I think you are probably from the United States? You have to remember that the British were an almost uniquely barbaric race (rivalled only by Australians, Canadians, South Africans, and of course the Crown dependency of the Isle of Man).
Until the 1960s, boys at Eton College were birched on their bare buttocks in public. Eton was unusual only in continuing to use the birch until the later 20th century. At Harrow School, birching was so famous that the school preserves a birch and a birching block to display to visitors. At Eton and virtually all public schools, it was also tradition that corporal punishment was inflicted not only by teachers but also by older pupils (in some schools, a majority of beatings were carried out by senior pupils). This practice was so widespread that Douglas Hurd, for example, Britain’s sometime home secretary and foreign secretary, was renowned for the sadistic beatings he had administered as a schoolboy. The King’s School, Canterbury, an Anglican establishment attached to Canterbury Cathedral, used to have a tradition known as a “school beating”, in which the victim was summoned to the school library and all the school prefects took turns to beat him with a cane. A “school beating” was such an ordeal that it was the only corporal punishment at the school to be administered on the clothed, rather than bare, buttocks.
Even at schools that did not use the birch, caning was common, both for misbehaviour and poor academic work. The headmaster of one public school once infamously caned the entire rugby team for losing a game. Note that a caning at such a school meant multiple strokes on the bare buttocks. Although most schools abandoned caning in the 1980s, it remained legal in private schools until 1999. For example, the St James boys’ school in Surrey was still caning boys until 1996 (some claim even later). The last school to cane girls was reportedly Rodney School in the mid 1990s. State schools were still using corporal punishment when it was banned in 1986, except in London, where it had been banned by the local authority in 1979 - some smaller local authorities may also have imposed voluntary bans around the same time. As recently as 1981, the British children’s TV show Grange Hill showed a girl being caned by the headmistress, something which was not remotely implausible at the time.
In 2017, a scandal came to light involving John Smyth, a senior British barrister. It was revealed that in the 1970s and 80s he had been involved with an Anglican charity called the Iwerne Trust, which organised camps for boys from public schools. During these camps, and on other occasions, Smyth had beaten boys until they bled. He got away with it because, although the severity of his beatings was extreme, it was not wholly different to the kinds of beatings that were standard in public schools.
Apologies for a rambling reply. My point is that severe physical beatings were the standard method of discipline in many/most British schools until the 1970s and even later. Whalebones seem to have been a peculiarity of Catholic schools, but this probably wasn’t any more barbaric than the beatings given in Anglican schools.
