Oh What A Time... - #178 Education! Education! Education! (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re chatting education: what did schooling look like in Ancient Greece and Rome? What has corporal punishment looked like in schools through history? And how has the concept of the ‘school meal’ evolved over time?Elsewhere, why did pirates pick hooks for hands above all other options?! We think we have the answer, but if you’ve got anything to add, you know what to do: [e-mail] from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Water Time. Hello and welcome to part two of education. Let's get on the show. Okay, now, corporal punishment in schools might seem like a thing of the past. Something happened in the 19th century, possibly only the 19th century,

but in fact, what the French once referred to as the English vice because of its commonality in British schools was only abolished by Parliament when, do either of you know? Oh, this is going to be so much later than I expect. I know this because I actually remember them discussing it on the news. I would have guessed. Oh, really? That late?

Yeah. 80s? Yeah. That blown my mind. I would have assumed 1950 something. 88? 89? No, 87.

So it was abolished by Parliament in the summer of 86. Bann was put to practice in 1987. I remember them discussing it on things like news round. That's unbelievable. Yeah. When was Live Aid? 1985. So it's after that.

It's after Live Aid. Yeah. Wow. Well, Mom was a teacher in She was a secretary of school teacher, and she taught in Liverpool in the 70s. And she was very against corporal punishment. She was once a kid had been naughty in her class,

and the headmaster called her in because he'd cane this boy. Right. Who'd been acting up, and, you know, like on the bum, and the guy was a boy who's crying. My mum was like, at that point, I'd never seen it happen before,

but I was like, I am absolutely against, you know, corporal punishment in schools. And my deputy head teacher at school, I'd told a very similar story. It was like, we've never done it. Oh, really? school, even when it was legal. Interesting. That's interesting.

So I think it was sort of, it was only, you know, it was abolished by Parliament. But I think a lot of schools have decided not to do it. But I think in private schools, they're actually allowed to do it until later, but I'd have to check that. Wow, that's amazing. So much later than I thought it would be. Yeah, the Conservative government at the time led by Margaret Thatcher, they weren't obviously by instinct abolitionists. But they felt it better that they acted before, as one minister put it, the European Court of Human Rights obliges us.

So they thought they'd get in quick so that it wasn't the ECHR rulings that made them do it because the ECHR, there had been rulings in the previous decade, which made it obvious that it was inevitable that Britain would have to get his act together. I think generally if you've got a concern, the European Court of Human Rights has got an issue with something you're doing,

it's probably time to knit that in the part of it. Oh, you would say that, wouldn't you? Because you're a lefty member of the Liberal Metropolitan. an elite. Absolutely. Snowflake. You know, the centuries and the 70s and the 80s or several countries look again at the use of physical punishment in schools with Spain and New Zealand, parts of Australia and several American states, including California and New York

instituting bands. I was at secondary school in the 90s. Like the three of us were and talking to kids or people who were at secondary school in the 80s, it was quite a different vibe, I think, an awful lot of having board rubbers chucked at you and that kind of stuff and being it with slippers and things. Now, progressives pointed to the cruelty of the cane and did so for generations. Now, this staggered me.

The first country to ban the use of corporal punishment in schools was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Now, if we did it in Britain in 1986, with the ban being put into practice in 1987, when do you think the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did it? Let's go with 1970. Christopher. Nauties. 1783. Wow.

So the Norwegians did it in 1889, the Dutch in 1920, the Italians in 1928, and the Danes in 1967, although Copenhagen had banned the practice at municipal level in 1951. Even the state of New Jersey took up the cause, instituting a ban in 1867 in the wake of the American Civil War. So by my math, I think that's 204 years, is that right, later? Yeah, if you went to school in Baselton, you could still be here since 1987. We like our traditions here, L. Yeah. Now I think about it. I think I was a victim of corporal punishment.

I remember getting hit by a ruler by a teacher once. No way. Mixing paints in primary school. I'm sure it did. For mixing paints. Yeah. I've never done it since. Dad in the 60s when he was at school, he remembers kids being caned.

Yeah. Now, proponents of, this is that scene in cares, isn't there, where all the kids are caned and they're caned in real life. Because that was made in the late 60s, and the kids went on strike. They said, listen, if you're going to cane us properly. so that it looks good on camera. You've got to pay us more.

Yeah, this is a famous scene where they're all lining up and being caned on the hand. I've always wondered why rulers say shatterproof on them. And I now know why. It's because skull is such a hard man. Exactly. So I'm teaching you confidently know if they were going to wax skull for mixing paints that the ruler would still be saying. That's a great point. Like, what were they making rulers out of?

Glass. That you had to brand them all this is shatterproof. The second question is, what are the situations that means that rulers are constantly shattering? What was happening before that? Where were people using them? Just one more. The other element of any pencil case in secondary school

that was the most dangerous was the compass. Did you have a compass? Yes, yes. And did you do anything of spreading your fingers out and showing off by stabbing between them as fast as you can? Yeah, I think we might have had a compass ban at school because they were being used for basically everything apart from drawing circle.

I've got one more thing, which is even worse of that, which is the Bunsen burner. Oh, yeah. Which was basically saying, kids, you know how you want to attack your mate? Well, why not introduce fire to that? Instead of burning your friends. Exactly. Now, proponents of corporal punishment argued not only for its perceived necessity, so it did remain in new since 17 other 50 US states,

but also was longevity, not just in the dark days of Victoria's rainbow as far back as you could go. And regardless of culture or context, so ancient Egypt, classical Greece, the Roman Empire, they all indulged in corporal punishment using a variety of implements from whips and lashes to read canes. No less than Plato, the Greek philosopher considered that verbal threats and physical blows were essentially to train the child for greatness, a form of discipline akin to pruning an unruly tree,

which is why Chris Skull is such a high achiever. If he hadn't mixed that paint and been hit with a ruler for it in 1988, he wouldn't be the man he is now. that's the argument they were making. Wow. So it should not be surprising then that Papi arrived from Egypt sometimes calls teachers by another name

flogers. Really? Yeah, but we can go too far and assume that ancient teachers were power-man bullies, so that they beat their pupils black and blue and a whim. There were limits of what was and what was not acceptable, what was sanctions

a form of punishment or correction. So one Roman writer Quintilian went further and argued that corporal punishment should be limited, that it was a disgraceful practice instilled shame and anxiety in children was used by teachers to cover up for their own failings as educators. If lessons were interesting, then there would be no need for misbehaviour and punishment. And the historian Plutat raised similar objections,

writing in an essay called The Education of Children, that children ought to be led by means of encouragement and reasoning and most certainly not by blows a real treatment. He was an advocate to what we now call the sandwich method of burying negative responses between positive ones for a little dose of negativity would serve not to excite or puff them up and so spoil them with excessive praise.

So that's a very modern approach to... It is, yeah. Isn't that a word for that? Isn't it? Negging or something like that, people say? It's a shit sandwich. A shit sandwich. Yeah. Negging is...

It's slightly different. I'm trying to think of it a... Negging would be, if you're trying to chat some up rather than saying that they had a beautiful face, you'd say that they had an interesting face. And then you're making that person think, well, is that good or bad?

I'm not sure I stand now. Shit sandwich is me saying, Scull, I like your jumper. I've never really liked you as a human being. And those glasses suit you. That's a shit sandwich. And I hope that's soften the blow. Oh, I see.

The bread felt quite thin, and the meat felt extremely, extremely impressive there. I didn't like any element of that sandwich. Now, Roma methods, survived in medieval schools, and here corporal punishment was endemic, although punishment might not be quite the right word

for medieval practitioners because they thought the, you know, what they thought of the classroom whip or cane as a tool for learning. Without it, they would have argued probably, what can we do to make our students learn? Right, yeah. Obviously, unfortunately, some rather enjoyed

the experience of wielding a whip. So one student at Oxford in the 16th century rote was tutored to say, that you punish me over Muchmaster, and please you, I cannot buy this punishment. So it doesn't feel, you know, you reckon you're going to go to uni if you pass your A levels? It doesn't sound great.

Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. Now, there was an additional caveat in monastic settings. Here the argument was that the usual methods of punishing adults, say with excommunication, weren't well suited to children because children didn't understand the meaning of the words.

So corporal punishment was a better alternative to teach youngsters a lesson. And that did not have to be about Latin grammar. It could be a lesson in faith. So if in the 11th century monk teachers at Canterbury's Cathedral School were encouraged to beat all of their people's five days before Christmas every year as a reminder of the penance and penitence owned to God. No way.

Five days before Christmas? Yeah. Oh, God. Do you imagine that? You wouldn't be looking forward to Christmas as a kid. No. Things have changed. Now you get to bring in a board game.

That's what is now final day of school. That's absolutely bonkers. By the 19th century, things have got so out of hand at Canterbury that pupils rebelled against a particularly sadistic headmaster. So he's a little bit like the headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby by Dickens, Wackford Squeers. Yeah. Holy disregarding the cry for mercy, Mr. Squeers, fell upon the boy and cained him soundly, not leaving off indeed until his arm was tired out.

Oh, that's horrendous. Yeah, so elsewhere the king was in listening, and strictly so. So at Wells Cathedral in 1460, the then bishop insisted that pupils be punished according to a hierarchy of severity to avoid physical violence. Number one was a warning. Number two was a sharp rebuke, and number three was a beating. So it's amazing. Number four were shatterproof rule.

Yeah, it's amazing that they'd be doing this for so long in British schools. So by the time, these alternative punishments would evolve into things like detention and the writing of lines. In the British state school system, which emerged in the late 19th century, punishments of all kinds were to be written down in the headmaster's punishment book, an official record of what had been meted out and why. So smoking, obviously, was a regular one, in discipline and other.

And the book meant that inspectors could examine how often the cane was used in the school for what purpose on whether particular pupils or teachers were more likely to meet the rod or not. So this in one school in Lincolnshire, more than a thousand pupils were punished with the cane in just six or seven years from 1968 till 1974. Wow. And for anything from lying to raiding the girls' playground and to getting caught short and weeing against a wall. Jeez.

Some poor kid weed against the wall because he was desperate and he got cane to for it in Lincolnshire at some point in between 68 and 74. Although you would get in trouble

at school if you were just winging against a wall somewhere on the school grounds. Yeah. You're getting a lot of trouble for me in my school. Oh yeah. I mean...

The teacher will be no you have to make it to the toilet. Don't get me wrong. Of course. But you know, I wouldn't have been cane for it. I'd have been shouted at, I think. But given opposition

to corporal punishment may well be asked how and white lasted ever so long. Well, in truth, corporal punishment was never uniquely identified with education, and this made it socially acceptable, at least commonplace,

because this is the thing, you're like, smacking is now illegal. In the 80s, every single trip to the supermarket, I'd see kids being smacked. Really? Oh, yeah,

and I used to love it. I did. So we'd go to Tesco, me and mom and my sisters, and some poor could be getting smacked, and I'd be like, see, that kid getting smacked, ma'am? My mom'd be like,

Yes, you must be naughty. I'd be like, am I naughty? She'd say, no, you'd be very well behaved. I go, yeah. I must have told the story on here before. My parents would dish out a smack. Oh, wow. I had an Auntie Susan.

Everyone, I didn't know anyone who didn't get smacked. No, I was very common when I was a kid, yeah. But except for my auntie Susan, who never smacked her kids. And she was seen as a lunatic. My mum had studied. teacher training in the hippie-dippy 70s and she was very against it and my dad, quite up for it.

But mom was like, no, you can't, it's not on. And she was seen as this sort of like flower power, sort of hippie child of the 60s. But all my, yeah, it was all the time when I was a kid. And you'd see in public places all the time. Yeah, all the time. It was everywhere. I love the ideas about you thinking,

Oh, it's because I was a good child. That's why I'm not getting smacked. And then you just reveal that your mom was dead against it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But she's telling it, oh, it's because you're a good boy. Yeah. No, you deserved us.

My big punishment was not having a story read to me. Wow. Yeah, that was a big one. Yeah. I also think I, because I studied fencing for a bit, I think my dad probably knew that I could handle myself. So he chose not to risk it. When I went past foil and briefly to savor,

you. No. We'll leave this one out. Oh my God. Obviously in the ancient world you know, people, slaves, for instance, were regularly beaten.

And this was part of Plutarch's argument against corporal punishment in the first place was how could you treat well-off boys as you treated your slaves? That was just bad for society, which is such a crazy argument.

Yeah. And in the medieval world, workers would be beaten by their bosses. So the problem was, everyday violence ensure that those with power exercised it over those words less or none and it was a reminder of who was in charge

and what little could be done to change things. I've just from at the start of this episode I mentioned that I complained the chocolate and I couldn't remember I've got a voucher. I remember what it was. They sent me a check but I was 11. Younger than that, I didn't have a bank account.

And was this just to be spent on their chocolate or was it just cash that could be? They said in the letter something like yeah, is it in the letter that I had to, why? We advise maybe you go spend this on some of our chocolate and obviously couldn't cash it. Yeah.

Put it back into the firm, clever. Come on, guys. Just let that 50 quid go. Give it one of those checks, those novelty checks we have lying around. That's so funny. This will go away. Fascinating, Elle.

It's also sort of a further reminder that the past was just brutal, wasn't it? It was an absolute horror show at times. God bless 2026. So, to finish today's episode on education, I'm going to tell you lovely boys about school dinners. Let's talk about this with your school to begin with. What was school dinners like at your school?

Absolutely horrific. I ate turkey burger beans and chips and chocolate sponge every day for seven years. And looking back, it's an absolute wonder I'm not dead. So that suggests you had options or was that just what they were there was there? We did. No, we did have options. Even at secondary school? What? No, this is primary school.

Primary school you had what you were given. And it was grim as fucking. It was awful. Beef with tubes. Oh my God. Liver was the worst. What? This lump of really irony meat.

Oh, God, it's so bad. I refuse to believe you didn't go to school in the Victorian age. Yeah, yeah. So what did you have? My primary school food was great. I remember the first time I tried pizza was in primary. I remember the first time they served pizza. I don't remember.

But you went to school in Florence, didn't you? It was delicious. And in secondary school, there was a couple of years right at the start where you could get chicken burgers and beef burgers and cheese burgers. They stopped that about three years in, I think. Secondary school was better. I remember when I was very little, my mum said, What's your job for lunch today?

Me saying, chips again. And she said, you've had chips every day? And I was like, yeah. And I think eventually someone complained. But yeah, it was bad. In our secondary school, so you had these two sides. You could queue either side. It didn't matter which side.

It was the same stuff. And it would be healthy food and also unhealthy food in different big silver tins. You choose your burger or you have your cod if you're being healthy, where it happens to be. And then I remember one year they decided to try and streamline it by putting the healthy stuff on one side of the one entrance of the hall. And the unhealthy stuff on the other entrance of the hall. And all that happened was just there was no cue at the healthy side whatsoever. And it was just ever, the whole school was coming through one door and going to this really stressed dinner lady on one side. Well, the other one who's in front of peas and carrots

were just kicking back with nothing to do all day. It would be on a tray and a tray smell like bums. You know that weird... Yeah. That weird smell. It's like, this is just the only thing I can say that this smells like is bums. And, yeah, grim. Let's go back to where this all started,

where the first thought that one day we could have a tray smelling like bums and our schools came from. And in Britain, school meals first appeared in the early 20th century. They were introduced in the 1906 Education Provision of Meals Act, which was a measure designed to ward off malnutrition among children and to improve standard of health. However, this early version had a crucial flaw in it. Do you want to guess what this crucial floor was

and why it didn't take off in the way they hoped? Cost money. Too expensive. That is one of the reasons it didn't take off. The crucial floor actually was that it was not applied universe. So local authorities and councils had to opt into the act. And as you say, Elle, a lot of them saw it as too expensive. So they didn't. And in many cases, it took industrial disputes or the outbreak of war in 1914 to finally force

council's hands. But despite this, I think it's quite impressive. In the first year of full operation, which is 1907 to 1908, some 2.75 million meals were provided to schoolchildren outside of London, with the figure rising to more than 9.5 million by 1910. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Don't you think? And it grew from there.

By 1914, some 14 million meals were being served across Britain with cities such as Birmingham, Bradford, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and London leading the way. But as we've discussed about our experience with Chris having thin-based stone-baked pizza at his call and us having liver, standards differed from place to place.

But also, that was a big thing, wasn't it? After the war and the First World War, they realised how malnourished a lot of the British working classes were. Exactly. So in the 40s, right through to the 50s, you could get bottles of orange juice from the NHS. Because they realised that kids weren't getting enough vitamin C and all that kind of stuff.

And it was, yeah, so they were just these, they were programs to try and make the general. general public health fear. That's exactly right. And this is what you'll see things progressed to off the back of sort of, you know, events that shake the country essentially. Some schools at this early stage, they take the meals very seriously. These pupils are sort of seated in a hall and given a meal as though in a refractory. So they're given cutlery, crockery was used. It's not so formal. And sessions were supervised by sort of like quite smartly dressed dinner ladies who would keep decorum and quiet as you're eating your meal and enjoying your crockery.

Thoughts on that, you enjoying that really formal setting? But I don't know how you would maintain how formal that is. Fear, I think, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just get smashed, wouldn't it? But I suppose the repercussions, as we've discussed with your section L, would be huge if you did smash the crockery. So it's probably the fear of the cane that stopping that from happening. That is like the opposite to our dinner hall.

Our dinner hall was sort of like mayhem. Yeah, every dinner hall had there been in his mayhem, even as an adult. Was yours like this? If you had chips, for example, and you left your chips to go somewhere for a brief moment, when you came back, they would have been nicked. That was what would happen last. And my friend Chris used to buy custard and chips and pour the custard over the chips. So that when he left, no one would touch the chips.

This would happen every day and he'd eat custody chips. Is this why you're custard obsessed? It might be, to be honest, yeah. But that was his way of defending if you had to go and get knife and fork or pop to the loo or whatever. That was just one way of ensuring people wouldn't knit his chips. They banned water from my school because we were playing with it too much.

And then we ended up on the news. What? What? So there was... So you were throwing at each other? Yeah, throwing water at each other. And then one of the teachers lost his temper and said, right, well, if you can't be trusted with water,

we won't let you have access to any water. and then one of the kids told his mum and dad, and then they rang wheels today, and we were an item on the news, the school had a back track. Do you know what that feels like, Elle, it feels like when as a parent you overstep the threat or the repercussion of something.

So they'll be mucking around and throwing sandwiches around or whatever. You go, well, in that case, there'll be no food for the next 12 years. Or whatever. And you realize, actually, I can't enforce that. Half an hour later, do you want a snack? Yeah. We were a news on. There were these formal settings, which as we discussed, are very different to the settings we were in, but elsewhere corners were cut.

In other schools, this is as an example of contrast, meals were served in canteens but without adequate supervision and often with dirty utensils. And in some schools, the meal was nothing more than a sandwich or opacity to be eaten on the street or in the playground. So where you went to school really affected the experience. Some were having like almost restaurant settings with bone china. other kids were sat on street corners eating sandwiches. So there was no consistency. But nonetheless, the original intention of the legislation had come from a good place. The idea was the brainchild of two socialist reformers and campaigners from Bradford,

namely Margaret McMillan and Fred Jowett, and the latter would go on to serve in the first ever Labour cabinet in 1924, and he had previously attempted to improve the quality of meals given to children at Bradford's workhouse. And as members of Bradford's education committee, the pair successfully campaigned for local free school meals in the city of Bradford and then use that example to push for a UK-wide scheme. So it all started in Bradford. And the question is why? And it's because to McMilliam and Jowett, free school meals were all about the relationship between education and physical improvement, promoting healthy lifestyle instilling decorum of manners. But mainly, and this is the crucial thing, ensuring that she was.

children from working class homes were well fed and able to withstand whatever could be thrown at them. All sorts of diseases resulting from malnourishment would, they argued, become a thing of the pass. So there was an element of kind of trying to keep kids healthy, kicking their immune systems boosted, giving them a chance. I read a really interesting article recently about the importance of food in your educational chances because obviously if you are from a background where you're not eating enough

and you don't have access to meals that directly affects your ability to concentrate and therefore your ability to do well in the classroom. And you can see how these, it's so important in so many ways and it's cruel when children don't have access to this very basic need. Also the quote that I keep thinking of in this conversation is Napoleon one, an army marches on its stomach. Like you can't get a group of people. to stay organised and focused on a goal unless they're well fed.

Exactly. That's just as true for war as it is for education and any element of society really. The Liberals themselves at that point, they were sold on this idea, in part because of a government report which was released in 1904, which pointed to widespread malnutrition

and ill health amongst the working population. As you said, Elle, similar anxieties had arisen out of the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 when potential recruits for the army were found to be unfit. And school meals and better physical education would provide some of the answers to the question of how to make Britain healthy again. And we're still dealing with the same approach to social engineering today. For example, I'm sure you've seen this.

Occasionally celebrity chefs nowadays are employed to sort of revamp school meals. Do you remember this? Get rid of fish and chips and chicken nuggets, all this sort of stuff, put in place something healthier. It's kind of difficult to do when budgets are limited. This blew my mind when Jamie Oliver was tasked with this in 2005. Do you remember this? Oh, vividly, yeah.

2005, if I was like yesterday. Yeah, I would have thought that was about nine months ago. Do you know what his budget was per pupil for a full meal? A full meal? 50p. Less. Wow, less. 37p per pupil.

That's crazy. I mean, that is a tough ask, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Do you remember in that documentary in 2005? He said something. thing in it that I have thought about almost every day since. Did you watch it? What's that? Yes, I did.

I'm sure it did, but I don't remember. He said the cuisine in schools are so bad that kids aren't, their stomachs are freezing up, they can't even digest, and poo is coming out of their mouth. Do you remember this? Are you sure he said that? I'm so certain he said it. I remember him having an issue with Turkey Twizzlers.

I don't remember that. I also remember him saying about parents shoving McDonald's through the railings as well. Do you remember that? Yeah, but I don't remember the pooing out of the mouth. But Chris, who am I to question you? Are you absolutely sure? Email, hello at oh what a time.com. I vividly remember him saying this and then thinking, that cannot be true.

I can see Ellis is currently looking that out. He's typing. Let's find out. I'm not, I'm not. I really hope this is wrong. Yeah, it's time to junk the junk food, says, say, the Guardian, 2005. not getting any pulling out of mouth. He did say that...

And Ellis, I think you can agree, it probably would come up on Google. He did say that we were feeding our children Scrotum burger shite and making the mill. Hang on, guys, I found an internet forum and this post... Oh my God, no, he's right.

Chris Scull is right. For others, it was a physician at the South London Hospital explaining calmly to camera that he sees children who were so constipated on their diet a fibres factory food that their colons have become compacted

with excrement and they've started vomiting their own feces. Chris skull. Oh my God. I remember that. I want to shake you by the hand. Do you know what?

I've never tried to Google his quote. I've just tried to see if it was possible which is obviously it's not, is it? I found another forum where people are talking about it.

He said he was a, yeah, like we're the nutritionist and the children were so constipated they were vomiting feces. This is impossible. Jesus. I hope he wasn't saying that when he was doing

one of those cookers. bits where he's over the stove telling you how to cut up vegetable to make a ragu. By the way, while we're here, let me just let me just tell you about this. Well, Chris, I apologise, I retract, I attract that corrections corner on the fly. But even at these rock-bottom prices that Jamie Oliver is having to deal with, at some points councils have decided they can't afford it. For example, during the two world wars, arguments raged over whether free school meals could be justified. The 1921 Education Act had consolidated the earlier legislation, but local authorities,

especially in mining areas, soon found they could not afford it. And so shortcuts are taken. In the coal lockouts of 1921 and 1926, the general strike of May 1926 and the depression of the late 1930s, school meals essentially took on the character of a soup kitchen. You would get bread and soup, at best, watery stew would be common fare. That's what you'd get. My kids love soup. Today. Well, we'll say that.

Yeah, it's one of the things they will eat. Maybe they'd have been okay in the Depression of the 1930s. But generally, you just get watered down soup, a little bread, and that's all you'd get. However, the 1944 Education Act at last saw school meals introduced on the size and scale envisaged by McMillan and Joward at the very beginning. School milk was then added, although that was then snatched away by Margaret Thatcher. Was it? Margaret Thatcher. of course, the milk snatcher in 1971 when she was the Education Secretary.

It's a great quote this. One observer from Liverpool said of her at the time that she has a way of pronouncing the word milk which invests it with more gloom than any other in the language. Here's another fun fact. A few years later, with Britain a member of the EEC, I love this, this is incredible, which is a precursor to the European Union,

Brussels offered to help reverse Fatcher's cuts by providing us with free milk for a six-month experiment. Wow. In a pan-European solidarity. So Europe just offered us loads of free milk. Do you think we take it? No, God, no. Correct. We do not, because the government is worried

it makes us look like we were too receptive to Europe's charms. I mean, come on, just take the free milk. Let the kids have the milk. If you're not going to be too tight to give the milk, just take the free milk and let the children benefit from it. And finally, though, what about more recent years? Well, in the 80s and 90s, outsourcing became the name of the game. So private companies would take over, meal quality rising and falling according to the profit motive, essentially.

Think of lunch lady Doris using Jim Matts as a substitute for meat and the Simpsons. The old complaints of meals being stodgy, of it being chips, custer spaghetti hoops all the time, added to the stigma not only of having school dinners, but also of being on free school meals. There really was a cruel stigma to that. Since 1944, educational authorities have been allowed to recoup the cost of meals by charging for that food except in the cases of need. And over time, this distinction became entrenched so that being on a free school meal became a marker of poverty and deprivation.

And even now, FSM, free school meals, is used in social policy analysis as an indication of those things. As a final interesting parallel, America has a very very important. very similar timeline to us. The National School Lunch Act was introduced in 1946. However, privatisation of lunchrooms in the 1980s similarly saw a sharp decline in standards. And in recent years, more active government intervention, initially championed by Michelle Obama, has improved matters again and various funding schemes have been put in place to universalise meal provision. As a final question, would you like to guess what unusual funding stream has been directed

into free school breakfast since 2025 in Arkansas, which is Bill Clinton's home state. Where do you think the money has come from that? What's unusual unexpected stream of revenue has helped the free school meal situation in Arkansas? Is it from sales of guns? No, it's not. Good guess, though.

Chris? I cannot think. What's Arkansas famous for? I don't know. It's not something that Arkansas is famous for at all, no. Not at all. and it's a very modern thing, but it's not what you think

the educational authority would be linking itself to it. I can't even guess. It's revenue from medical cannabis. Yes. Wow. Get the munchies, get a free breakfast. What more can you ask for?

But this money has been pumped in in Arkansas and is really helping the situation in that state. I've loved that episode, guys. What a fun episode that was. Tom? Great subject. Tom, it was educational. It was, oh, lovely.

Absolutely. And thank you, by the way. I think it's worth saying. It's important we thank him. Dr. Darrell Leeworthy, who is a fantastic historian who works for the show and gives so much time and effort and provides so much interesting stuff. We just can't thank him enough. And he's really not that out of the part. And he's a great freelance historian and writer. So if you need a historian to write something for you, he's your man. And you can get in touch with him through us. So please do that. Email the show, DM us and we will point him in your direction. And if you become a supporter of the show on Patreon or Apple, you will get a Tomorrow's World episode

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