Category Archives: Children

1896: Girl, 7, escapes penalty for swearing, drunkenness

In January 1896, a Miss Suider appeared before the Magistrates Court in Albany, Western Australia, charged with using indecent language in public.

According to a press report, the defendant said almost nothing during the hearing. On the instruction of her stepfather, she later offered an apology. The stepfather asked for the magistrate’s understanding, advising that the defendant had “made herself drunk” on homemade wine while unsupervised. Miss Suider was only seven years old:

“The language used by the child and heard by several others was said to be filthy in the extreme… His Honour had a wish to convey the child to the reformatory but instead discharged her into the custody of her step-father, who advised the court that he was headed into the bush. The magistrate warned the step-father and mother that it would be they held to account with a large fine, if the child was brought before him again.”

Source: The Australian Advertiser (Albany, WA), February 3rd 1896. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1911: Man has wife, 15, locked up – for acting like a child

In 1911, Charles H. Daly petitioned a Washington DC court, seeking to have his wife Edith institutionalised. According to Daly he married Edith in Rockville, Maryland about two years before. Since then she had conducted herself very poorly, “making faces” and being “impudent to her elders”. Attempts to restrain and discipline her had failed.

In short, Edith was behaving like a child – not unsurprisingly, since she was 15 years old:

“He has been unable to control his wife. So he haled her, gold wedding ring, marriage vows and all, before Judge De Lacy… a few days ago, and charged her with being incorrigible.”

The judge approved Charles Daly’s request and sent Edith to the House of the Good Shepherd, a reformatory for girls and young women in Burleith.

Source: Washington Times, January 19th 1911. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1958: New US national flag earns a B minus

In 1958, the United States was on the brink of admitting Alaska and Hawaii as its 49th and 50th states. In Ohio, a 16-year-old schoolboy named Robert G. Heft was given a school social studies project with a broad focus: design an original visual artefact connected with US history.

Aware that two states were about to be added to the union, Heft resolved to design a new national flag. At his local department store he spent $2.87 on a length of blue cloth, along with some white iron-on tape. Working on the dining table at home, Heft cut up an existing flag, something that horrified his mother. He then set about designing a new configuration containing 50 stars rather than 48.

Heft presented his updated flag to his teacher, the appropriately named Mr Pratt, who was far from impressed and graded it severely: a B minus. According to Heft, Pratt told him:

“Why you got too many stars? You don’t even know how many states we have… If you don’t like the grade, get it accepted in Washington then come and see me. I might consider changing the grade.”

Determined to prove his teacher wrong, Heft sent his design to the White House. Over the next two years he followed his submission with 21 letters and numerous phone calls. US president Dwight D. Eisenhower endorsed Heft’s design in late 1959 and on July 4th 1960 it became the new national flag of the United States.

Mr Pratt subsequently agreed to change Heft’s grade from a B minus to an A, although by then Heft had graduated from high school.

Source: WBUR interview with Robert G. Heft, July 3rd 2009. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1544: Thomas Phaer’s remedies for poor bladder control

Thomas Phaer (also spelled Phaire) was an English physician of the Tudor period. Phaer studied law at Oxford and became an attorney and a Member of Parliament. He also had a lucrative sideline in medical advice and treatments. In 1544, Phaer published The Boke of Chyldren, believed to be the first specialist text on paediatrics.

In this extract, Phaer offers advice on how to deal with bed-wetting and incontinence:

“Old men and children are often times annoyed when their urine issueth out, either in their sleep or waking against their will, having no power to restraint it when it cometh. [To mitigate this] they must avoid all fat meats till the virtue of retention be restored again, and to use these powders in their meats and drinks: Take the windpipe of a cock and pluck it, then burn it to powder and use it twice or thrice a day. The stones [testicles] of a hedgehog, powdered, is of the same virtue. [So is] the claws of a goat, made into powder, drunk or eaten in pottage.”

Source: Thomas Phaer, The Boke of Chlydren (1544). Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1900: Harry Potter – bully, thief, hobby horse rider

In January 1900, a Chester Castle magistrate heard a charge of theft laid against Harry Potter, described as “a respectable boy of eleven”. According to the prosecution, Harry Potter had accosted and robbed a much smaller boy named Joseph Goodwin:

“Goodwin, who was only seven years of age, was sent on Thursday by his mother to buy some groceries, and was given [three shillings and sixpence] to pay for them… Potter asked him if he had any money [and] without further parley put his hand in Goodwin’s pocket, bringing out two shillings in silver. With his plunder Potter then took his departure… spending the money upon bottles of ginger beer and trips on hobby horses, etc.”

Harry Potter pleaded guilty to the charge and the magistrate sentenced him to “six strokes of the birch rod”, expressing his hope that this would “have a salutary effect upon him.”

Source: The Cheshire Observer, January 13th 1900. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1872: Headmaster uses barbed wire to thwart sexual hijinks

Edward White Benson (1829-96) was an Anglican clergyman who for the last 16 years of his life served as Archbishop of Canterbury. He started his career as a schoolmaster at Rugby before becoming the foundation headmaster of Wellington College, Berkshire, in 1859.

As an educator, Benson was a disciplinarian especially tough on sexual misconduct or antics. Students caught masturbating, dallying with other boys or girls from outside the school were punished severely. Several students were expelled, including one senior who fornicated with a teenaged servant over the Christmas holidays and returned to Wellington with a sexually transmitted disease.

Benson also moved to prevent unhealthy relationships by separating older students from much younger ones. Mixed-aged dormitories were dissolved and restrictions were imposed on ‘fagging’. Concerned that students were breaching these rules by climbing over dormitory dividers after lights out, Benson personally strung two tiers of barbed wire along the tops of each cubicle.

Rudyard Kipling’s son John attended Wellington College in the years before World War I. In 1912 Kipling wrote to John warning him to steer clear of:

“..any chap who is even suspected of beastliness… Give them the widest of berths. Whatever their merits may be in the athletic line, they are at heart only sweeps and scum, and all friendship with them ends in sorrow and disgrace. More on this subject when we meet.”

Source: D. Newsome, A History of Wellington College, 1959; Rudyard Kipling letter to John Kipling, May 1st 1912. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1524: Spanish boy invites cartographers to chart his backside

In 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, effectively dividing the rest of the uncolonised world between them. But the treaty only covered the Atlantic hemisphere, so by the 1510s, Spanish and Portuguese explorers and colonists were again clashing, this time in Indonesia and the Philippines.

In 1524, both powers convened more treaty negotiations to divide the other side of the world. These meetings, held in the border towns of Badajoz and Elvas, were attended by some of the most notable diplomats, cartographers, astronomers and mathematicians of the age.

Leading the delegation from Lisbon was Diego Lopes de Sequeira, a prominent military leader and a former governor of Portuguese Goa. According to a contemporary report, Lopes and his advisors took a break from the negotiations and went walking along the banks of the Quadiana river. On the Spanish side of the river they saw:

“…a boy who stood keeping his mother’s clothes which she had washed… [The boy] demanded of them whether they were those men who were partitioning the world [on behalf of] the emperor. And as they answered ‘Yea’, he took up his shirt and showed them his bare arse, saying: ‘Come and draw your line through the middle [of this].’ This saying was afterward in every man’s mouth and laughed at in the town of Badajoz.”

The negotiations ended with the Treaty of Zaragoza which, in general terms, handed Portugal colonial rights over the Asian mainland, while Spain was given access to islands in the Pacific.

Source: Richard Eden, The Decades of the Newe Worlde, London, 1555. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1780: For a long life, inhale the breath of virgins

Philip Thicknesse (1719-92) was a writer for London’s Gentleman’s Magazine, known for his esoteric and eccentric views. Thicknesse served as an officer in private colonial armies, before retiring to Bath and making his living as an author and raconteur. He was three times married and twice widowed.

In 1780, Thicknesse published The Valetudinarians Bath Guide, a handbook for longevity, health and happiness. In it, he suggested a possible secret to longevity was:

“..partaking the breath of young virgins, or what is perhaps the same thing, by partaking the breath of youthful persons.”

He attempted to justify this theory by citing several examples of teachers who had lived to very old age. A schoolmaster named Claudius Hermippus, Thicknesse claims, lived to the age of 115 years and five days because he was:

“..a tutor or director of a college of young virgins, where there might be a constant and quick succession of female children, from the age of five to 13. Doctors Busby, Friend, Nicholls and many learned men who have been at the head of great schools have all lived to a considerable age.”

Source: Philip Thicknesse, The Valetudinarians Bath Guide, or the Means of Obtaining Long Life and Health, London, 1780. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1867: Fannie Paine, 13, runs a payroll for 400 workers

In 1867, several American newspapers ran the story of Miss Fannie Paine, an employee of the Eagle Works Manufacturing Company in Chicago. Fannie was employed by the company as a bookkeeper the previous May, aged 12 years. She was promoted to paymaster shortly after her 13th birthday.

According to one report, in the second half of 1866:

“…she will have paid out about a quarter of a million dollars, keeping the time sheets, payroll and a private account for each of the 400 men employed. She receives the money weekly from the bank, to the amount of $4,000 to $5,000, carries the transaction of paying all the men through, settles and makes her balances with the cashier. She knows every man in the establishment [and its] eleven departments…”

Fannie reportedly made $12 a week, more than the wage of skilled male industrial workers. She also “attends an evening course at a commercial college” and “takes two music lessons each week”.

According to other sources, Eagle Works was well known for its progressive employment policies, hiring women and African-Americans at pay rates equal to those of skilled white males – a rarity in Gilded Age America. The company was forced into closure during an economic depression in the mid-1870s.

Source: Highland Weekly News, Ohio, January 10th 1867. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1911: Public schools no place for “the sons of Pork Butchers”

In 1907, the British parliament passed the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, a significant piece of educational reform. One of the provisions of this act was to facilitate full and partly-funded scholarships so that talented working-class boys could attend prestigious but expensive private schools.

Two beneficiaries of these scholarships were Eric Blair, later George Orwell, and the Trinidadian historian and cricket writer C. L. R. James. But the state-funded admission of working-class boys to elitist public schools did not please everyone, and for years there was considerable criticism and debate.

Two examples appeared in The Guardian in March 1911, one from a writer claiming to be a public school headmaster, the other a public school student:

“The real difficulty is not the social or pecuniary inferiority of the elementary boy but his enormous moral inferiority. Most of the other boys that come to us [at public schools] have a very definite idea that certain actions and thoughts are “caddish” or “bad form” or “blackguardly”… I have been dealing with a certain proportion of elementary boys for some years and I have failed to find any parallel idea of the word.”

‘Head Master’

“I wonder whether you have ever considered the matter from the side of a gentleman forced to come into daily contact with the innate vulgarity of the lower orders. Is it not more probable that the sons of gentlemen will be levelled down, rather than the sons of Pork Butchers levelled up, by continual daily contact? The lessons of the gutter are more easily learnt than the traditions of caste.

“The fact that by keeping particular secondary and Public Schools a reserve for a particular class keeps the higher walks of life, in the professions and public services, a preserve for the same class, is surely a great argument in its favour. The lower classes never were a governing class, and why should the master sit side by side with the servant?”

‘Public School Boy’

Source: The Guardian, March 29th 1911. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.