<P> In Lewis Carroll's early poem The Two Brothers 1853 one laments: "Oh would I were back at Twyford School, Learning lessons in fear of the birch!" as his sadistic brother uses him as fish bait . </P> <P> Today birching is rarely used as a judicial punishment, and it has also almost completely died out as a punishment for children . </P> <P> In the United Kingdom, birching as a judicial penalty, in both its juvenile and adult versions, was abolished in 1948, but it was retained until 1962 as a punishment for violent breaches of prison discipline . The Isle of Man (a small island between Britain and Ireland with its own legal system as a British Crown dependency) caused a good deal of controversy by continuing to birch young offenders until 1976 . The birch was also used on offending teenage boys until the mid-1960s on the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey . </P> <P> In Trinidad and Tobago, the Corporal Punishment Act 1953 allows the High Court to order males, in addition to another punishment (often concurrent with a prison term), to undergo corporal punishment in the form of either a' flogging' with a knotted cat o' nine tails (made of cords, as in the Royal Navy tradition) or a' whipping' with a' rod' (i.e. switch) of tamarind, birch or other switches, and it allows the President to approve other instruments; in 2000, the minimum age was raised from 16 to 18, the legal threshold of adulthood . It may now be the only country in the world still officially using the birch . </P>

When was the birch abolished in the isle of man