pandy bat

plural pandy bats · alternative pandy-bat · alternative pandybat

1. Irelandhistorical(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

   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.

   5 more 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 […]

   1916, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC

   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.

   1991 March 3, Gregory Allen, “Letters: Christian Brothers”, in The Irish Times, page 11

   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.

   1991, Benedict Kiely, Drink to the Bird: a Memoir, London: Methuen, →ISBN, page 69

   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.

   1995, Aidan Higgins, Donkey's Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told, London: Secker & Warburg, →ISBN, pages 140-141