I was belted at school. It felt unfair, but was it harmful?

I imagine he had wanted to be Matisse. Instead, he found himself teaching art to teenage boys in a Scottish provincial town, class after class, day after day, year after year. Life had flashed past. In 1924 he visited the British Empire exhibition at Wembley as an art student, to be thrilled by the new products he found there. Now, 30-odd years later, he stood in his teacher’s black gown before form 2F and tried to interest us in this experience: how it was there that he first saw how abstract shapes – a circle, a triangle, a rectangle – could be the basis of a design for a fabric or a poster, such as the one he was asking us to draw for a shipping line. But we had begun to chat among ourselves.

“The next boy who talks gets the belt,” he shouted, and a second or two later singled me out as a culprit. It seemed unfair – I hadn’t been talking any more than the rest – but I went to the front and stretched out my arms so that they met in front of me, one hand supporting the other. I can’t remember how many he gave me – probably three or four rather than six (“six of the best” was the phrase) – but he cracked the belt down along the hand, from fingertips to wrist, rather than across it at 90 degrees. He was too furious and out of control to be accurate. The belt’s tails reached my lower arm, and by the time I went home two purple stripes had risen on the tender skin. My mother was angry; she even talked briefly of registering a formal complaint. I was glad when the subject was dropped.

Belting was quite usual then. I got it from the deputy head for throwing snowballs in the playground, and from my Latin teacher for making mistakes in my corrections. Belts came in two or three weights and shapes – two-tail, three-tail – and teachers either kept them in handy drawers or looped them over their shoulders and under their gowns as a crafty gunslinger might. “This is Percy,” Mr Bachelor, the music teacher, said one day, exhibiting his two-tail model to the class. “His full name is Percy Cution.” He did his best to give us a menacing smile and then began to bang out Marie’s Wedding on the piano: “Step we gaily, on we go / Heel for heel and toe for toe” and so on. We sang vigorously, thrilled by his gothic humour.

It’s difficult now to know what to think of these events: with what degree of distaste (if any) to look back at them; how to fit their memory into a new morality that invites us to redefine previous patterns of behaviour, once thought to be “normal”, as bullying and abusive. A new book by the always-interesting Scottish writer Carol Craig argues that Scotland’s poor health, the worst in western Europe, has its roots in the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences, an American term signifying an upbringing affected by the stresses caused typically by a proximity to drugs, alcohol and violence.

“As a country, we need to admit that nurturing children has never been one of Scotland’s strengths,” she writes in the introduction to Hiding in Plain Sight. In a piece in this week’s Scottish Review, she contends that teachers were encouraged to belt a pupil in front of the class because the Scottish educational system “was designed to instil fear”. She says that in the course of her research she encountered hardly anyone of our generation (hers and mine) who hadn’t been belted, “many of them multiple times”, for offences as trivial as giggling.

Craig reminds us that the belt was wielded in primary as well as secondary schools, and that girls got belted as well as boys. (I personally have no memory of a girl being belted; to me, it was a gendered punishment.) England was no stranger to corporal punishment in schools either, but Scotland was far more addicted to it – the contrast between the two educational systems grew after English local authorities began to limit the use of the cane in the 1960s. The truth is that the belt was popular in Scotland among parents and teachers, and its banning from state schools in 1987 stemmed from a judgment by the European court of human rights rather than local lobbying. Private schools had to wait until 1998 in England and 2000 in Scotland. Poland had banned it as long ago as 1783, the Netherlands in 1920 and Italy in 1928, but Scotland preserved a reverence for it, perhaps partly because the chosen pain-giver had its own Scottish name, the “tawse”, a word that, like “dominie” and “lad o’ pairts”, appeared frequently in the stern but at one time famously successful story of Scottish education. In 1973, Edinburgh’s education committee voted to phase out the belt by 1977, but abandoned the decision after loud opposition from schoolteachers who were zealous of their right to beat children as young as five.

In 1972, according to logs kept by teachers, the belt was used about 30,000 times on an Edinburgh school population of 80,000, and 494 girls aged between five and 11 were among the 4,201 schoolchildren belted in the spring term of 1973. These statistics come from a piece I wrote at the time. Retrieving one’s feelings from that time is a far harder job, but I think they ran along the lines that belting, so far as I could tell, had done me no harm. I had feared a teacher’s sarcasm far more. I sympathised with a good friend, a teacher in a rough Glasgow school, who said: “Basically, it’s a matter of convenience … when you’re faced with a class of 40 15-year-old boys who don’t want to be there anyway, pelting you with paper balls, the quickest, surest way to get some kind of attention is to belt somebody. Then you can get on with the history of U-boat warfare or why the UN is a good thing.”

In the Fife mining town of Lochgelly, saddler John J Dick made the belts known as Lochgelly specials. When I went to see him in 1974, he reported that business was booming, with the home trade supported by exports to particularly Scottish parts of the old empire such as Malawi and New Zealand. Dick had recently discontinued the extra-heavyweight line, but still produced belts in five other varieties, including a 2ft-long, two-tail heavyweight for £1.98. I remember how wary he was of publicity, previous newspaper stories having led to inquiries from people who wanted belts for what he would describe only as “other uses”.

The saddlery still exists, run now by the late Dick’s daughter, Margaret, who has written a history of the tawse on the company’s website. She rejoices in its disappearance – “for humankind to develop we must stop beating each other, and I look forward to that day” – but, surprisingly, still makes a few for what she calls “the collectors’ market”. All weights and shapes are available at a price; a two-tail heavyweight now costs £160. Here at least, cruelty has taken on the strange innocence of folklore.

• Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist