The story of how children as young as eight endured public punishment beatings has been unearthed by researchers working on the £45 million refurbishment of Paisley Museum.
Historians have discovered that in the early 1900s Renfrewshire children – mainly from poorer households – were frequently tied to the 'whip post' for sustained flogging after being convicted on relatively minor misdemeanours.
Juveniles were hit with a birch rod – a flexible wooden stick, which caused significant injuries.
The original whip post, thought to have been used at Johnstone police station as installed in 1903, will be part of a new display which is sure to ignite debate among visitors, as they discuss punishment of children through the ages.
Sarah Cartwright, the project’s social history curator, who looked into the practice, said: “It was quite barbaric and it was used mainly as a deterrent. There are newspaper accounts which detail how many stripes, as they called it, were meted out.
“People were employed to execute the punishment and some parents were happy that it was the court dishing out the punishment, instead of them keeping their children in check.”
It is thought that a whip post was also used at Paisley police station, with the level of punishment in 1903 determined by the courts. Sarah says it was mostly poor children who were on the receiving end.
“It wasn’t like really well-organised gangs of bank robbers or anything like that,” she said. “It was very much poor boys stealing apples from orchards and selling them for food or stealing small amounts to survive.”
The story of a young boy who was whipped at the age of 11 features in the display. As a young man, aged 22, he joined the navy and his medical records state he had marks across this buttocks, back and elbow.
“It was truly brutal,” added Sarah. “It wasn’t just a smack.”
In November 2020, Scotland’s ban on parents smacking their children was enshrined in law, making it the first part of the UK to outlaw physical punishment of Under-16s.
Parents and carers were previously allowed to use physical force to discipline their children if it was considered “reasonable chastisement”.
The law means that the so-called “justifiable assault” defence is no longer available, providing children the same protection from assault as adults – protections from state and parental violence that children in Renfrewshire in 1903 could never have imagined.
Sarah concluded: “It was barbaric, brutal and violent assault. Many of these poor boys really weren’t doing anything for any kind of monetary gain, a lot of the time, often they were simply trying to survive.”
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