Whatever Happened To … Whittling

When I was at Junior School (ages 7-10 years) in the early sixties, every boy and, I suspect, many of the girls would take a knife to school. Not because Bournemouth was a hotbed of knife culture and we needed to defend ourselves, but because knives were an essential part of school life. We needed something to sharpen our pencils with, carve our names in desks, and … to whittle.

No teacher would have dreamed of confiscating our knives. They didn’t like the name carving but – the rest – that wa...