“Lash for Robbers.” “20 Strokes of Cat.” “Mayfair Men on Trial.” “Cat for Two Mayfair Men.” “Prison Warders Lash English Playboy.” Headlines across Europe and North America hailed the sentences doled out by Lord Chief Justice Hewart. It was no surprise that the trial of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers made worldwide news. Well-off young men, of respectable families, educated in the nation’s most elite schools, were not supposed to be subjected to punishments tailored for their social inferiors. Some were satisfied that the sentences demonstrated the even-handedness of British justice; others protested that the court should have taken into account the culprits’ backgrounds. At a house party a woman asserted that it was outrageous that the “cat” had been used on public school boys. Chief Justice Hewart, who was present, angrily replied, “Scoundrels, all of them! They are lucky. They might easily have been on a capital charge. The fact that they are public school boys makes their crime all the worse. They should have known better.”1
The popular press agreed, playing up the contrast between the sordid crime and the social eminence of the four. One account described them as “fashionably dressed and well-spoken men.”2 In another they were “young dandies of fashionable Mayfair.”3 The tabloids had a long experience in pandering to their expanding readership with tales of toffs gone bad. The case of the “Mayfair playboys” was exceptional because it entailed four young gentlemen carrying out a vicious crime and a judge sentencing two of them to be flogged, which, apart from hanging, was the most brutal form of punishment available by law. The tabloids were transfixed by the prospect of the lash, normally reserved for working-class brutes who only understood the language of pain, being used to bloody the backs of sophisticated men-about-town.
The debate over the morality and efficacy of corporal punishment had been going on in Britain for over a century. By coincidence, a report of the Committee on Corporal Punishment appeared just weeks after the Hyde Park Hotel trial. Normally the popular press would have ignored such a dry document, but because the court had sentenced Wilmer and Harley to be flogged, journalists gave it unprecedented attention.4 The irony was that for the next two decades both the supporters and opponents of corporal punishment would try to turn to their advantage the story of the Mayfair men, the most atypical of felons subjected to the lash.
Harley and Wilmer were initially held at His Majesty’s Prison Wormwood Scrubs, located in inner west London.5 Though they did not appeal their prison sentences, they asked the Home Secretary for the commutation of their flogging.6 A petition opposing the sentences was signed by the Dean of Canterbury, Dr. Hewlett Johnson; the Dean of St Paul’s, Dr. W. R. Matthews; the Reverend P. T. R. Kirk, vicar of Christchurch, Westminster; Dr. L. P. Jacks, Unitarian minister; Professor John MacMurray, Grote Professor of Mind and Logic at University College, London; Edward Glover, psychoanalyst and criminologist; George Benson, Labour MP for Chesterfield; and Clara D. Rackham of the Howard League. Flogging, they insisted, was not effective. Those who did approve of such sentences were not ensuring the safety of the community; such people’s satisfaction only lay in knowing that pain would be inflicted.7
The question of the flogging of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers surfaced in Parliament. In the House of Commons, Thomas Kennedy, a Labour MP, asked if the home secretary would consider remitting the flogging of Wilmer and Harley. In addition, he and George Ridley wanted to know when the committee on corporal punishment would present its report. In replying, Geoffrey Lloyd insisted that the Home Office could not interfere with court sentences. He did say that the report had been received but was not yet published. Not content with this simple factual statement, Sir Archibald Southby paraded the back-bench Conservatives’ adulation of discipline by asking, “In view of the cowardly attack on an inoffensive citizen, will my honourable friend see that these criminals receive the punishment they richly deserve?” This sally won “ministerial cheers” from one side of the House and from the other George Ridley’s query if Southby “did not consider that this was a barbaric and sadistic form of punishment.”8 MPs’ views of the issue varied according to class loyalties and political persuasion. In discussing corporal punishment Labour MPs presented themselves as humanitarians and Conservative MPs as disciplinarians.
In March the question of the Mayfair men and the “cat” surfaced once again. In response to a Labour member asking if the convicts had yet received any of their strokes, Sir Samuel Hoare, the home secretary, reported that the wardens had carried out the full sentences on March 1. Far from being sated, Tory MPs pushed for an extension of such punishments. Sir Gifford Fox asked if the Home Office did not agree that sabotage and the giving away of official secrets should similarly be punished. Frederick Pethick-Lawrence countered by inquiring if the home secretary had noted the sadistic influence such acts had on the public and whether he would consider ending such punishments. His assertion elicited ministerial cries of “No!”9 Godfrey Nicholson insisted that press speculations and deplorable parliamentary questions like Pethick-Lawrence’s resulted in the “cat” garnering unfortunate publicity. The Conservatives once again used the issue of punishing playboys to burnish their reputation as defenders of law and order.
Once the Home Office refused to commute the floggings of Wilmer and Harley, the press devoted even more column inches to the disgusting details of the administration of corporal punishment. The papers initially asserted that Wilmer and Harley would be moved from Wormwood Scrubs to Maidstone Jail and only be subjected to a whipping after they were settled. In fact they were both flogged as soon as their appeals were denied. The popular press thoroughly covered the fate of Wilmer, the first to be scourged on March 1.10 Though some held that only three strokes were given at a time, spaced out every three weeks, Wilmer received his full fifteen at once while still at the Scrubs.11 “Two burly warders swinging alternately laid 15 strokes of a nine-thonged ‘cat-o’-nine-tails’ on the bare back of a Mayfair playboy in prison today,” wrote one reporter. “His hands stretched above his head and tied to a triangle, the youth was flogged while a doctor stood by ready to halt the beating if necessary.”12 Newspapers in Europe and North America gave accounts of Harley’s ordeal. Asserting that he was appalled by this cruel form of punishment, the editor of Le Populaire, a Parisian paper, went on say that such tortures gave birth to unhealthy interests that were unworthy of a civilized nation.13
The press based its accounts of the floggings on a perusal of the published regulations. In prison before sentencing, a medical officer determined if the prisoner were fit enough to be flogged. For example, in 1932 a judge spared two men found guilty at the Devon Assizes of robbing women after they produced medical certificates that testified to their having been wounded in the war. An appeal court revoked the sentence of six strokes imposed by the 1935 Carmarthen Assizes on a miner whose health was dodgy. Lord Hewart’s biographer claimed that the judge had never before the Hyde Park Hotel trial passed a flogging sentence, but at the 1937 Kent Assizes he came close when enraged by the case of a thirty-five-year-old man who had beaten a sixty-nine-year-old woman. After sentencing the man to five years in prison, he added that if the cad were not unfit “he would have had a severe flogging that he would have remembered all the rest of his life.”14
If the medical officer declared a prisoner fit, the court specified the number of strokes, twenty-four being the maximum. Warders strapped the prisoner to a triangle or easel by his hands and feet, screened his head, and protected his neck and loins. The prison governor, a male nurse, the prison doctor, and a senior warder who counted the strokes witnessed the lashing of the prisoner. The doctor could at any time halt the proceedings if he believed that continuing them posed a serious danger. The warders received two shillings sixpence and a half day off work for doing the job.15
The Sunday Pictorial published what it claimed to be an ex-felon’s experience of being flogged.
Never mind what I got it for. Never mind my name. I’d heard the Beak order me flogging. I knew it was coming. Well, one morning, my Dartmoor cell door opens and the screw (warder) tells me to put on my trousers, and nothing else. There’s a couple more outside—in case I am going to get rough. What’s the use, I do as I’m told. Between the three of them I’m marched along the iron gallery outside my cell, down to the floor of the hall. There I see the triangle, ready, with the straps on it. The old man, the quack, and the chief screw (governor), medical officer and chief warder are waiting. There’s a couple of attendants from the hospital, and three young screws learning the job. They don’t waste time. The old man reads out the number of strokes (from a Home Office order authorizing the flogging), and the minute he’s done I am grabbed, shoved face-first against the triangle. Both my feet are strapped—my wrists are strapped, too, hauled up on a pulley rope so I’m stretched full. A canvas strip is buckled over the back of my neck so the lash won’t get me there. All very quick, see? I don’t know which warder has the “cat”—you’re not allowed to know. I hear something as though he is swinging it back behind me. I bite my teeth and start to get ready, but I am not quick enough. It comes sooner than I expect, like a smash with a ton weight, right across the bare back that cuts and burns in fierce. It bangs a yell out of me, for I am not ready. I hear the chief shout out “One.” Somehow that makes me murder angry. Then it comes again. Too quick. You see, the first crack kind of knocks you silly, so you can’t time the rest. After three the quack was in front of me, looking close. But he must have reckoned I was all right, because I got three more. Then they unstrap me, carry me back to my cell. Listen—the “cat” has nine tails of cord nearly three feet long, knotted at the ends. They’re on a handle a couple of feet long. The screw that wields it is chosen for strength—he gets half a dollar and a half-day off the job. Them tails leave your back all covered in red snake-lines and torn about a lot, too. You get a mattress and pillows to rest on, and the quack rubs in stuff and binds you up. But you never lose the marks. It takes a week before you try and fetch a deep breath afterwards.16
“Le chat à neuf queues dans une prison de Londres.” L’Illustration: Journal universal, Sept. 3, 1910. © The British Library Board
Opponents of corporal punishment claimed that few men were able to stand more than five strokes at a time without collapsing.17 And fear of the dreaded cat-o’-nine-tails even drove some desperate criminals to suicide. In 1930, James Edward Spiers, serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery, jumped from Wandsworth prison’s second gallery before the group of justices of the peace assembled to witness his receiving fifteen lashes.18 In a 1934 case the coroner concluded: “It appears here, on the man’s own statement, that he was suffering very bitterly in mind, especially at the thought of the flogging. That no doubt preyed on his mind to a great extent. It is open for anybody to suggest that that mode of punishment is too barbarous in these times. On the other hand, some people would say that the statement of the deceased and the fear shown in him absolutely justified that particular form of punishment. However, that is purely a matter of academic discussion.”19 Given the suicides, George Bernays in 1934 demanded that an inquiry be made of “this horrible form of punishment.” The home secretary initially rebuffed this request, optimistically citing the decline in the use of the cat as evidence that the problem was solving itself.20
By chance, the trial of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers took place just as a wave of opposition to the use of the “cat” and other outmoded forms of punishment was cresting. Wilmer’s whipping, claimed the press, sparked a letter-writing campaign by reformers. The debate was followed across the English-speaking world. The Toronto Globe and Mail headed one account with the headlines: “Shaw and Churchmen Protest Lashes Vainly: 15 Strokes Inflicted upon Young Man-about-Town Robber—Public’s Appetite for Pain Said Filled” and later “English Opinion Split on Cat O’ Nine Tails.”21 A Jamaican paper headed its version with “Is the ‘Cat’ Necessary? Controversy in England as to Whether This Form of Punishment Should Be Meted Out or Not”: “Cause of the controversy was the recent conviction of four May fair men for robbery with violence. The four were sent into penal servitude—two in addition being sentenced to receive strokes of the dreaded cat-o’-nine. Daily prominent London dailies reproduced letters from many prominent persons in the United Kingdom, some protesting against administering of the ‘cat’ and some seeing no reason why flogging should not be administered for certain serious crimes.”22 Appearing on the same page as accounts of the opening of the Mayfair trial was a report of a speech Sir Samuel Hoare, the home secretary, gave to the Howard League for Penal Reform. He lauded those seeking to modernize the law. “The people who had made the changes were not faddists, sentimentalists, and cranks, but men and women who realized the grim facts of the problem.” These reforms were all part of Hoare’s new Criminal Justice Act, which would, he predicted, eventually mean less crime.23 Central to his reform campaign was the 1938 Cadogan report, which called for a radical curtailment of corporal punishment.
Corporal punishment, commonly employed by the courts in the eighteenth century, had declined in the nineteenth century.24 This evolution reflected in part what Michel Foucault later identified as a shift in the attention of the penal authorities from the body to the soul.25 Nevertheless, occasional panics, aroused by what were regarded as particularly heinous crimes, led to parliamentary acts that reintroduced corporal punishment.26 They included the Treason Act of 1842 (sparked by a threat to Queen Victoria), the Vagrancy Act of 1824, the Garrotters Act of 1863, the Vagrancy Act of 1898, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1912 (resulting from the White Slave Panic).27 There were, the defenders of these acts asserted, brutes, bullies, and cowards who only understood pain.28 Prison wardens were also allowed by law to employ flogging to punish serious cases of inmate indiscipline.
Nevertheless, in the interwar years judges were less and less likely to include strokes of the cat in their sentencing. Though a handful of men on the bench—like Mr. Justice Day in Liverpool and Mr. Justice Darling in Kent—were prone to demand the whip, fewer and fewer judges handed down sentences of corporal punishment. Yet most judges favored the retention of such an option and bristled when reformers pointed out that English courts were backward, whipping and flogging having been outlawed in every civilized country except for the British dominions.
To respond to such criticisms and to assist the home secretary’s program of judicial and prison reform, in May 1937 the government set up a departmental committee, chaired by Edward Cadogan, a Conservative MP. Its mandate was to determine the effectiveness of corporal punishment in the United Kingdom. Its first task was to establish the actual numbers of floggings. It found that many of the old laws sanctioning the “cat” were moribund and could be easily removed from the statute book. For example, no one had ever been charged under the Treason Act of 1842, and the Vagrancy Act led to only four cases of flogging between 1926 and 1935. The Criminal Law Amendment Act (a spawn of the 1912 White Slave Panic) resulted in eleven pimps being flogged in the first year, but between 1913 and 1935 there were only twenty-five similar cases, of which fifteen occurred in the first three years. Robbery with violence was the one offense that resulted in a large number of sentences of corporal punishment levied against adults.29 Its provisions were contained in the Garrotters Act of 1863 and updated by the Larceny Act of 1916.30 Robbery with violence cases actually dropped from 1,414 (1904–1913) to 656 (1926–1935), but the percentage of felons sentenced to be whipped rose from 4.3 to 35.8 percent.31 Between 1900 and 1935, judges subjected a grand total of 466 offenders to the “cat.”32
Did whipping work? Most policemen and judges believed that it did. It was popularly held that no one was ever flogged twice. This was not true. The committee was familiar with the story that the lash had ended an outbreak of garroting (robbers strangling their victims) that took place in London in the 1860s.33 Investigation proved that in fact the number of such crimes increased after the passage of the Garrotters Act. Judges insisted that the 1908 crime wave in Cardiff was squelched by fourteen floggings. The subsequent high level of recidivism demonstrated that they had had no apparent effect.34 Some asserted that the flogging permitted by the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1912 ended pimping in Scotland. In fact, there were no floggings there between 1912 and 1922, yet cases dropped from forty-seven in 1913 to seven in 1922. Similarly, there were relatively fewer robberies in Scotland (where there was no flogging) than in England and Wales (where there was). Moreover, in England between 1921 and 1930, 55 percent of those flogged (142) for robbery reoffended, versus 43.9 percent of those not flogged (298).35 To be generous, the committee was willing to concede that flogging made little difference regarding a felon’s subsequent career choices, but the more critical witnesses argued that the lash produced bitterness and resentment that increased the likelihood of convicts committing more serious crimes. Rather than repressing crime the punishment tended to fuel it.
Although politicians and newspapers frequently argued that sex crimes should be punished by floggings, the committee noted that experts doubted the efficacy of using the lash in such cases. In practice judges shared this skepticism, since of the 974 men convicted of “attempts to commit unnatural offences (includes importuning, assaults with intent to commit unnatural offences and indecent assaults on males)” only twenty-five were flogged. Courts increasingly recognized that homosexuality was a “psychological abnormality” that could not be cured by beatings. And most young male prostitutes were, the committee stated, not really homosexuals and could be best reformed in a Borstal, or youth detention center. It also pointed out that pimping—living on immoral earnings and procuring—was rarely prosecuted. Courts recognized the injustice of the law that regarded the husband or lover the same as a woman’s pimp. The threat of the cat was further discounted since a large portion of the men found guilty of procuring were physically unfit to be punished. Consequently, since 1912 the Criminal Law Amendment Act resulted in only thirty-two floggings, with twenty-two of these in 1913–1914.36
The Cadogan committee’s report was published a few weeks after the Hyde Park Hotel robbery. It stated that the statistics demonstrated the futility of employing corporal punishment, and that in countering attempts at reform, use of the “cat” posed the danger of making matters worse. Recommending that all corporal punishment of adults outside of prison be repealed, the report concluded: “Corporal punishment is purely punitive; and is out of accord with those modern ideas which stress the need for using such methods as penal treatment as give an opportunity for subjecting the offender to reformative influences.”37
The press noted that the public’s interest in the topic of corporal punishment was clearly sparked by the Mayfair case.38 The Spectator, a conservative weekly magazine, observed:
The Report of the Committee on Corporal Punishment appeared at a most opportune moment; it should help to decide finally a long controversy which recently has been brought to a head by the sentence passed on the “Mayfair men.” The Committee recommends that corporal punishment should be completely abolished for all court offences, and should be retained only as a means of maintaining prison discipline. The Committee’s grounds for this conclusion are as interesting and important as the conclusion itself; for while its recommendations will please all who are already convinced of the barbarity of this form of punishment, the Report should also persuade those who hitherto have believed in its deterrent effect. After examining carefully all the evidence the Committee concludes: “We have been unable to find any body of facts or figures showing that the introduction of a power of flogging has produced a decrease in the number of offences for which it may be imposed.” This conclusion leaves the defence of corporal punishment in the hands of those who believe in purely retributory punishment, without any deterrent or reformative value, and even they must make logically an exception in the case of juvenile offences; thus there should be no strong opposition to the immediate adoption of the Committee’s recommendations. The Committee’s own adoption of the principle that purely retributory punishment is not justifiable should have a good effect on public opinion, and the administration of the law; the sooner this principle is generally applied, the better.39
A letter to the editor of the Spectator went further, linking the lash to state terror.
SIR,—As an ordinary citizen, I feel I must beg a space in your columns to voice a strong disapproval of the flogging sentences in connexion with the recent Mayfair robbery case. I shall, of course, be accused of being a “sentimentalist” and reminded that sympathy is due to the victim and not the perpetrators of the crime. I certainly concede that sympathy to the victim, and am the very last to condone acts of violence, but as a reasonably civilised human being I must indeed ask myself whether in this year of grace a.d. 1938, the infliction of torture on the bodies of criminals for crimes of violence can be morally justified. We are frequently expressing indignation at acts of cruelty in other countries on unfortunate offenders convicted under their respective codes, but are we any better? It seems that the Continental label of hypocrisy is as true in this as in other matters. There is no difference in substance between methods used now and those used in former days, except a more refined method of infliction—for according to a description given by one who had undergone flogging, the act is carried out with a technique and milieu like that of an operating-theatre perverted to the function of causing agony, the avoidance of oblivion and any fatal effects resulting from the lashing. That this form of punishment is merely the expression of sadistic impulses latent in all of us, and which we can legally satisfy upon suitable scapegoats, is a self-evident fact upon analysis. The relish with which such sentences are reported in our yellow Press further confirms my contention. Embryonic as the stage of psychology still is, we now know enough to “debunk” Victorian self-righteousness.… At the present time many States have fallen back into making the inflicting of bodily pain a recognised instrument of policy and terrorisation, and the darkening veil of passion and prejudice seems to be engulfing what little light of intelligence and reason we have developed in European civilisation. Sadism, mass emotion, self-righteous indignation are exceedingly powerful psychic forces, responsible for many social evils.40
Though reformers were in the main pleased with the Cadogan report, they were annoyed that it defended the continued use of the “cat” in prison. This appeared to be illogical. The committee had found that whipping had no deterrent value, so some, including Sir Stafford Cripps, asked why it was retained in prisons.41 Nevertheless, most critics lauded the report for its use of facts and statistics to counter the myth of the efficacy of corporal punishment.42
In the interwar years George Benson, Labour MP for Chesterfield and head of the Howard League for Penal Reform, led the campaign against the lash.43 Benson likened flogging to the death penalty: “Savage penalties have very frequently been tried for the purpose of supplementing ineffective police work. If, for various reasons, the police were inefficient and had captured only a small percentage of criminals, and the authorities, in order to supplement that weakness in detection, increased the severity of penalties on such as are caught, that policy invariably proved a failure.”44
The league stressed that the various flogging acts were the results of social panics bordering on hysteria, that there was no evidence of whipping having any deterrent value, and that such savagery was almost unique to the United Kingdom.45 Others made the point that impoverished criminals had little “choice,” so retribution was useless.46 Class made a difference. Sir Christopher Robinson reported that writing a letter to the conservative Telegraph opposing the lash led to his being bombarded with violent denunciations by members of the upper classes, including women furious at idea of being denied the pleasure of reading about and discussing the “cat.”47 John Parker suggested that the moneyed were accustomed to accept corporal punishment by years spent in elite boarding schools, “particularly Eton.” “To-day, only the very rich still feel a strong desire to preserve the right of buying the very doubtful privilege of birching for their offspring.… The ordinary decent Englishman’s view … is that birching should be abolished.”48 George Bernard Shaw agreed on the influence of environment. “The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged,” wrote the dramatist, “is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.”49
Benson, in arguing that the floggers’ preoccupation with sex crimes revealed their unseemly psychological motivations, picked up on a theme developed at the end of the nineteenth century. The exaggerated hatred that “normal” men so vociferously declared against the “abnormal” had disturbing sexual undertones, which those in the campaign against flogging could not help but notice.50 The Humanitarian League, with the support of intellectuals such as Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and George Bernard Shaw, led the opposition. Salt declared that it was ironic that conservatives presented the lash as a purifier of morals when the “psychopathic side” of the question was so obvious.51 Shaw, in an 1898 lecture entitled “Flagellomania,” asserted that flogging was a form of debauchery, a mania based “on a sensual instinct” and a “special disorder of the imagination.”52 He returned to the issue in 1912, noting that those who favored the lash ignored or pretended not to know that the desire to flog or be flogged was a vice. Raids on brothels always uncovered whipping paraphernalia. The 1912 act, he declared, was “not a legislative phenomenon but a psychopathic one.”53 Prominent clergymen and liberals joined in the Mayfair men’s appeal against their flogging after Shaw wrote to newspapers that “the transient pain to the flogged men is not worth considering in comparison to the gratification and encouragement it has given to all our sadists and flagellomaniacs.”54
The psychotherapist Edward Glover gave a psychoanalytical gloss to such accounts of the sexual excitement experienced by the censorious, but by the 1930s laypersons were also discussing issues of unconscious motivation. “My excuse for this letter is the immense and sensational publicity given to the ‘Mayfair’ flogging sentences,” began a March 1938 letter to the New Statesman and Nation, Britain’s leading left-of-center weekly magazine. The writer went on to argue that an immoral punishment like whipping debased the community. And such a barbaric custom had its disturbing sensual side. He was shocked to discover that even “girl typists” were now discussing it. The linkage of pain to pleasure was obvious, for shops selling smut, contraceptives, and aphrodisiacs also displayed books on flogging. “The obvious object is to create a market for the other articles.”55 In the next week’s issue of the New Statesman came a report that a Paris company was seeking to recruit women authors to write short stories on corporal punishment. It suggested that works on the whipping of schoolgirls, slaves, and wives (“matrimonial chastisement”) would sell.56
Did whipping deter others? The committee found scant evidence to support such a contention.57 For this reason the civil servants in the Home Office saw no need to extend the practice. Yet every year the vengeful in and outside of Parliament demanded an extension of flogging to sensational cases that had excited their indignation. “For the man who peddled drugs,” declared Sir Archibald Southby, “there was only one punishment—‘the cat.’ ”58 The “cat” could end the smash-and-grab assaults of the “motor bandit,” said some, just as it had stamped out garroting.59 Blackmail also warranted a whipping, declared the Common Sergeant, as it was the “most cowardly offense.”60 Sir Ernest Wilde felt that the purse snatcher was as bad.61 Sir Robert Gower, enraged by reports of a man who had beaten a dog to death, sought flogging for cruelty to animals.62 Sir Thomas Moore told the story of louts pulling the feathers off a live sparrow. “There was no means of showing the meaning of pain to such fiends unless it was inflicted on their own hides.”63 Disciplinarians repeatedly demanded that a taste of the “cat” be dealt out to those guilty of any of a motley collection of crimes including incest; sodomy; rape; demanding money with menaces; assaults on wives and children; cruelty to animals; assaults with razors, bayonets, and broken bottles; and the use of exploding or corrosive substances.64 Save for the crude desire to meet violence with violence, these crimes were not linked in any logical fashion. Critics noted, however, that it was hard to imagine any middle-class individual being involved in such activities. “If flogging is to be retained as a form of punishment,” declared George Ridley, “I see no reason why the list of offences for which that punishment should be applied should not be rationalised in the light of modern conditions. I see no reason, in that case, why share-pushing, tax-evasion, fraud at the expense of poor and unsophisticated people, animal hunting and blackmail should not be added to the list.”65
Under the heading “Bringing Back the Cat,” one paper hailed the sentences imposed by the Lord Chief Justice in the Mayfair robbery case. The writer asserted that there had been too much “coddling” of villains.66 Sir Reginald Coventry at the Worcester Quarter Sessions took up this line. He claimed that reforms threatened to turn prisons into rest homes where “people can have comfort they would not enjoy in their own homes; where they will be entertained and generally live a type of life which for many of them will be a great improvement upon the life they have at the present moment.” Given that humanitarians now threatened to end flogging—despite every judge’s opposition—the “professional garrotters of Liverpool and Cardiff” could look forward to being spared the only thing they feared.67 In a withering reply, Edward Hemmerde, recorder of Liverpool, noted that the social conditions of the poor had to be truly terrible if prison life were better. His main point was the notion that flogging eliminated garroting was a myth, a myth propagated by the same sort of reactionaries who in 1881 had opposed the termination of whippings in the army and navy.68 The Spectator piled on:
The observations on corporal punishment made by Sir Reginald Coventry at Worcester Quarter Sessions on Monday were reported at length, which is hardly a kindness to Sir Reginald, for they were not wise remarks. He “knew it had been said that corporal punishment did not cure people, but they would have difficulty in finding any men ever coming back for a second dose.” It is not clear what steps Sir Reginald has taken to look for such cases; he might perhaps consult the report and minutes and evidence of the Home Office Committee on Corporal Punishment on the point. He invoked in support of his contention “the professional garrotters of Liverpool and Cardiff, who could look forward to being spared the only punishment which deterred them—the cat o’ nine tails”; this is a subject on which more seems to be known at Worcester than at Liverpool or Cardiff. The wisdom of the abolition of corporal punishment is admittedly an arguable question, but the evidence worth hearing on the subject is that of persons, such as prison governors, who are in a position to see what the effect of flogging on a man really is. High Court Judges, who pass a flogging sentence and have no concern with its execution, are little better qualified than, say, bankers, to pronounce on its penal value. Having heard evidence from every quarter, the Home Office Committee reached a unanimous conclusion, and the Home Secretary was fully justified in adopting it.69
Despite such sarcastic attacks, the defenders of flogging presented themselves as realists and their opponents as sentimentalists. One wrote, “I cannot find sympathy either for the cruel ‘crook’ who receives a beating, or for the exaggerator who bleats of the temporary minor suffering undergone by these beasts.”70 Another, in arguing for whippings to counter such “abominable offences” as blackmail, asserted, “In comparison with such a result, it would seem that the welfare of so debased an individual is not worthy of consideration.”71 The conservative press portrayed the reformers as out of touch with public sentiment. “When a judge, ordered a flogging for the jewel thieves, known as the ‘Mayfair Playboys,’ there was much public criticism to the effect that the punishment was not in accord with modern humanitarian principles in dealing with criminals. A survey concluded during the week, suggests that recent criticism did not reflect public opinion, as only 44 per cent, of those approached expressed the opinion that flogging should be abolished.”72
Defenders particularly disliked being accused of taking a perverse pleasure in inflicting pain. F. O. Taylor tried to reverse the argument, asserting that to accuse of sadism those who employed corporal punishment was a sign of “an unhealthy mind.” He insisted that his headmaster, though he inflicted severe pain on his charges, was no sadist.73 The psychiatrist Robert Armstrong-Jones (grandfather of the Earl of Snowden) agreed. The whipping of children, far from being cruel, was a kindly way of saving boys from their innate desires to steal and lie. Pain acted as a deterrent and was nature’s response to the violation of its laws. The sexual side of the issue, he suggested, was something dreamed up by elitists. “It is the perverted imagination—or may it be called the ‘intellectual narcissism’?—of a Freudian to discuss sadism and masochism (the love of self-torture) as aspects to be considered in the administration of Justice.”74
Defenders of the “cat” went so far as to claim that those subjected to flogging in time came to realize its benefits. Often such assertions were accompanied by the revelation that the writer had been “made a man” by the punishment that he himself had received at boarding school. A Marlborough Police Court magistrate stated that sailors, seeing the need of the lash to maintain order at sea, requested its employment.75 Harold Arthur Frere, late superintendent of prisons in British Guiana, pushed this line of argument to laughable lengths.
Sir, Mr. Shaw must know that “like cures like”—“similia similibus curanter.” Therefore it follows that the only punishment which has any meaning for the man who has committed an act of brutality is the “argumentum ad hominem,” or to take it out of his skin. I have witnessed, during my 25 years’ sojourn in the East and West Indies, hundreds of floggings, and not once have felt any maudlin sympathy for the victims of the lash—though I have often shuddered at the crimes for which they were being thrashed. Flogging is a deterrent, not only to the brute but also to others who may be inclined to commit acts of violence and cruelty, it cured garroting in this country and the use of the knife in Barbados. People in their sense do not argue with sharks or alligators, nor should we use gloved hands when dealing with human brutes who assault women and children and lay violent hands on their fellow-creatures. I have been “slippered” by my father, thrashed by my schoolmaster, and not been brutalised. Nor have I ever felt the slightest desire to use violence except in self-protection. Flogging in our prisons (home and colonial) is not the brutal thing it is made out to be by the would-be reformers, who, for some unearthly reason, always sympathise with the bully rather than with his victim. It is salutary; it is performed in the presence of the prison surgeon, who stops the flogging if the brute faints, from fear rather than from pain. I was once deputed to carry out a flogging upon a “buck nigger,” a man with a magnificent physique. After he had received his two dozen lashes with the “cat” and was taken down from the triangle, he merely shot out his arms and cried “Rule Britannia” and from that day behaved like a lamb.76
In a 1939 discussion of corporal punishment the leftist MP Denis Pritt declared that the only defenders of flogging were Adolf Hitler and the Conservative Women’s Conference.77 This sally was not literally true, but it captured the essence of the social polarization revealed by the debate. Yet at the same time the popular press exploited the stories of lashings that the upper-class broadsheets shunned. The newspaper reports of the sentences that Chief Justice Hewart doled out were, as a number of commentators complained, all too often transparent appeals to the masses’ voyeurism, class resentment, and schadenfreude. The respectable press declared itself appalled by the tabloids’ sensational accounts of corporal punishment.78 The consensus of the respectable, claimed the Evening Telegraph, was that flogging was a “degrading and brutalizing form of punishment.”79 The New Statesman pointed out that the Sunday papers were “stuffed with sadistic material” pertaining to the floggings.80 In an editorial the Times noted that the Cadogan report was timely: “It happens to be published at a moment when special circumstances lend it adventitious weight. Certain recent sentences of corporal punishment have given occasion for the wanton and mercenary incitement of the public appetite for the most morbid details of the physical process—an appetite supplied with as little regard for truth as for decency. When an institution may expose the mind of the people to a repetition of such nauseous assault, there should be a double welcome for the proof that we can do without it.”81
The quality newspapers and weekly magazines on both the left and right recoiled from the sensationalism of the “yellow press.” The Spectator expressed its disgust at the latter’s vulgarity.
The so-called Mayfair men who were recently sentenced at the Old Bailey to flogging as well as imprisonment were guilty of a brutal crime, and if the use of the “cat” were either redemptive or deterrent it would be justified here. But the real scandal, and the decisive reason for the abolition of this penalty, is the loathsomely degrading treatment of the subject in a section of the daily Press. In the interval between delivery of the sentence and the infliction of the penalty readers of certain journals have had laid before them detailed accounts of the manner of a prison flogging and the physical results of it, while on Wednesday at least two papers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, published what purported to be actual descriptions of the flogging that had taken place the day before. The value of their versions is sufficiently demonstrated by a comparison of the two. According to the Mail Harley and Wilmer “took their full flogging without a whimper. Harley received 20 strokes, Wilmer 15.” The Express alleges that Wilmer “received five strokes and then collapsed.” It reported, a little less categorically, “statements” that “Harley received six strokes before he collapsed and was taken to hospital.” Whatever the intention of such descriptions (and whether they correspond with fact or not), they can appeal only to sadists or people who find utter beastliness congenial. The one redeeming feature is the prospect that such journalistic exhibitions will do more than anything else to bring the infliction of the “cat” by judges to an end.82
Flogging might not change Mayfair men, wrote a contributor, but it made money for the penny papers.83
Having played up the notion that the Hyde Park Hotel robbers sentenced to be flogged were young dandies, the press set its own expectations for the punishments’ drama. Although journalists were not allowed to witness their scourgings, they nevertheless produced accounts of what must have occurred. Little imagination was required to recognize the dramatic possibilities of a scene in which a working-class warder used the “cat” to break the spirit not of some crude ruffian but of a supercilious upper-class playboy.84
The Cadogan report eschewed questions of morality and focused simply on the ineffectiveness of corporal punishment. Its call for reform was a symptom of a changing social landscape in which the Labour Party was slowly increasing its power while elements within the Conservative Party and the civil service grew ever more concerned with allaying the hostility of the working class.85 Given the class discrimination inherent in corporal punishment it was ironic—though predictable—that the only prisoners whose punishments the public recalled were those of the Mayfair men. The story colored the discussion of flogging for another two decades.
The government accepted the recommendations of the Cadogan committee and included them in the Criminal Justice Bill, which Sir Samuel Hoare presented for a second reading on November 10, 1938. Most of the criticism of the bill came from the Conservative government’s own MPs. Sir Alfred Beit tried to use the example of the Hyde Park Hotel robbery to defend flogging.
There are some crimes for which reform is not enough, those which are grossly revolting to the public conscience. A very good example of this type of crime was that committed earlier this year and known in the popular Press as the crime of the Mayfair men. I think a case can be made out for some measure of retribution in those circumstances. I hope that it will be possible in Committee for adequate safeguards to be given that the same protection at least will be given to the public as it is now proposed to give in very special cases to prison officers.86
Labour MPs responded that disapproving of flogging in general but approving of it in particular cases was illogical. To follow such a line of reasoning would always result in retribution winning out over reform. George Ridley went on to reply dramatically to Beit.
In connection with the Mayfair case I had an extraordinary experience, and I have the permission of the people concerned to relate it to the House. A young society woman, a friend of the injured man, went to the court, filled almost with vindictive indignation against the crime. She sat through the trial, and more and more found unbearable what she described as the evident and indecent pleasure which the infliction of the punishment gave to some people in the court. She was nauseated by it, and, finally, used every effort she could to save the assailants of her friend from the brutality of the “cat.”87
Whether or not this unlikely story was true is not important. What is interesting is how parliamentary debaters projected onto Mayfair men their own concerns. Both sides in the flogging debate attempted to use the same case to support their opposing arguments.
By June 1939 the bill had passed through committee stage, but it was too late to go to the Lords, for the war intervened. The Labour Party was swept in to power in 1945 and turned to a long list of overdue reforms. It reintroduced the Criminal Justice Bill of 1938, which received almost unanimous support. Though there was a general consensus that the old penal system based on deterrence had to be replaced by one infused with a modern reformative spirit, nevertheless the issue of flogging was, in the words of the Times, still “contested with passion.”88 And once again the debaters sought to turn the story of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers to their own purposes. Captain Arthur Marsden, in giving a potted history of the 1938 bill, asserted that flogging had reformed Wilmer and Harley.
However, the war intervened, and [the bill] was not put to the vote of the whole House, but what influenced the House and the public at the time was the incident of the “Mayfair boys” assault and robbery case. Now the Home Secretary has told us that some of those boys, or young men, came back on further charges—but not charges of violence. That is the point. Some of those who got the “cat” certainly came back on further charges, but not robbery and violence, which really proves the point that flogging of that description is a deterrent to violent crimes. I think it is the wish of the people generally that for certain crimes some form of corporal punishment should be retained.89
A week after Marsden’s speech Mr. Justice George McClure, who ten years earlier had been the crown prosecutor in the Hyde Park Hotel robbery, sentenced a carpenter to eight years’ penal servitude for robbing two sisters, aged eighty and seventy-seven. McClure took the opportunity of lamenting the loss of the lash. “In a fairly long experience in these courts I have never heard of a more brutal case than this. Anyone who listened to the evidence may well wonder why the punishment which this offence carries, so far as corporal punishment is concerned, is about to be abolished. If ever there was a case for that kind of punishment this is that case.”90 Despite such last-ditch appeals the Criminal Justice Act received royal assent on July 30, 1948.91 There were reasons for reformers to celebrate as well as to reflect. In the ten years since 1938, when the bill was first introduced, 310 men had been subjected to floggings—so the rate had actually increased.92
Judges refused to accept defeat. They lamented their loss of discretionary powers and in the 1950s kept up the pressure on the Home Office to reintroduce the whip.93 In the Commons, James Chuter Ede, the home secretary, had to face the assertion that since flogging had ended, the number of women “coshed” had greatly increased.94 Though the numbers of violent crimes were in fact down, there were always some, as the Manchester Guardian noted, who felt greater severity was needed.
There is a section of opinion in this country which habitually turns to the cat-o’-nine-tails whenever there is a run of well reported crimes. Eleven years ago, one of Mr. Ede’s critics of this week wanted us to flog the misguided Irishmen who left bombs in London railway stations. We were once urged to fight car bandits and window slashers with the “cat.” Indeed, at one time or another the courts have used the “cat” with intensest zeal to fight gangsters in Liverpool, pimps in Glasgow and Manchester, assaults on drunken sailors in Cardiff. The result was always the same; people were glad to feel that “something is being done,” yet in no case was flogging the key to victory.95
With the election of a Conservative government in 1951, hopes for a return to flogging blossomed once more, as did references to the Hyde Park Hotel robbers. Inspector Fabian, the officer who took the credit for arresting the Mayfair men, now presented himself as an expert on the deterrent value of the “cat,” and Wilmer and Harley were once more used to advance a political agenda. Under the inflammatory headline “Only the ‘CAT’ Holds Back the Brutes,” Fabian wrote:
I know. It was I who sent the four Mayfair playboys up before the judge for brutally beating and robbing a jeweller in the Hyde Park Hotel and two of these young society men got the “cat.” One got the maximum—20 strokes. And the other got 10. It sent a shudder through England to read about it. Remember? Well, I had a drink with both men when they finished their prison sentences. It was not my idea. They came to see me. One of them said: “Would you like to see what all the fuss was about?” He wanted to show me what the “cat” had done to him. Now I believe—as do most senior police officers—that an official should know exactly what he is doing, the full consequences of his acts. I think judges should be as familiar with the grim interiors of prisons as they are with the barristers’ robing-rooms. And I was glad to agree to look at this young fellow’s back. I felt that, however shocking the sight, it would help me better to understand my responsibilities as a policeman. We went into a private room. He pulled his shirt off. “There,” he said, “on the right shoulder blade, Mr. Fabian.” Yes I could see it. The scars looked like smallpox marks. No better and no worse. He said, “There it is. That finishes me. You’ll never see me inside prison again.” “It was so bad?” I asked. He nodded. “The pain wasn’t so bad. Not nearly as bad as I’d expected. But to be strapped up there to this easel thing, and whipped like a dog, with the chief warder counting ‘one … two …’ and the prison doctor peering into your face from a hand’s width away to see how you’re taking it—well, I found myself thinking what kind of animal had I become that this was the only way civilised society could pay my score? To be whipped like a donkey? No—I’m going away where nobody knows about this—I’m going to start the slate clean.” He did, too. Both of these Mayfair boys did. And that is why I have been careful not to use their names in telling you this story. Because they are names to be proud of again. The names of men who made their mistake, took their punishment, became wiser and repented.96
Fabian’s story is too good to be true and contains some obvious errors, such as the number of strokes Wilmer received.97 Nevertheless it has to be admitted that Fabian knew how to craft an effective narrative.98 After retiring from Scotland Yard in 1949 he became a crime writer for the Empire News and Sunday Chronicle. In the fall of 1954 the BBC began to televise its first police series, Fabian of the Yard, based in part on the detective inspector’s memoirs. An actor played his part, but at the end of each program the real Fabian would step forward and somewhat woodenly draw out the moral of the story in the same way as he did in the above piece on the Mayfair men. Similarly, the defenders of flogging, being unable to produce hard evidence to support their stance, had to rely increasingly on rhetoric and personal testimony. It might be said that if the Mayfair men or playboys had not existed, the floggers would have had to create them.99
Their trial helped to popularize the discussion of corporal punishment; their purported reformation justified it. The trial also marked the emergence of the playboy as the representative of a hedonistic 1930s subculture. The popular press played a key role in creating such celebrities, pandering to the conflicting desires of its vast readership to both applaud and condemn the sophisticated self-centeredness of cynical young men at play.