Eastbourne manslaughter

R v Hopley (more commonly known as the Eastbourne manslaughter) was an 1860 legal case in Eastbourne, England, concerning the death of 15-year-old Reginald Cancellor (some sources give his name as Chancellor and his age as 13 or 14) at the hands of his teacher, Thomas Hopley. Hopley used corporal punishment with the stated intention of overcoming what he perceived as stubbornness on Cancellor's part, but instead beat the boy to death.

An inquest into Cancellor's death began when his brother requested an autopsy. As a result of the inquest Hopley was arrested and charged with manslaughter. He was found guilty at trial and sentenced to four years in prison, although he insisted that his actions were justifiable and that he was not guilty of any crime. The trial was sensationalised by the Victorian press and incited debate over the use of corporal punishment in schools. After Hopley's release and subsequent divorce trial, he largely disappeared from the public record. The case became an important legal precedent in the United Kingdom for discussions of corporal punishment in schools and reasonable limits on discipline.

Thomas Hopley, aged 41 at the time of the incident, was a schoolmaster in Eastbourne who ran a private boarding school out of his home at 22 Grand-parade. He was well educated and from a middle-class family, the son of a Royal Navy surgeon and brother of artist Edward Hopley. His household was fairly well off, and he and his wife kept several servants. Hopley was described by Algernon Charles Swinburne as "a person of high attainments and irreproachable character". He expressed "utopian" educational ideals shared by many Victorian educational theorists. He wrote pamphlets on education topics which included "Lectures on the Education of Man", "Help towards the physical, intellectual and moral elevation of all classes of society", and "Wrongs which cry out for redress" advocating the abolition of child labour.

In October 1859, he was offered £180 a year (compared to an average annual salary of £94 for a male public elementary school teacher in 1860) to teach Reginald Channell Cancellor, a "robust" boy who had been "given up as ineducable". Reginald was the son of John Henry Cancellor (1799–1860), a court master and a "man of fair position" from Barnes, Surrey. The boy had previously been a student at a private school in St. Leonards and under a private tutor. He was not a good student, with contemporary sources suggesting he "had water on the brain" and describing him as "stolid and stupid". Hopley attributed Cancellor's failure to learn to stubbornness. On 18 April 1860 he asked the boy's father for permission to use "severe corporal punishment" to obtain compliance, with permission being granted two days later. Hopley did not possess the cane traditionally used to administer corporal punishment to students, so instead he used a skipping rope and a walking stick.

...
Wikipedia