SIR - Your interesting old picture of a flock of sheep being driven through Worcester city streets may well have been taken in Victorian times but it was a common enough occurrence when I was a lad. The men driving them usually had sticks with which they beat stragglers while dogs yapped at their heels. I must have been about seven years old when I interrupted my teacher to tell her this while she was giving a scripture lesson about good shepherds and how kind they were to their charges. "But those men are drovers, not shepherds" she explained.

Now in those days, each butcher's shop generally had its own slaughterhouse. There was one in nearby Wyld's Lane and the door was left open in summer. Young as I was, I had seen many a beast hoisted up by the hind leg and witnessed its convulsions and squeals as its life blood drained away and it became transformed from a living creature to a piece of meat.

I knew where those sheep were going. My hand shot up again. "But Miss, if the shepherds are so kind to the sheep why do they let the drovers have them ?" I was called out and given two strokes of the cane. This taught me a valuable lesson for later life. We may have freedom of speech but we still need to exercise discretion in what we say and how we say it.

JOHN HINTON,

Worcester