The Tawse

Hello all, hope you've had a good weekend. Bank holiday here today and Memorial Day for our friends across the pond.

A nice weekend for us with family and friends, though no spankings for me. Worked part of Saturday and out on the night. Yesterday an unexpected visit, one of P's nephews and wife drove up from Worcester and dropped in on P's mother who is the nephew's grandmother and now a great grandmother as they have a baby girl, so we went to say hello as we hadn't seen them for a while. We had friends over last night.

P's had to cancel our China trip, I'll tell you about it another time but basically with BA strikes, dust clouds and uncertainty from our new government on immigration policy there were too few to make the trip viable.

I've been doing some more Internet searches looking for implement ideas for Ps birthday. Still plenty of time. I spotted two leather tawses on ebay, similar to these I would hope.

I've never felt the tawse on my bottom so I'm wondering maybe that's what I'll get him, but I'm also thinking mightn't it be much the same feel as the belt or strap. What do you think, does anyone have a tawse? They do call the tawse "the belt" in Scotland.

I know they were used mainly in Scottish schools and were administered on the palm of the hands (what a waste!).

Read a little history of the Tawse here "The best-known Scottish tawse maker was John J Dick of Lochgelly. He made Tawses in four weights: Light, Medium, Heavy and Extra Heavy. A typical Light tawse of his manufacture is 3 cm wide, 54 cm long, 5mm thick and weighs 80 gm. A heavy tawse, while not being significantly larger in any dimension, weighs 110 gm. They are divided into 2 'tails' about 23 cm long at the operating end. Wider Tawses might be divided into 3, 4 or even 5."

Apparently original Lochgelly tawses are now considered collectibles and may be sold for several hundreds pounds each. The ones I spotted can't be originals then because they certainly weren't several hundred pounds but they were stamped John Dick, Lochgelly.

I also spotted this old bill of prices for school straps from1966.

Ronnie

xx