Newspapers today often carry stories about school life – a pupil banned for an inappropriate hairstyle or earring; parents protesting about school decisions and fines. Other examples of school stories focus on discipline, however: a teacher accused of being verbally abusive, or even of seeking to control a recalcitrant child by tying him or her to a chair, or locking them in a room.

Yet these incidences pale when we compare them to their historical counterparts. Until 1986, corporal punishment in schools was permitted, and many of us either remember being punished, or have parents or grandparents who ‘entertain’ us with tales of being slippered or caned.

There have been many different forms of punishment in schools, from smacking or spanking a child (with some children being laid across the laps of their teachers – unthinkable now), to the use of a leather strap, a can or paddle, or a slipper. Teachers were permitted to do this, because they were seen as acting in loco parentis in the school setting, thus able to discipline a child just as his or her parents would at home.

Back in 1860, a shocking case in Eastbourne highlighted the dangers of school discipline, and how attempts to punish children could go wrong. In this case, 15-year-old Reginald Cancellor was seen as stubborn by his teacher, Thomas Hopley. Hopley decided to try and ‘beat’ this stubbornness out of his pupil by using corporal punishment, but failed to use a moderate level of discipline, and instead beat the boy so badly that he died. The death led to a charge of manslaughter against Hopley.

Reginald Channell Cancellor had been born in the summer of 1844 in the St Pancras district of London, the son of John Henry and Eliza Ann (née Agutter). John Henry Cancellor was, in 1851, the Master of the Court of Common Pleas, and his family lived at 32 Chester Terrace in Regent’s Park. This was a well-to-do family, with a litter of servants tending to their every needs, and the money and background for John Henry Cancellor to realise the importance of educating his sons well. He therefore arranged for Reginald to become a boarder at a school in Sussex. However, this decision would come to haunt him. The burial register for Barnes, where the Cancellors later moved, shows the sad repercussions of Reginald’s schooling: on one side of a burial register double page is the burial of Reginald Channel Cancellor, aged 15, on 28 April; on the other side, the burial of his grieving father, John Henry Cancellor, two months later on 28 June 1860.

When Thomas Hopley was charged with manslaughter, press coverage of the case was surprisingly eviscerating of the teacher, in an era that tended to perceive children as animals who needed disciplining (and it was admitted that Cancellor could be a difficult student). It was recognised that Hopley had gone way beyond what was reasonable, and that he had lacked the control expected of him as a teacher. One Gloucestershire newspaper even titled an article about him as ‘The Boy Slayer’, and described him as a notorious author who had written a pamphlet about the employment of young people who had been omitted from the Factories Act, which they said was ‘vulgarly and offensively put together’. Their argument was that his pamphlet had argued for the better care of young people, whereas he had actually ‘cudgelled’ a ‘poor lad for three hours, until he was compelled to lay himself down and die’.

Hopley was seen as even worse because, rather than accept his punishment quietly – he was sentenced to four years in prison at the Sussex Assizes in July 1860 – he had written another pamphlet that was seen as ‘a heartsickening attempt to win the advocacy of the press in his favour’, in which he defended his actions. In it, he described Reginald as ‘a fat, dull, greedy, lazy, incapable boy, intensely dogged and obstinate, who refused to learn the simplest things, bit his nails, and was addicted to a variety of unpleasing habits’. As a contrast, he presented himself as a model teacher who aimed to shape his lumpen students into model adults by whatever means necessary – including by beating them with a ‘thick stick’. In addition, he argued that he had beaten Cancellor coolly and rationally, and after realising he was dead, failed to have even ‘one single pang of conscience’, so sure was he that he had done the right thing with this annoying child.

What Hopley also made clear, though, was that Reginald’s family had agreed that when he misbehaved he should be flogged. However, they had never agreed the level of force, or the duration, with the school, thus giving Hopley – he thought – permission to do so for as long as he wanted.

Hopley may have had other motives in punishing Reginald so severely, as he certainly seems to have been a complex, and unpleasant, character. He was used to being looked after, and as a man in his thirties, working as a teacher in Lewes, Sussex, he had his mother living at school with him to maintain him, despite the fact that she was in her sixties. However, he was also interested in very young women, and in 1855, he married a woman he admitted was a ‘young girl’ young enough to be his daughter. This was Fanny Cobb, the youngest of several daughters in a wealthy Yorkshire family; she was married off to Hopley when she was just 17 – her new husband was nearly 40. By 18, she was a mother, and by 1861, before she had reached her 23rd birthday, she was a mother of three boys. Hopley said he married Fanny ‘not for what she was… [but to train her to] apply herself heart and soul to become an example to wives’. His methods, however, were similar to those he employed as a teacher: beating her for getting her spelling wrong, or for having untidy handwriting.

Thomas Hopley’s violence had long-lasting repercussions. After his initial spell at Millbank, he was sent to Portsea Convict Establishment, or prison, in Hampshire, where he was recorded as a ‘convict in custody’ in the 1861 census. Meanwhile, his wife Fanny was left at home in Uckfield, aged just 23, but with their two younger sons to look after; Thomas Southwood was aged just two at the time, and John Ernest was five months old.

On Hopley’s release from prison, Fanny – who must have welcomed the respite from her husband that his jail sentence offered – applied for a judicial separation on the grounds of cruelty, with her suit detailing the abuse she herself had received at his hands. He had educated her by means of ‘thrashing’ her; he had ‘supervised her letters and beat her when he found words therein ill-spelled’. He wouldn’t let her show him affection – she even had to call him ‘Thomas’ rather than ‘Tom’ – and refused to let her have help when she gave birth, beat their baby sons when they cried, and spat in her face. He had even hit Fanny while she was breastfeeding her newborn first son. It was noted that this first child, Edward, was a ‘hopeless’ idiot, but that many regarded this as a ‘release’ from being aware of his father’s cruelty. It’s tempting to wonder whether Edward’s intellectual disabilities were a direct result of his father’s physical abuse when he was a baby; but whatever the cause, he was severely enough impaired to be institutionalised, and he sadly died in an asylum at the age of 15.

Cruelly, Fanny was not allowed her separation. Thomas Hopley argued that the fact that she had continued to live with him despite his behaviour towards her showed that she had actually condoned it – and the jury convened to decide this point agreed with him. This was despite it being hard, if not impossible, for Fanny to have explicitly shown Thomas her disapproval by leaving him: she was financially dependent on him, and society would not have understood her leaving a respectable husband. A male jury was unlikely to understand the pressure on her to remain with this violent man, despite his prior conviction for beating a boy to death.

However, Fanny was braver now, and despite having her petition for a separation rejected, she would no longer live with Hopley. Instead, he moved back to London, where the 1871 census records him as a boarder with the Pascall family in Bloomsbury. His career was finished, and the census records his occupation as ‘not known’. He died in London in 1876, aged 57.

Meanwhile, Fanny disappears from the records, but two of her sons took on a new surname, Harrison, to dissociate themselves from their father. They moved to Scotland, where John Ernest worked as an engineer, and where Thomas brought his own children up. Thomas’s ‘idiot’ firstborn son, Edward, died at the Earlswood Asylum in Redhill, Surrey, in 1872, at the same age Reginald Cancellor had been when he died. Hopley’s own mother, who had looked after him and perhaps coddled him into his thirties, lived on in Lewes, where her son had once been a respectable schoolteacher, and died there in 1878, aged 86, outliving her shamed son by two years.

In 1982, the European Court of Human Rights ordered that teachers could not use corporal punishment without the permission of parents, and this led to the banning of such punishment in the UK four years later. In some English and Welsh private schools, however, corporal punishment was only outlawed in 1998, and a couple of years later in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Many of us have stories or memories of teachers who appeared to take pleasure from their sanctioned power to physical punish their students; Thomas Hopley shows that in some cases, this pleasure was all too real – and that it was not confined to the school, but reflected a wider desire to inflict pain on others.