Corpun file 24683 at www.corpun.com

Daily Mail, London, 7 April 1961, p.8

Mailbag

He found a touch of the cane worked wonders

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If the 40 youths involved in misbehaviour on a rail excursion trip (April 4) were sentenced to a caning of not more than six strokes many of them, with some imagination and some sense of guilt and dignity, would be unlikely to repeat the offences.

This would leave a harder core to be dealt with, if they erred again, by other methods.

I speak from experience. I retired in 1947 as the last British Director of Intelligence for India. Previously I had been in turn Commissioner of Police, Bombay City, Secretary to the Government of Bombay in charge of matters relating to law and order, and Inspector General of Police for the Province of Bombay.

Bombay City was plagued for years by communal riots, which later took the form, far more difficult to suppress, of sporadic stabbings by bad characters.

To meet this the Government applied, by specific notification, the Whipping Act.

The whipping, done with a light rattan cane, could in no respects be described as cruel. Yet the effect was almost magical. Bad characters seized in suspicious circumstances were given this treatment, and the trouble died out until the next outburst of communal fury revived it.

(Sir) NORMAN SMITH. Eastbourne, Sussex.