A number of ministers said that they were surprised by his charm and good manners and his persistence in private

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A number of ministers said that they were surprised by his charm and good manners, and his persistence in private, since they had expected an uncouth firebrand. But this did not deter the energetic Flannery from going, as he often did, on delegations or with fellow members of the Tribune Group of which he was chairman in 1980-81 to see Tory ministers. Are the British government doing anything to get William Beausire home and to find out what the Chilean government have done? That he didn't get a helpful answer from the Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Cranley Onslow, was of no surprise to him. He was a passionate advocate of human rights, with excellent contacts with Amnesty International. I remember his sustained onslaughts in the early Eighties on the Chilean junta.

On 7 July 1982 Flannery asked: Does the minister remember the torturing of Sheila Cassidy who is now President of the Chilean Human Rights Committee? Does he further remember that William Beausire, who is a British as well as a Chilean citizen, was kidnapped from a plane in Argentina while on his way to Paris, taken back to Chile and tortured there? We have reason to believe that that young man is still alive. As an experienced and successful headmaster in a tough area of a tough city, Flannery was one of the driving forces in changing the parliamentary attitude to corporal punishment. And for 15 years few Commons debates on education were complete without his contribution. Where the Commons was less likely to listen to him was on foreign affairs, where he held extreme views and where he was suspected, rightly, of anti-Zionist tendencies and, wrongly, of anti-Jewish tendencies. Ever one for detail, Flannery told the Commons that in England and Wales there was a caning every 19 seconds and that it closed the channels of learning, made it more difficult for the teacher to teach and had all sorts of bad effects.

I then said, "Hands up those boys who have been caned", and 46 boys put their hands up. On one such occasion a little boy came and stood by my desk and boasted: "Sir, I have been caned." I asked: "Have you, John? What had you done?" He told me about some peccadillo for which he'd been caned Another child came up with his book and said the same thing I told him to go and sit down. He was a very good person, but as soon as there was any indiscipline he felt that he must use the cane. Like me, he had taught primary and secondary school children. He took over a class of mine in which there were 46 nine-year-olds I had found the class easy and friendly.