Who produced the belts sold to Scottish teachers?
When violence to children becomes folklore
Image by Phil Wilkinson. Credit TSPL.
There’s a phrase that haunts most Scots of a particular generation. Say the words ‘Lochgelly tawse’ to them, and you can watch them draw their arms in close, for comfort and relief. When they were a child they’d have had to do the opposite: stretch out their arms, place their up-turned palms one under the other, and then stand still, ready to receive one or two or ‘six of the best’ strikes, from their fingertips right up to the edge of their wrist.1
The majority of the strikes laid upon children’s hands during the twentieth century in Scotland would have been delivered by a Lochgelly tawse.2 This would have been the case even if the children knew it only by a more straightforward name, such as ‘the belt’ or ‘the strap’. Administered with the right technique, every Lochgelly tawse was guaranteed to deliver a bright red raised welt, evidence of the quality of the product. The esteem was such that its manufacturers came to hold a 70% share of the Scottish tawse market.3 They became the preferred suppliers of the Scottish education system’s need for a device that could inflict fear and pain on children as a means of controlling them.
John Dick Leather Goods was the family run business who achieved this legacy. Based in the little Fife town of Lochgelly, their association with the belt stretched back to at least 1884,4 shortly after the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 made primary education compulsory. Every tawse they manufactured in their workshop was hand crafted (until the 1970s, when the process was mechanised5), with either two or three long tails cut into it, depending on the preferences of the customer. Each tail had bevelled edges, put there to ensure that, with smooth edges, the strike would be sore but not draw blood.6
Advice was available on how best to keep the leather supple, although there are stories of teachers who stored theirs in whisky or in the freezer, as a means of delivering strikes that were ‘more nippy’. A hole was incised at the end of the tawse so it could be hung on the wall, to keep the children anxiously alert. Many teachers didn’t make use of this feature, though, as they preferred to keep the tawse down the sleeve of their jacket or slung over their shoulder, where it was handy for quick retrieval. The video made by Edinburgh’s Living Memory Association gives a sense of that ease. For those teachers who chose to wear a gown, a ‘tawse pocket’ was stitched in for this very purpose. The Dick family was proud of their reputation for workmanship. They showed the same attention to detail when producing other items in their range, including saddles, luggage and upholstery for coaches.
The Lochgelly was regularly advertised in educational journals throughout Scotland.7 Orders were usually placed by individual teachers, but schools could also purchase them to supply to staff. Prices by 19738 ranged between £1.37 and £1.98 (roughly £20 to £30 in today’s money), with the differences in cost deriving from two factors: the desired length (21 inches? 24 inches?) and the preferred weight of leather (light? medium? heavy?). There was a ‘miniature strap’ available, intended for use on very small children or as a toy, at only 33 pence. The price list from 1973 states, in an almost apologetic tone, that extra heavy weight leather is no longer available.9
Uncomfortable?
How am I doing? As the reader, you may well be feeling uncomfortable. If so, I hope you are asking yourself why society at the time, including the Dick family and their education customers, weren’t equally uncomfortable. I realise that hitting children with a tawse (or a cane or a ruler or a book or a shoe or a hand or…) had been an ordinary practice in Scotland and Britain for a long time, endorsed by parents as well as by teachers. It would be 1986 before the practice was formally brought to a halt (in state schools) following a landmark 1982 decision in the European Court of Human Rights. I have written about that journey previously.10
The purpose of this piece is to ask why. Why could society not see the brutality in what I have described? If we can find the courage to apply the lens of what I call Fierce Curiosity, we get better at looking behind the ‘ordinary’. What happened in Scottish society to block adults’ empathy? Why did teachers think that belting children for poor academic performance or handwriting or technical drawing could help to improve those skills? How did corporal punishment remain stubbornly normalised, even as other European countries declared it to be inhumane? Where did the Scots’ insistence on controlling children through fear and humiliation originate? And how much of that insistence remains with us today?
If you’re not feeling uncomfortable, that’s understandable too. Lots of Scots maintain that they were belted as a child and it never did them any harm. One of those was the Archbishop of Glasgow, Thomas Winning, who expressed that sentiment in 1980, when he refused to support a mother (Margaret Maguire of Clydebank) who was being prosecuted for protesting the school’s belting of her son.11 Ian Jack, journalist and news editor, said the same in 2018, in a reflective piece he wrote in The Guardian.12 “Belting, so far as I could tell, had done me no harm. I feared a teacher’s sarcasm far more.” It is notable that Jack’s piece received 1850 comments before moderators closed it to the public, 24 hours later, with most (but far from all) offering scathing disagreement with his position.
Even if you are amongst those who doubt the claims of emotional damage, it is undisputed that a well-respected family firm was gaining economic benefits by contracting with educational institutions to fashion implements whose explicit and only purpose was to inflict pain on the bodies and minds of children from the age of five years.
Belting and branding
Let’s pause for just a moment to consider what it’s like to be belted as a five-year-old. How big is your palm? It’s roughly 3 inches square, about the size of a satsuma orange. Strikes for young children were usually laid down across the hand, with older children given strikes in a lengthwise fashion, so that they took in the whole surface from fingertip to wrist. If the child’s jumper didn’t quite cover the wrist, then a jotter or towel might be laid over it. This protected blood vessels underneath the thin skin at the wrist from being broken, in case poor technique on the part of the teacher left the tails of the tawse travelling further up the arm than was intended. When Grace Campbell decided in 1976, as a mum, to resist the local school’s corporal punishment policy (leading eventually to the 1982 legal case would see the practice banned for all children in Britain), her motivation was that she did not want her 6-year-old son Gordon to suffer the experience of belting that she had endured.
The tawse was not the only product the Dick family manufactured, but it was one that certainly brought them economic benefits. In 1949, a local newspaper article described the Lochgelly tawse as a “rip roaring success”, remarking on the “orders pouring into the shop” as the family’s “fame” grew.13 In 1974, John Dick confirmed in an interview that “business is booming, with the home trade supported by exports to particularly Scottish parts of the old empire, such as Malawi and New Zealand.”14 One museum of Scottish history described the influence this way: “So famous did the local product become that ‘Lochgelly’ became another word for tawse.”15 Essentially, the business encountered the kind of marketing success enjoyed by some multinational corporations today, such as Hoover, whose name is now synonymous with the whole product category of vacuum cleaners, and Kleenex, whose name dominates sales of paper tissues. That’s how powerful the Dick family became in 20th century Scotland. They achieved a near-monopoly on the tawse market (with none of the modern bother that comes from the requirement to tender for contracts).
The branding must have helped. Every tawse was stamped with what we would now call their logo. In the 1880s, it read simply: ‘Robert Philp, Lochgelly’. The early 1940s reflected the change in ownership: ‘G W Dick, Saddler & Co, Lochgelly’. In 1945, a new stamp was fashioned to “celebrate” (as the website puts it) George’s “last and youngest son John joining the business”. The logo now read: ‘G W Dick & Sons Ltd, Makers, Lochgelly’. When the premises expanded in 1978 to a nearby town, the heritage links were ensured through branding that now read: ‘The original Lochgelly, made by John J Dick, Cowdenbeath’. Every time a teacher belted a child, they knew without doubt whose product they were using.
The branding mattered because 70% of the market is not 100% of the market. The remaining 30% was covered by manufacturers based in locations to the west of Scotland, in areas like Glasgow and Renfrewshire. Glasgow was a particularly challenging region, business wise, because teachers there were specifically instructed to use a Glasgow-based supplier.16 These belts were often of a poor quality, though, fashioned of substandard leather, with a handle too wide to hold easily and tails left with raw, unpolished edges. Many teachers on the west coast secretly sought out the higher quality Lochgelly. Their problem was that Glasgow belts tended to be black, while the Lochgelly was brown. It was not unknown to the Dick family for Glasgow teachers to come through to their east coast shop, buy a tawse, and then ask ‘how might I stain this black?’.17
The descriptions of the Dick family as ‘famous’ and ‘well respected’ are therefore accurate.18 In 2002, Lochgelly Council decided to mark the 125th anniversary of the burgh by “recognising people who have provided a service to the town” but whose efforts had not been sufficiently credited. The Council was pleased to award a personal “Diploma of Achievement” to Mr John Dick for “services to education”, not only in Scotland but “worldwide”. The certificate they gifted him proudly names the “Lochgelly Tawse” as the category for the award. Note the date: 2002. That’s 16 years after corporal punishment had been declared illegal by the ECHR. The certificate and accompanying letter are proudly displayed on the company’s website, uploaded in 2018. That’s 32 years after the ECHR decision. Is such pride tenable in today’s cultural climate? In 2020, the Scottish Parliament outlawed parents’ right to smack children, and in early 2024, it was confirmed that the UNCRC would be embedded into Scots law. If our perspective on children’s rights has fundamentally altered, then perhaps we are ready to begin facing up to our past?
Here’s a reminder of just how tense the efforts to make change can become. By 1978 (as featured in this video), Scottish society was actively debating the merits of continuing with the belt. It would be another decade before its use ceased.
Coming to terms with the past
Margaret Dick is now the owner of John Dick Leather Goods. She is the daughter and granddaughter of the men who ran the business and filled the orders in earlier generations. It is she who has been willing to tell openly the story of the family’s participation in this cruelty. “It’s not my intention to glorify the tawse, but history is important. These are valuable lessons that hopefully make us think and prevent the mistakes of the past.”19 In a 2017 television interview she put it more personally: “It’s part of the history of my family. Like it or lump it, I’m stuck with that.”20
Ian Jack made a point of quoting Margaret’s relief that this treatment of children had ceased. She said: “For humankind to develop, we must stop beating each other, and I look forward to that day.”21 It is compelling to consider how one goes about confronting such grave responsibility, though. My conservative estimate, based on calculations using existing records (which were sparsely kept), is that between 1945 and 1986, the Dick family was involved in more than 10 million acts of violence against children.22
I recognise it’s uncomfortable to put it that way. But it’s also the truth. I also fully accept that the Dick family could never have achieved that on their own. They needed the help of all the teachers who enthusiastically wielded their product, and the education administrators who allocated budgets to pay for that product, and the parents who supported those choices.
And I agree they weren’t ‘bad people’. They were just ordinary people. Margaret Dick makes a point of defending her family’s values when she writes that her parents were “mild mannered folk who never lifted their hand, far less a belt, to their [own] children”.23 The Dick family were business people responding to the norms of their time, putting to use the skills they had in leather making. They were meeting the education sector’s demand for a device that would keep children in check. If their family business hadn’t cornered that market, someone else’s would have.
Neither were the teachers ‘bad people’. They were just ordinary. They were engaged in the normal professional practices for their time. Classes were large. Training was minimal. Children’s behaviour was frequently disruptive or frustrating or confrontational. The older children often regarded a belting as a badge of honour, earning them brownie points with peers. The science of trauma and the concept of restorative justice were unknown. While stories make clear that some teachers enjoyed a sadistic use of their power, most would not have imagined nor intended long-term harm. All would have thought of themselves as maintaining classroom standards and would no doubt find it discomforting to sense anything else being ascribed to their motives.
And yet… It is still true that every teacher who raised their adult hand to bring a Lochgelly tawse down upon a child’s hand engaged in a conscious act of violence. The education sector needs to be able to own that.
Are we ready in Scotland to look more deeply at the historic violence we have meted out? Author Carol Craig maintains that Scottish culture has traditionally been harsher to its children than any other Western Europe nation, including the other regions of the United Kingdom.24 Is that true? Have we really been that punitive? Can we bear to even consider the possibility? What could be the cause of such callousness – religion or patriarchy or poverty or….?
Stepping into accountability
If it is true that we were particularly harsh, could we find some way to step into accountability? What would that even look like? Would taking such a step give us a wider lens through which to make sense of the behaviour problems featuring so prominently today, in post-Covid headlines and parliamentary reports? Would it force us to look more closely at the impacts of transgenerational trauma? Would it lead us to be more cautious about behaviour management tools marketed to schools today, such as star charts and isolation booths? Might our thinking assist in other countries where campaigners are still working to end corporal punishment in schools, such as America where the favoured device is a wooden paddle and Singapore where rattan canes remain popular? These are all questions that Fierce Curiosity lets us ask.
We are living in a time when other historic wrongs are being addressed in a quest for healing. The group Heirs of Slavery is comprised of British people who have acknowledged their ancestral families’ role in profiting from transatlantic slavery.25. They are working to step out of silence and tackle the ongoing consequences. The campaign group Witches of Scotland is calling for action on the miscarriages of justice suffered by 4000 Scots accused or convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1563.26 The leaders of this campaign include a member of the King’s Counsel, whose judicial profession would have been involved in issuing the allegations.
Ian Jack ends his 2018 commentary on the tawse with the intriguing idea that “cruelty can take on the strange innocence of folklore”.27 Witches have become folklore, a fun costume to dress up in at Halloween. The Witches of Scotland Campaign seek to change that, insisting that we acknowledge the cruelty associated with it. Is the tawse heading the same way, relics confined to museums and the stories told about our past? If so, then it is time we stop that. The tensions that led to the use of the tawse in controlling classrooms have not gone away. Rendering it as an icon of times gone by is a form of denial. That serves no one – neither the adults carrying wounds from their school days, nor the children walking down school corridors today subject to adult power, nor the adults who hold that power.
If we can discern how Scottish society blinded itself to cruelty in the recent past, then we have a better chance of avoiding a legacy of yet more unintended harm. What long-term consequences might follow from the disciplinary techniques employed in schools today? Even in these post-Covid times when teachers are exhausted and schools are under-resourced, that’s a question we should be asking ourselves.
The feature image of a tawse used in this article was created by Phil Wilkinson, credited to TSPL Photographers. It was obtained from a 2016 article on the Blantyre Project, which archives memories of the mining town of Blantyre in South Lanarkshire. https://blantyreproject.com/2016/01/horrors-of-the-tawse/
There is debate about the origins of the term ‘tawse’.
Some historical accounts credit it to the traditional method of curing leather known as ‘tawing’, in which substances such as salts and potash alum are used to make the leather obtained from animal hides pliable and soft. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/16160146.myth-behind-scotlands-famous-school-belt/
Others report that ‘tawse’ was the Scots word for the thongs of a whip. https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/remembering-the-lochgelly-tawse-581600
BBC News. (2017). How the tawse left its mark on Scottish pupils. 22 February. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-39044445
The tawse had been made in Lochgelly since about 1884, by two generations of the Philp family. George Dick served an apprenticeship in leather making to the Philp family, beginning in 1896. George then set up his own business in the mid-1940s when the Philp family retired. His children and grandchildren followed in his footsteps. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk/history-of-the-lochgelly-tawse-in-the-beginning/
In the mid 1970s, the company “modernised” their production techniques and for the first time produced machine-cut belts. The website describes the change this way: “John Dick bought a 3-phase cutting press and had cutters made in a new one-size-fits-all metric size. A couple of chomps and a belt was cut to shape, complete with tails and hole, just needing edged, polished and creased.” The paragraph ends with a jaunty “Hallelujah!”. Violence against children had been mechanised. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk/history-of-the-tawse-times-are-changing/
If, as I hope, my description of violence as ‘mechanised’ feels too a bit too raw, it is not far from that used in a 2017 BBC article recalling this shift: “In the early 1970s demand for the tawse was strong but a modern manufacturing method was required to keep up with orders from teachers not just in Scotland, but across the UK. The company modernised their method with a state-of-the-art three-phase cutting press, allowing manufacturing of the tawse on a factory scale.” The phrase “factory scale” is not just raw, but chilling. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-39044445
This is not an exaggeration. There really was concern about drawing blood due to poor craftsmanship, although the frivolous reference to it that features on the John Dick website is ill-judged. When outlining the traditional steps for constructing a tawse, website readers are advised: “Use the edging tool to remove sharp edges. Can’t have the children bleeding on their jotters.” Upon reaching the step of creasing the tool line, readers are reminded: “Even implements of torture need to be beautiful.” Um…no they don’t. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk
Hansard Records for Houses of Parliament. (1981). Debate on corporal punishment. 8 June. Vol 6, cc123-53. Opening remarks by Mr O’Neill. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1981/jun/08/corporal-punishment
Photo of 1973 price list is shown on website of John Dick Leather Goods. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk/history-of-the-tawse-times-are-changing/
The difficulty in supplying these belts proved to be only temporary. During the 1970s, agricultural changes in the farming of cattle led to a decline in the large bulls whose hides were required for extra heavy weight leather. The Dick family worked hard to find an alternative source, eventually locating a supplier of buffalo leather. This allowed for the return of extra heavy weight tawses to the price list. There must have been considerable demand from teachers for this particular model of belt, in order to make it worth importing buffalo leather. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk/history-of-the-tawse-times-are-changing/
Heatherbank Museum of Social Work. (2010). Factsheet 12: The Belt. https://web.archive.org/web/20100601215648/http://www.gcu.ac.uk/heatherbank/pdfs/fs12belt.pdf
Jack, Ian (2018). I was belted at school. The Guardian. 24 March. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/belted-school-education-corporal-punishment
John Dick Leather Goods website. Content uploaded 2018. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk/history-of-the-tawse-a-roaring-success/
Jack, Ian (2018). I was belted at school. The Guardian. 24 March. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/belted-school-education-corporal-punishment
Heatherbank Museum of Social Work. (2010). Factsheet 12: The Belt. https://web.archive.org/web/20100601215648/http://www.gcu.ac.uk/heatherbank/pdfs/fs12belt.pdf
M C Customs website. Tawse manufacturer. Website established 2004. https://mccustoms.co.uk/products/tawses
QI (Quite Interesting) Discussion Forum. Entry 1380501, by ‘suze’. 29 April 2021, 12.09 pm. http://old.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=32492&start=6135&sid=505fa9962d137bea9d7c5a12218814d3
In contrast, ‘James T’ considered the Dick family “misguided”, when in 2010 he described their influence in the following way, on the Kintyre Community Forum chatboard: “A misguided saddler in Fife had been allowed, and even encouraged, to produce straps of such fearsome thickness and density that their effective use was nothing less that child torture.” (7 Feb 2010). http://www.kintyreforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7018&start=15
John Dick Leather Goods website. Content uploaded 2018. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk/history-of-the-tawse-intro/
BBC Television. (2017). Making the Lochgelly Tawse. Growing up in Scotland: A Century of Childhood. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04qz9s8
Jack, Ian (2018). I was belted at school. The Guardian. 24 March. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/belted-school-education-corporal-punishment
The logic of my mathematical calculation is as follows. If any readers disagree and want to offer a more precise formulation, I’m happy to have that discussion. For me, the point isn’t the number. The discussion is.
A set of Edinburgh records for 1972 [referenced by Ian Jack, 2018] shows that for a school population of 80,000 children, there were 30,000 recorded instances of the belt being used. There were probably many more instances not recorded, as well as instances using other implements, but we’ll stick with these figures. That’s a rate of 37.5% for the Edinburgh population.
The Scottish population in 1971 was 5,227,000. Children aged 0 – 14 years constituted 26% of the population. https://twitter.com/Scotcensus2022/status/1717119052596814159/photo/1
Remove the children aged 0 – 3 yrs from the calculations, and you are left with something like 20% constituting the population aged 4 – 14 years. That’s roughly 1,045,400 school-aged children in Scotland in 1971.
Apply the belting rate of 37.5% to that figure = 392,025 beltings across Scotland in 1971.
1945 to 1986 = 41 years x 392,205 beltings per year = 16,080,405 beltings total.
70% of 16,080,405 beltings delivered with a Lochgelly tawse = 11,256,283 beltings.
John Dick Leather Goods website. Content uploaded 2018. https://johndick-leathergoods.co.uk/history-of-the-tawse-john-johnstone-dick/
Craig, C. (2017). Hiding in Plain Sight: Exploring Scotland’s Ill Health. CCWB Press.
Heirs of Slavery website. Established 2023. https://www.heirsofslavery.org
Witches of Scotland website. Established 2020. https://www.witchesofscotland.com
Jack, Ian (2018). I was belted at school. The Guardian. 24 March. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/belted-school-education-corporal-punishment