{"id":1215,"date":"2004-06-01T10:21:11","date_gmt":"2004-06-01T14:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1215"},"modified":"2004-06-01T10:21:11","modified_gmt":"2004-06-01T14:21:11","slug":"making-real-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1215","title":{"rendered":"Making real men"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whether it is a mark of decadence or of advancing civilisation, we find it harder and harder to credit how the English middle classes treated their children. This is from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&amp;grid=&amp;targetRule=10&amp;xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F06%2F01%2Fdb0103.xml\" title=\"SIr Gervase Sheldon\">obit of a 90-year-old judge<\/a> in the <em>Telegraph<\/em> today:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>John Gervase Kensington Sheldon, always known as Gerry, was born on October 4 1913 in Burma, where both his parents were working as doctors. His younger brother died in infancy having been given too strong a dose of a prescribed drug by a local chemist; Gerry was given the same dose, but spat it out.<\/p>\n\n<p>Aged six, he was sent to England to board at Ovingdean preparatory school in Sussex, spending holidays with his grandparents. His mother came home once a year to see him, his father once every three years.<\/p>\n\n<p>He grew into a fun-loving, mischievous boy, and at Winchester held the record for the number of beatings in a term.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>The rest of the obit, after war service, is taken up with the most notably savage sentences he handed down &#8212; 15 years to a Hell&#8217;s Angel for attempted murder; 25 years for a drug smuggler who shot a Customs man, and so on. It is another mark of change that the obituary finds his childhood worthy of mention. I suspect that, had he died fifty years ago, only the record of his beatings would have been thought remarkable.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whether it is a mark of decadence or of advancing civilisation, we find it harder and harder to credit how the English middle classes treated their children. This is from the obit of a 90-year-old judge in the Telegraph today: &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1215\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1215\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}