Meaning of pandy bat | Babel Free

Definitions

(originally) a stout leather strap reinforced internally with whalebone or even lead, and used at Jesuit schools to inflict corporal punishment on pupils by striking the palm; (latterly, sometimes) more loosely applied to any punishment bat

Ireland, historical

Examples

“The soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted and a loud crashing sound and a fierce maddening tingling burning pain made his hand shrink together […]”

“1930 Irish Province News, 5th Year No 3 (Irish Province of the Society of Jesus) "Obituary: Fr James Daly" All this punctuated, driven home, by loud-resounding strokes of the pandy-bat, not administered one after another quickly, but at regular intervals.”

“1957 Irish Province News, 32nd Year No 3 (Irish Province of the Society of Jesus) "Obituary: Fr Esmonde White (1875-1957)" While Prefect of Studies in Belvedere Junior House, he combined gentleness with severity in such perfect measure that a past pupil recalls: “He hit very hard with the pandy bat but obviously felt every bit as miserable about it as the unfortunate victim!””

“The strap seemed preferable to the cane and the pandybat.”

“Round about here it would seem to me to have become necessary to make some general statement about the Irish Christian Brothers. ... I have heard them blamed for many things. ... Blamed for the pandy-bat, as it was called in Dublin, or the leather as we called it in the North.”

“The procedure was that you knocked on the door and were called in, presented the docket, watched the pandy bat (some were slim, some fat) being removed from a drawer or inside the soutane. You took your punishment on either hand, thanked the priest and withdrew. ... The pandybat was a sort of sjambok slick as a spatula that imparted sudden deadening pain, felt in the head as in either hand, turn and turn about, pain travelling through the nervous system.”

“Crowded round a small table are seven figures: a schoolmaster holding what looks like a wooden spoon — it is probably a pandy bat, a stick kept for the sole purpose of hitting children — over the half-open palm of a mop-haired boy, who is wiping a tear away from his eye as he waits for the next blow.”

“Corporal punishment was administered by use of a thick leather strap called a ‘pandy bat’.”

“Boys were beaten with a strap device referred to as “cockers, which you got on the bare bum” and also with a paddle-type device called a “pandybat” used to strike boys on the hands.”

“Corporal punishment was used by both for disciplinary purposes; the pandy bat by the Jesuits, and the leather strap by the Brothers.”

CEFR level