wemburywaves

On this day in Wembury, 6 August 1933

A short court report noted that a fifteen year old boy appeared before the Yealmpton justices after stealing two small sums of money and two purses from a tent at Wembury on the sixth of August. The amounts were sixteen shillings and sixpence in total, roughly the equivalent of about ten to fifteen pounds in today’s spending terms, depending on the calculation. It was a minor theft by modern standards, the sort of holiday-season opportunism that occasionally occurred around the tents and beach shelters of interwar Wembury.

What stands out today is the severity of the punishment. The magistrates sent him to Whipton Reformatory School for three years, an institutional sentence that would be viewed as extremely harsh by current standards. A modern court dealing with the same offence committed by a young teenager would be far more likely to use community measures, restorative approaches or short supervision orders rather than detention. The 1933 outcome reflects the very different attitudes of the period, when reformatory schools were a routine response even for relatively small offences.

Source, Western Morning News, 11 August 1933.