Miss Claire Brooks and the six o’clock swishings

New Years greetings from RH and My Beloved Jojo. Chez Humphries is slowly getting back to normality as the guests begin to leave so regular service will shortly be resumed … in the meantime here is an extract from Volume 23-Stolen Bumbags of the Woody Back to School Unit saga.

This storyline was developed from a single inadvertent comment made by a former female colleague that I like to think of as life’s ‘Vanilla Nuggets’ … you can read more in ‘Did Claire get the Cane?’ … also here is the collector’s edition of one of the original Woody Toon’s developed in collaboration with my great friend Dave Ell … enjoy … Bottoms Up! … RH

In keeping with family tradition Claire Brooks was shipped off to boarding school. Her mother’s alma mater the Woody School had fallen on hard times and closed its doors, so she was dispatched to the exclusive Dayton Manor.

“Everything was extremely polite at Dayton,” Claire recalled. “We communicated a lot through little notelets that we left in each other’s pigeon-holes. We’d get invitations to picnics, folk dancing lessons and etiquette classes.” Claire giggled. “Don’t look at me like that. Yes! I attended my share of fucking etiquette classes. Anyway, I still have my favorite invitation. I had been at the school just a few months when I found a pretty pink envelope placed in my box. I opened it expecting to be invited to a birthday feast or, better still, a polo match. The message inside was neatly hand written.”

“It read, ‘Dear Miss Brooks, You are invited to repair to the House Captain’s quarters to participate in a six o’clock swishing. Yours Faithfully, Monica Rodgers’. Even more bizarrely at the bottom she had written RSVP!”

“You have to admit that’s quite a stylish way to invite someone up to your rooms so that you can beat their arse with a whippy stick,” chuckled Claire.

“Monica Rodgers was a prissy little thing with pigtails and a really big snooter; we used to call her Monc the Conk behind her back,” smiled Claire, “but receiving an invitation to participate in one of her six o’clock swishing’s was a little unnerving. She was rumored to be rather good with the stick.”

“Monc was in a terrible tizzy,” Claire told her audience. “She said that I had a bad case of the dt’s and was getting her house a bad reputation. I couldn’t very well argue; I had taken up permanent residence in the detention room since I arrived at Dayton. She suggested we try a swishing.”

“I had no objection in principle to the suggestion. Ma always told me that she far preferred a swishing to writing boring lines or spending hours in the detention room. So I agreed we should give it a try.” Claire grinned. “She bent me over the back of her sofa and gave me three hot ones, but we all know that is only half a caning, so I felt compelled to go back a few days later and get the other half.”

“Once I was on the swishing circuit I started to get all kinds of interesting invitations. The Headgirl and my House Mistress were both keen for me to stop by. I was becoming rather popular on the circuit and my social calendar started to get rather busy at six o’clock,” continued Claire. “My chums took to calling me Bendover Brooks.”

Claire’s accounts of her shenanigans at the prim and proper boarding school attracted considerable applause. Apparently her former teachers had a lot in common with the Woody Brass. She recounted an episode when she was yanked and spanked. “Nobody had ever been spanked in class before so it came as quite a surprise to be hauled out of my seat and pinned down across my desk. The teacher was a real old battleaxe, a right gargoyle in a dodgy tweed suit. She’s yattering and chattering while she’s walloping me. All of a sudden she stops. Apparently her false gnashers came unstuck and dropped on the floor and one got broken. She held me responsible and I got sent up to the Headgirl for a six o’clock swishing. Imagine that, she breaks her false teeth and I get six of the best. Where’s the justice in that?”

Of course school holidays were equally fun-filled with Claire seeing plenty of hairbrush action. “My sister Jen was becoming extremely competitive,” said Claire, “she’d just been sent up to Dayton and had got a couple of swishing’s. She wanted to make a name for herself and she started sassing Ma at home. I had always been the naughty sister so of course I had to defend my reputation which meant that there was whole lot of spanking going on.”

According to records maintained by the Ministry of Education Claire Brooks ranks as the second most caned school pupil in the nation’s history. She admitted that the specter of expulsion often loomed large but her outstanding achievements as an international class equestrian and the kudos that she brought to the school often saved her bacon, although rarely her arse. However, all good things must come to an end and eventually she would face her Armageddon.

Claire’s account of her somewhat ignominious eviction from the institution earned her considerable sympathy.

She had been caught in a compromising position with a stable-boy, discussing Ugandan affairs. She was hauled up before the Board of Governors.

“They made a terrible fuss, which I thought was rather silly,” she told her chums. “After all it was supposed to be the age of enlightenment and, besides, back in the day everybody was boffing anything in trousers.”

According to the minutes of the Governors Meeting, now available on the internet, one of the board members, a certain Baroness Fielding, demanded that ‘Miss Brooks should be punished with the most extreme gravity. She needs to be chastised in such a manner that will deter our future pupils from indulging in such rampant promiscuity’. It can now be revealed that Baroness Fielding is the younger sister of Melissa Forsham-Smythe.

“I was hauled before the board,” remembers Claire. “This terrible old ogre called Baroness Fielding droned on and on about the gravity of the situation and the shame I had brought on the school. Apparently my greatest crime was that I had got laid while I was wearing my school uniform. I considered explaining that I had actually taken off my clothes while the deed was being done but she didn’t seem much in the mood for listening. She produced this dusty ledger and informed me that according to ancient protocols I was to be horsed and birched. I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about.”

The horse and birch technique had first been introduced in several independent fee-paying schools, reformatories and military installations during the mid-eighteen hundreds. For many years the heinous punishment was limited exclusively to the male genre.

The first recorded horsing and birching of a female occurred during the Great War. Two Red-cross nurses were accused of fraternizing with the Hun and brought before a military tribunal. It was a difficult situation. The British Army had not yet enlisted women into their forces but the nurses were on active duty on the front-line and consequently fell under their disciplinary bailiwick. The two nurses were held at the Convent de Bon Pasteur while the military-men considered what to do with them.

By this time the Lawrence Sisters had passed on and the original Woody School was governed by the Marchioness of St Ives, a whop-hardened veteran and a highly-respected disciplinarian. The army decided she would be an ideal arbitrator of the case. She was smuggled across the channel to preside over the nurses’ hearing. She was appointed two quarter-sergeants as her advisors during the hearing.

The two unfortunate nurses were eventually found guilty. It fell to the Marchioness to deliver their sentence and she found herself faced with a curious dilemma. If a male member of the armed forces was found guilty of similar charges he would be taken to the stockade to be horsed and birched. It seemed wholly reasonable that the two nurses should be subjected to the same fate. However, this presented a problem. The spray birch favored by the military was only truly effective when administered across exposed flesh. The protocols of the Red-cross dictated that when nurses required corporal punishment the beatings should be delivered across the clothed seat.

The nurses remained under guard in the brig while the Marchioness risked her life crossing the channel several times at the dead of night while she attempted to broker a deal.

It seemed that she had reached an impasse. Both the Army and the Red-cross agreed that the horsing and birching sentence was appropriate. The matter of their bumbags remained the only issue to be resolved.

Finally the Marchioness visited the nurses. The convent was cold and miserable and they were confined to their cells twenty-three hours a day. She explained that if she could not reach an agreement soon they might be held there for several years. She proposed a solution.

The two nurses were smuggled back to Britain under the cover of darkness. They were taken to the Woody School and enrolled as mature students. The Marchioness would personally perform the birching’s in the privacy of her study.

The fate of the nurses was widely reported in the press and the ‘Woody Birchings’ would have unfortunate ramifications for a number of schoolgirls over the next twenty years.

According to Ministry of Education records several of the nation’s most prestigious boarding school’s applied for permission to introduce horsing and birching in extreme circumstances. One of those schools was Dayton Manor which Claire would attend.

The record shows that between the wars nearly a hundred luckless schoolgirls were subjected to the ghastly punishment. After the end of the Second World War the practice was largely abandoned.

As a historic footnote, the Marchioness was later presented with new information regarding the nurses fraternization’s and learned that they had bravely helped dying men to go peacefully into the night. She campaigned for their exoneration and eventually they were presented with Medals of Valor by the King.

Claire Brooks was blissfully ignorant of the colorful history of horsing and birching when she was escorted to the Grand Dame’s study by two burly prefects. She wanted nothing better than to get her punishment over with so that she could go and exercise her pony.

Over the next twenty minutes she would become one of the world’s few living experts in one of the most heinous forms of punishment ever devised.

“I was told to remove my blazer and my bumbags which was a little queer as we were never caned on the bare,” Claire told her chums. “Then I was made to mount up on the back of one of the prefects as if we were preparing for a piggy-back race. It was most undignified. She was built like an outdoor brick-shithouse and made Ivan the Terrible look like a waif. The Headgirl grabbed my wrists and yanked me forward so that my chin was over the top of the prefects head and my arse was raised up in the air. The Grand Dame came around and showed me the instrument that I was to be beaten with. I can only remember thinking ‘Holy Fuck’.”

In some ways Claire Brooks had been lucky. The Grand Dame had only succeeded in acquiring a spray birch which generally only weighs in at three to four ounces, as opposed to an Eton birch that is significantly heavier.

Nonetheless, being horsed and birched is not a taste that is easily acquired. With her arms being yanked out of her sockets by the Headgirl and her buttocks being widely spread due to her legs being wrapped around the prefect’s waist Claire Brooks felt like a sitting duck.

The birch was constructed of a bundle of twenty Betula Pendula twigs bound together with a leather handle. The total length of the birch was twenty-eight inches.

“It was a weird sensation,” Claire reported, “the first three strokes seemed relatively harmless. I was far more dismayed at being horsed than I was at being birched. It is the most humiliating feeling. However, as we progressed the cumulative effect of the birching was getting pretty intense. Thankfully, the Grand Dame stopped at six and I was allowed to dismount from the prefects back.”

Claire assumed that her punishment was over but the Grand Dame had another shock in store for her. The Board had voted on a proposal by Baroness Fielding that Claire should be sacked and the Baroness had prevailed.

It was not until years later that it would be revealed as a result of the Snobs and Rotters tribunal that the Baroness’s sinister sister, Melissa Forsham-Smythe, was cynically targeting top equestrians in a plot to get them expelled from the selection pool for the forthcoming Olympics to allow her daughter, Sarah, a free passage to fame and glory.

“Predictably Ma was less than pleased at this turn of events and she triple zinged me in the back of the Bentley before we’d even left the school grounds. That was most disagreeable. Triple zinging’s on top of a well-birched arse are to be avoided at all costs,” said Claire. “Nonetheless when she learned of the Baronesses involvement she went ballistic. Apparently the Baroness had been a prefect at the Woody School and had cut Ma’s bumbags to tatters a time or two. Sorry Sarah, but Ma is almost as tenacious as your mother and she took the Baroness’s head and had her booted off the Board of Governors. Malicious never forgave Ma for beating up on her sister and ten years later that is how the Snobs and Rotters tribunal began.”

Claire entertained her chums for almost two non-stop hours of Whops and Clobber humour. The guests at the feast tickled their ribs and clapped their hands at her revelations of her life-long errantcy. Finally Claire grinned at her pals.

“Shit I need a drink,” she said and then she took them by surprise. Claire Brooks, the ultimate clothes horse, reached up and loosened her tie and unfastened the top button of her tailored blouse.

No sooner had Claire sunk down in a comfortable seat to enjoy a glass of Cristal than the Bounder barreled down on her.

“We’re going commercial,” said Bernadette.

“We’re going commercial?” laughed Claire.

“You’ll need an agent,” insisted the Bounder. “You don’t know the first thing about selling Whops and Clobber Comedy.”

“And you do?” grinned Claire.

The Bounder cocked her head and hooded her jet-black eyes. “For fifteen percent I’ll teach you everything I know,” she said emphatically.

“Oh good fucking grief,” was all Claire Brooks could think of to say.

Nixdown Nixon was furious. “You never told me about this horsing and birching business,” she said accusingly to Claire. “I’ve known you for fifteen years and you’ve kept this a secret?”

Claire looked taken aback. “I was just using it as a point of reference, it wasn’t any fun Nix. I can assure you of that.”

“Well I’ll thank you to let me be the judge of that,” snapped Nixdown. “Now, I’ll need you to sketch up one of these spray birch’s and give the details to Bernadette so she can track one down.”

“You are truly fucking barking,” groaned Claire.

If you are enjoying the Toon Collection and the book-extracts and you have finished reading the complimentary Volume 1 – Whops and Clobber and still want to know more about the antics of the World’s greatest mega-mixes then cut along sharpish to the newly redesigned Woodettes Publication Page which gives direct access to the five volumes from the Woody Back to School Unit saga that are available for download for the very reasonable sum of $4.99 each. I have included a brief synopsis of the content of each book and of course I have kept the Free Preview Chapters available for your enjoyment.