Parents
At 10 o’clock while my form was with me in came Abbey to say he believed Wetenhall [b. 1847] and Lindsay mi. [b. 1847] had run away! Told him to tell West first. It seemed it was true. They went to Oxford but were encountered there by Risley who brought them back. I am very sorry for it. There is no reason but that of childish folly, but these things do harm in many ways and I doubt the wisdom of the way in which the Warden proposes to treat the case. It is, to send for the parents and require that they should acquiesce in the boys being flogged or treated in any way the Warden may think fit. But parents are weak, and it is hard to make them judge their own children. They are not all Brutuses.

William Wood’s Diary 1855-1861, ed. by Mark Spurrell, is available from Oxfordshire Record Society. These excerpts are presented to give a flavour of life at Radley in the 1850s