The Dyke, George W and Reverse Defenestration

Free Chapters of the Woody Back to School Unit spanking saga are available at the Woodettes Publications Page.

I had great fun developing the character of Ms MacAllister, a.k.a. the Dyke. She is a combination of two people I encountered along life’s highway, who had little in common other than they were Scottish.

The first was a teacher named Miss MacF. She was younger than most of the other teachers and rather popular. Nonetheless she was a fearsome disciplinarian and liked to scare us with stories of her own schooldays in the Highlands where the infamous Lochgelly tawse was in daily use.

The provenance and history of the Lochgelly tawse is widely available on the web but in summary, the original lethal tawses were designed by a saddler named Robert Philp who owned a store in the town of Lochgelly. He originally cut the tawses for his son and daughter who were both employed as teachers in the town. The stinging straps soon became famous and Philp was commissioned to provide custom made tawses for schools throughout the Scottish Education System. Later, a former apprentice, George W Dick, would purchase the business and dedicate his life to perfecting the aero-dynamics of the split-ended strap.

The two-tailed tawse in the picture is available from M C Customs at 

http://www.mccustoms.co.uk/main.php,

along with a fine collection of custom tawses and paddles. 

 In my stories it amuses me to refer to the Dyke’s tawses as George W’s. I wonder whether the inept and pompous British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was ever whapped with a George W. Delicious thought.

In the Scottish Education System the tawse was delivered across the palms. A 1977 survey by the Educational Institute of Scotland (the teachers’ trade union) found that 36% of 12-to-15- year-old boys were belted at least once in 10 school days; 21% of these were strapped three or more times in the same period.

However according to Miss MacF use of the tawse was far from limited to boys. She used to tell us that first thing in the morning a boy or gal would be randomly selected and brought before the class to hold out there hands so that the remaining pupils would be reminded what would happen if they misbehaved. Now that could give you the serious pip!

A friend of mine’s wife who was brought up in the rough Clyde area of Glasgow (and who I suspect of being a latent, if dormant, spankette) confirmed that the tawse was widely used on gal’s during her schooldays and is unashamedly eloquent on the subject. She has provided me many nuggets that have resurfaced in my stories.

Miss MacF was a brilliant teacher, her only failing was her unfathomable brogue, especially when she was vexed. She was actually not allowed to use the cane (or the tawse) and was fond of telling us, “Ah’d love to cane ya maself but ah’m sending you up” (or oop, as she pronounced it). She was tough but fair and if you were sent ‘oop’ you knew that you deserved it. I tried to write this judicious character trait into the Dyke.

In my stories the Dyke is known for her stylish attire and is much given to wearing tailored men’s three piece suits with collar and tie. She wears her hair cropped short and chain-smokes unfiltered Camel cigarettes through a variety of vintage cigarette holders. She occasionally sports a top-hat, monocle and spats.

This unlikely sartorial taste is actually derived from a young lady who I worked with many years ago in a fishing port in the North East of Scotland. The port had a deepwater dock where we could bring our floating hotel in for commissioning and testing before taking it offshore.

Phyllis was the human resource director and always dressed in a three-piece suit. The more flamboyant accessories favored by the Dyke are a result of Phyllis arriving at a fancy dress party dressed as Fred Astaire. I have actually no idea as to her sexual predilections or whether she was ever thrashed with a George W, but she helped me create a fun (and hopefully funny) character.

As I said earlier the tawse was predominantly delivered across the hands at Scottish schools but I personally think that they are ideally suited for bottom work.

The currently available Lochgelly tawses are constructed from dense British Harness leather which is guaranteed to become supple with age and use and their nineteen and a half inch length is designed to wrap perfectly across a well presented bottom. The ratio of the tailed and untailed ends of a perfectly cut George W tawse is exactly one to two and according to the literature accompanying the ‘George W OTK Collection’ the business end is designed to safely wrap around a matured buttock. They are designed to have a disconcerting effect when applied to the naked bottom. Although the delay between the impacts of each tail is barely discernable recipients are unequivocal about the intensity of the experience. To avoid undue discomfort the edges of the tails are marked with a saddlers crease line and fully beveled, burnished and finished.

Apparently outside of the education system the tawse was commonly applied to recalcitrant off-springs behinds. I remember a particularly compelling letter contained in the correspondence sections of one of my spanking magazines written by an unfortunate Scots lassie.

She recalled that she took regular trips across her father’s knee to be corrected with the tawse. At school she had worn a traditional Royal Stewart Tartan Billie kilt secured above the left knee with an ornate crested pin to stop it from flapping open in the bitter Highland winds. When she had been punished by her father she was required to remove the pin and her bumbags and hand them over to her mother for twenty-four hours. This resulted in her being forced to constantly clap her hands to her thighs to hold her kilt in place to avoid the embarrassment of full frontal exposure caused by the hostile climate. She complained that an added inconvenience was that the kilts were cut from a heavy and coarse yarn to give them weight and flow. The heavy wool chaffed the naked flesh of her well-tawsed bare behind unbearably.

Of course I have no idea of the veracity of this letter but it certainly offered inspirational fuel. This brings me neatly to the subject of defenestration.

The strict dictionary definition of defenestration is the throwing of a person or thing out of a window. In the Woody stories, during her own schooldays, the Dyke was subjected to reverse defenestration. She would be sent to a cold room known as the Ice Chamber to await the tawse. Relieved of her bumbags she would be forced to bend out through a third-floor window and subjected to the harsh external elements. The window would then be lowered across her back to stop her from defenestrating when the wicked two-tailed tawse started to lick her behind.

Now who would dream that up? Well actually the derivation of this macabre ritual can be found in David Niven’s, “A Moon’s a Balloon”. According to Mr Niven, while he was at Dulwich College this was a method employed by one of the master’s. So don’t be pointing fingers at me, all I do is collect nuggets and piece them together to create my characters and the situations that they find themselves in.

Don’t Forget – Free Chapters of the Woody Back to School Unit spanking saga are available at the Woodettes Publications Page.