I was swimming through a few culled snippets – dozens of them, but all too brief to justify a post by themselves. Then I saw a common theme for a few of them. Most are from the past, which is a good job as today they would probably result in a court case. But all illustrate how times as changed in regard to societies attitude to women.

Obviously we have a prurient interest here and I would not hesitate to appropriate many of these scenarios for a short story. That doesn’t detract from the moral outrage we would feel if this happened for real. Does moral outrage have a statute of limitations? Different times certainly.

In 1960 Janice L, a secretary from Windsor, wrote to Woman’s Weekly to complain that her boss had spanked on numerous occasions for being late for work and other ‘sins.’ She said the spankings were pretty ‘sore ones’ applied to the seat of her knickers while she was across his knee.

“My bum hurt so much I could hardly sit down. But when I told my mum she said it served me right,” Janice wrote.

The vast majority of the women readers to that magazine had no sympathy either. One even suggested that she was lucky not to get a bare bottom spanking.

Writing in a UK national newspaper last yet a modern day captain of industry who had been a secretary herself during the 1970s was more sanguine and claimed she even missed those ‘innocent days.’ She said, “A red face and an even redder bottom, was reasonable recompense for shoddy work,” and “all-in-all was just a bit of fun.”

She admitted that there was ‘undoubtedly’ a sexual dimension to being spanked, but said office banter was often sexual in a way that “understandably would not be acceptable these days.”

“I don’t think we should judge it all by how we feel about it today, no doubt some of the men concerned are as embarrassed now as I was then. I think we can all move on.”

My favourite story in this vein was found on a now deactivated blog and was purportedly taken from a magazine called Titbits, also in the 1970s.

The background to the story was the recruitment of women clippies (ticket collectors) on London buses during the 1970s.

One hapless woman kept letting people off fares and sometimes forgot to ring the bell to let the bus move on because she was talking too much. She also had the habit of getting off and popping into shops for a few minutes.

All grounds for dismissal one might think but instead the bus driver decided to take matters into his own hands. After dressing her down in drivers’ rest room she resorted to answering him back.

According to a witness, another woman clippie, who had chanced in on them, “He had this clippie girl across his knee with her knickers right down and was giving her the spanking of her life. My gosh, she had a red bottom and was yelling her head off.”

“I just stood there dumbfounded for a second and wondered if I should get help. Then this girl saw me and all she said was, ‘do you mind, can’t you see we are busy?’ I left them to it.”