Girls caned at my old school

Back in the 1970s I went to a secondary school that had changed from girls only to girls and boys. At the time the Headmistress appeared to me to be an ineffectual old bat, which was, in retrospect, probably a bit unfair, as she probably wasn't that old, and as I would discover almost 50 year later not that ineffectual either. My discovery came on a famous social media site which has a page for the school. A woman was posting some memories of her time there in the 1960s, when it was still single sex. She recalled this hopeless music teacher who couldn't control a class (she was still there when I went to the school). Well one day her form were playing this teacher up, and throwing books around the room, when to their horror the Headmistress turned up! She took all 30 or so girls back to her office, where they got a good telling off and were then told they were to be caned. The woman remembered being on the end of the queue and hearing her classmates being thrashed. However by about 27, which could have been 162 strokes later, the Head had got bored and run out of steam, so the last few were let off, and our woman's bottom was spared. Imagine the games lessons later that week, when almost all of the girls had red bottoms, there must have been some muttering about the two or three with pale white cheeks.