This weekend marks another milestone for me – it’s exactly 50 years since I set a record I believe remains unbroken.
This weekend marks another milestone for me – it’s exactly 50 years since I set a record I believe remains unbroken. The 16-year-old me had landed in New Zealand the day before, an immigrant from the UK. At 5pm on Sunday, October 4, I was delivered by relatives to Wellington College where I was to become a boarder for the final school term of 1970. A few minutes after 9pm, I was marched from my dormitory to an empty corridor by a teacher who insisted I bend over. He then belted me six times with a heavy leather strap across my pyjama-clad rear. My crime? I’d been talking (no surprise there). I’d owned up to it when the teacher stuck his head through the door, asking who was breaking the rule of silence after lights out. My beating earned me instant notoriety among my new peer group for getting “six of the best” before I had seen the inside of a classroom – an all-time school record for corporal punishment in the shortest possible time. The welts (sitting was awkward fo...