an unauthorised, thicker type of cane. Farrell's notes name Wildman as the supplier of those canes. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins shut the school, which was the largest approved school in Surrey, and it formally closed in February 1968, according to the National Archives.

Australian newspaper clipping headlined Six of the best made Eric a wilder man, reporting the Horsley Hall caning

There's another strange footnote. Five parcels of Wildman and Corpun pamphlets ended up in the British Library's Private Case, the locked collection of erotica, as Peter Fryer noted in his 1966 book on the collection. The man who insisted his work was purely educational ended up filed alongside the nation's pornography.

Wildman is thought to have spent his later years working as a private maths tutor. He died in London in May 1990, aged 68 or 69. By then the world he'd campaigned for had largely vanished: caning was banned in British state schools in 1986, a change that historian Andrew Burchell traces in his study of school discipline in England between 1945 and 1986.

Why the Story Still Lands

Plenty of people defended corporal punishment in the 1940s and 1950s. Most of them were headteachers, magistrates and parents who never thought twice about it. What makes Wildman stand out is how far he went beyond that: the gown, the sandwich boards, the price lists, the pamphlets about girls' punishment postures and the nagging sense, shared by the court, that his interest wasn't entirely educational.

It's also simply one of the best examples of poetic justice on record. A man who spent years telling the country exactly how children should be beaten got a live demonstration from the children themselves, with his own cane, on his own recommended number of strokes. Like the schoolkids behind the Oz obscenity trial two decades later, the pupils of Horsley Hall showed the grown-ups that young people could hit back. In their case, quite literally.