Michaelhouse Chronicle 1997 CENTEI^RY EDITION
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Michaelhouse Chronicle 1997 CENTEI^RY EDITION This little one stayed at home This little one had roast beef This little one had none This little one went to market Unit Trusts still offer one of the best wealth-creating, inflation- beating investments available. But the market can be uncertain at times. At Sanlam, our specialist Unit Trusts team use knowledge, FM Sanlam III Unit Trusts Your investment in good hands experience, skill and an ear to the ground to protect the value of our investors' money, no matter what. Give us a call. It's one little decision you'll never regret. Phone 0800 220 567 toll-free between 08h00 and 17h00. Sanlam Unit Trus ts are now available through the internet at http://www.sanlam.co.za. The selling and repurchase prices of units are based on ruling share pric es and the value of the units therefore fluctuates accordingly from time to time. Besides an initial charge not exceeding 5%, a service charge of 1/12 of 1,14%, calculated on the market value of the portfolio at the e nd of every month, is levied, as well as an obligatory cost included in th e purchase price. Returns are based on actual unit prices and include the reinvestment of distributions. Should you wish to convert all or part of your investment into cash, the management company will purchase units from you at the ruling price in accordance with the Unit Trusts Control Act and the applicable trust deeds. BERRY BUSH/BBDO SAN 0029/E Michaelhouse Chronicle MICHAELHOUSE, BALGOWAN 3275 • MARCH 1997 ADDRESS BY MR A J ARDINGTON, CHAIR- MAN OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS, AT THE UNVEILING OF THE PLAQUE AT THE ORIGINAL SITE OF MICHAELHOUSE AT NO. 380 LOOP STREET. 5TH AUGUST, 1996 "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..." The start of Henry V's great speech before the Battle of Agincourt is appropriate to this little gathering as we consider the event that took place this day a century ago on 5 August 1896 when the Rev. James Cameron Todd and his two members of staff, Spencer Tryon and H C Dobree, opened the doors of Michaelhouse at 380 Loop Street, Pietermaritzburg to admit fifteen boys - five day boys and ten boarders. There were many sceptics about the future success of this new school. Its predecessor, Bishops, had closed its doors in 1880. In the latter part of the last century universal formal schooling was not well established in the English speaking world. In Britain, out of a population of 2.5 million pupils of school going age, the Newcastle Commission of 1861 found less than 35,000 attended secondary schools. Nearly all elementary schools were denominational schools aided by Government grants. Ten to twenty percent of children did not go to school at all and the overwhelming majority attended no more than four years of schooling. The position in this Colony was certainly worse. It was only in 1863 that the Colonial Government formed the first sec- ondary school, Maritzburg College. DHS followed three years later and a private, non-denominational school, Hilton College, followed six years after that. Do not think that these were widely supported establishments. In 1877 there were only 25 pupils at Maritzburg College and St Andrews College, founded in 1856 in the Cape, saw its numbers fall as low as 17 by 1880. The establishment of a school under the auspices of the Church of the Province of South Africa was going to be a difficult task. Bishops College of Maritzburg suffered signifi- cant disadvantages compared to St Andrews in Grahamstown and Bishops at Rondebosch. In the Cape there were no State competitors where as we have seen in Natal, State schools had already been established. But of even more relevance was the fact that the church was divided following the Colenso controversy into "clergy without churches and churches without clergy" and neither Bishop MacRorie nor Bishop Colenso were able to take an appropriate measure of interest in Bishops College. The divisions in the church healed in the 1890"s and in 1893 Arthur Hamilton Baines became Bishop of Maritzburg. There were also a new prosperity in the Colony as trade grew with the Transvaal and the world. The growing confi- dence of what had been little more than a garrison town illustrated by the building of a City Hall in Pietermaritzburg which was burnt down shortly thereafter and the city had the confidence to immediately rebuild it. And so, James Cameron Todd, with the encouragement of the Bishop, was to prove the sceptics wrong. Within two years numbers had risen to 50. Despite the start of the South African War in 1899 the school continued to grow and when it moved in 1902 to the Jaffrey land at Balgowan, numbers were up to 77. Todd had a capacity to inspire young men with enthusiasm. Scholarship and religious instruction were the primary func- tions of the school. His vision for his school is recorded in the first issue of St Michaels' Chronicle. "A boy's connection with the school is not severed when he leaves but lasts throughout life. I mean that his whole tone, moral and spiritual as well as intellectual is largely deter- mined for life by his school; and that to his dying day he will be different from what he would have been if he had been at any other school. Every school has its own character or Mr Tony Ardington unveils the Michaelhouse Commemorative Plaque in L oop St. 1 engraved stamp which impresses on each of its members however they may differ from one another. Hence the old boys of a school necessarily form a brotherhood wherever they may be." But Todd was also an enthusiastic supporter of games and played rugby and cricket with the boys. Some of his staff were equally enthusiastic, the first addition to which was a Cambridge rugby blue. J C A Rigby. Dobree, whose enthu- siasm for the school was unbounded, felt that there was a correlation between rugby and scholastic achievement writ- ing in the Chronicle that "by setting the blood freely in motion, rugby especially is beneficial to the brain". The coin- cidental arrival of Langley at Maritzburg College in 1896 and Todd's foundation of Michaelhouse ensured the future of rugby in Natal schools, most of which then played Association football. But Todd also had a vision of the environment in which his young charges should grow up. C W Hannah, to whom Todd spoke about his vision of Michaelhouse in persuading him to join the staff in 1898, recalled the first inspection of the site at Balgowan with Todd in 1899 when he revisited the school in 1946. "Never shall I forget when I first saw the site at Balgowan. A few days later I stood with Canon Todd about where the rondavels are. Remember that, at that time this was a piece of bare veld, not a tree, not a building, not a shrub. He then pictured to me the type of school he intended to build and marvellously accurate his vision proved. The great quadran- gle almost exactly as it is today. Even the chapel as we hope soon to see it for he wished to build a crypt chapel on which should eventually rise a great chapel worthy of the school he meant to build." The tenuous lease over a few properties in Pietermaritzburg by a private school was replaced by the first buildings at Balgowan on land owned by a Trust - Michaelhouse had become a "public school" governed by a permanent Trust Deed. It was "public" in the sense that the Trustees had an obligation to the public imposed on them by the provisions of the Trust Deed and the school was not run for private profit. Todd's vision seemed secure. Two other schools operating today started as a result of Michaelhouse. In 1912, arising out of an initiative of the Board of Governors of Michaelhouse, Cordwalles was established on Town Hill and today continues to have a close and mutually beneficial relationship with Michael- house. The second school is Asithuthuka, the farm school at Michaelhouse. It was founded in 1949 as a day school. We need to remind ourselves that it was illegal for a farm school to offer education to blacks beyond Standard 2 in the fifties. Twenty years later one still required special permis- sion to offer education beyond Standard 4. A farm school offering education to matric is a relatively recent novelty. Subjected to these constraints, Asithuthuka has grown steadily to a school right through to Matric and today has 800 pupils, 80% of whom come from families with no con- nection to Michaelhouse, with approximately 70 writing matric each year. Standing here one hundred years later we have the benefit of hindsight - to what extent has Michaelhouse filled its mis- sion? Barrett in his history of the school describes Rex Pennington as a new Rector taking up the task begun by Todd, a task "continually changing in its demands but ever the same in its purpose to educate young people for Christian service to their country". In a critical review Barrett goes on "But in two respects at least the vision and faith of the founders have been justified: the education the school was able to provide became markedly and more genuinely liberal - in the sense that it assumed that man's intellect is what contributes most to his freedom and in the sense that there is more than one way to train the intellect; and the rec- tors have consistently upheld the view that Christian witness should be the distinguishing feature of the school." That was 25 years ago.