Oh, how the head of our lower school must have congratulated himself when he struck upon the cure for bullying, so beautiful in its simplicity. We had to wear blazers, and had to carry our school calendar in our breast pocket (A5 card folded into three, nice blue colour which poked out of the pocket, and looked a bit like one of David Niven's hankies - very dapper). Everyone in the school was instructed to clearly write their name on the top of the calendar, so we were all effectively wearing nametags. Now here comes the genius of it: as the most likely bullying targets, we lower school boys were told that, upon finding ourselves in a sticky situation, we were to look our aggressors in the eye, point at their name tag, and inform them,
"I know your name."
Then, for fear of repercussions, or because of the humanising element, bullying would cease.
Sadly, and almost unbelievably, this was not to be the case. Many of our school?s ingenious thugs simply wrote something on the back of the card, then in times of violence or escape, they could simply reverse the card. These "dummy plates" ranged from the names of members of the bee-keeping club and librarians, through to "Michael Ryan" and various gung-ho statements such as "Eat Lead" and "Feel the Fist".