B. B. Gordon

B. B. Gordon, called Squirts by the boys, is a master at Philip Carey’s school whose classroom authority is marked by anger rather than patience. His importance lies less in a developed personal history than in the lasting effect of his conduct: he makes Philip afraid to speak, converts the boy’s club-foot into an instrument of humiliation, and exposes the limits of the school’s safeguards against abusive discipline.

Position and Temperament

Gordon teaches the form Philip enters after the preparatory school. The narrator presents him as ill-suited to teaching: impatient and choleric, with little capacity for self-control in a room where the pupils are small boys and no one seems able to hold him to account. He begins work in anger and ends it in a passion. His physical appearance reinforces this impression of barely contained agitation: he is short of stature, corpulent, with closely cropped sandy hair turning gray, a bristly moustache, a large red face, indistinct features, and small blue eyes. When anger takes hold, his face darkens toward purple; while a boy tries to construe, Gordon may sit shaking and biting his nails down to the quick.

The narrator says that stories of Gordon’s violence may have been exaggerated, but records a serious case from two years earlier. Gordon struck a boy named Walters on the ears with a book so forcefully that the boy’s hearing was affected and he had to leave the school. Walters’s father threatened prosecution, and the incident provoked indignation in Tercanbury and comment in the local paper. Yet the other boys, though they loathed Gordon, took his side and made life uncomfortable for Walters’s younger brother, who remained at the school. The episode shows that the institution’s power relations were not simply a contest between a master and his pupils: the boys’ collective response helped protect the master from consequences and redirected the costs onto the family of the boy who had been hurt.

Discipline and Classroom Conflict

Gordon’s formal powers had been curtailed by a rule forbidding masters to cane boys on the hand. He could no longer use a cane to emphasize his anger by beating the desk. His restraint, however, did not amount to gentleness. He still took naughty or refractory boys by the shoulders and shook them; he could also make a boy stand with one arm outstretched for ten minutes or as long as half an hour, and he continued to use violent language. His conduct therefore persists through different means even after the school removes one sanctioned instrument of punishment.

Philip initially expects school to be less frightening than it was at Mr. Watson’s preparatory school. He knows some of the boys, feels more grown-up, and hopes the larger school will make his deformity less conspicuous. Gordon quickly destroys that relative ease. Perceiving which boys are frightened of him, he appears to take a particular dislike to Philip. Philip, who had enjoyed his work, begins to dread the hours in class. Rather than risk giving a wrong answer and provoking abuse, he sits silent; as his turn to construe approaches, he grows sick and pale with apprehension. The contrast with Mr. Perkins is sharp: Philip’s happiest classroom moments come when the headmaster teaches the form, invites him to answer, and gives him a chance to display his general knowledge.

Philip’s success with Mr. Perkins becomes another source of Gordon’s resentment. When Philip is called on to translate, Gordon glares and bites his thumb as the boy begins in a low voice. After Gordon shouts at him not to mumble, Philip cannot get the words out. Gordon mocks the discrepancy between the headmaster’s good opinion of the boy and his own: he calls Philip a blockhead, repeats the insult loudly, and adds a reference to his club-foot. He then orders Philip to fetch the Black Book, where the boys’ misdeeds are recorded and a third entry brings caning. Gordon records the incident as gross impertinence, although Philip does not understand what he has done to deserve it.

Philip’s Vulnerability and the Limits of Redress

Gordon’s insult draws force from a stigma Philip already experiences beyond this particular classroom. At his first encounter with another boy, Philip is asked what is wrong with his foot and instinctively hides it behind his sound one before naming the condition. At school, boys imitate his limp during a playground game, turning his movement into their entertainment. In Gordon’s classroom the same visible difference is not merely noticed but invoked by an adult wielding authority. The sequence makes clear how an ordinary physical characteristic can become a social vulnerability, exposed first to peer mockery and then exploited through a teacher’s public language.

The headmaster’s handling of the Black Book incident provides some redress, but it does not erase Philip’s fear. When Mr. Perkins asks what the entry concerns, Philip repeats that Gordon called him a club-footed blockhead. Perkins sees that the boy is white-faced and visibly distressed. The scene distinguishes the written disciplinary charge from what has happened in the classroom: the official record names Philip’s supposed impertinence, while his explanation points to Gordon’s insult and the power imbalance behind it. The available account does not establish a lasting penalty for Gordon; instead, it shows the headmaster encountering evidence of the mistreatment and recognizing Philip’s distress.

Narrative Role and Significance

Gordon functions as a concentrated example of authority exercised without sympathy. His impatience turns learning into a threat, while his readiness to identify and target a frightened pupil gives classroom discipline a personal, arbitrary edge. The Black Book sharpens the irony: a system intended to catalogue boys’ offences can be used against the child who has been insulted by the master who controls it.

His treatment of Philip also connects the school’s social environment to the novel’s recurring attention to the club-foot. Children mimic the limp; Philip tries to conceal his foot; Gordon makes it part of a public rebuke. These are different encounters, but together they show how stigma is created and renewed through other people’s attention and speech. Gordon’s curtailed right to cane boys demonstrates that the school can limit a form of physical punishment, yet his remaining power to shake, intimidate, and shame them leaves the deeper problem of unchecked authority unresolved.