During the time that I attended the Technical High School and Trinity high school 1953 to 1957, I didn't last long without getting a detention. There was only one detention evening each week, and unfortunately, in common with several other pupils, I regularly had more than one detention a week. Attempts to remove the excess entries from the book, by rubbing them out, using a pin to scratch them out, or in extreme cases removing the whole page, inevitably failed and often ended in a further detention. The school's way of dealing with an excess of detentions was to cane pupils who managed to get a hat trick of three in one week and then the detentions got cancelled. Some of us, when we had got two, often sought out a third so that we got caned instead.
If at the end of term a pupil still had a large number of detentions left over they were each replaced with one stroke of the cane. Gunner usually administered the caning with great gusto. I think in the early days I may have been caned by 'Percy Tompkins who was Deputy Head at the time, although I am not sure, because I remember him as a nice old chap who probably let me off. Buzzer was the easy option for a canning and I can remember him speaking the well known phrase "small boy, this is hurting me more than it hurts you". I didn't believe him.
On one occasion I had disrupted a French Class presided over by Miss Clegg (I was only talking, but not in French). She sent me out of the class with the instruction to go to the Head's office for the Cane. Being of a gambling nature I decided I would go to the toilet instead. When I returned to the class I told Miss Clegg Buzzer had caned me (I considered this to be just a white lie). Unfortunately for me, Miss Clegg met Buzzer at lunch time and thanked him for dealing with me. Of course he didn't know what she was talking about. I had three strokes of the cane in the afternoon but would have had two in any case, so worth the gamble? I thought so.
I wasn't really a naughty boy just misunderstood.