The origins of our oldest schools are obscured by the sands of time. I've done a bit of research into the schools in the Northern part of the country and have found that most of those who have been operating for more than 100 years were founded by the Church in the last years of the 19th Century, and they then morphed into other institutions before becoming what they are today.
Joburg's oldest school, St Mary's Waverly was established by the Church of England in 1888, in the mining camp that became the city, and it, as an exception, was always called St Mary's. The predecessor to Jeppe High School came two years later, in 1890.
I'd always assumed that those were the oldest existing schools in the region, but I'd forgotten that Pretoria was the capital of the then Transvaal Republic and it had been settled before gold was discovered on the Reef.
The picture was made clearer for me last Saturday when I went to St Mary's DSG in Pretoria to be at their 145th Anniversary Hockey Festival. I arrived there feeling curious – 145 years, I realised, would make them the oldest school in this part of the country (by my definition of continuous operation).
One of the first people I was introduced to when I got there was the Executive Head, Mrs Odelle Howard. I asked her about the school's history, and for the next two hours the hockey was put aside - when you meet a passionate person who really knows her stuff, you shut up and listen. She told me about how the first Bishop of the Diocese of Pretoria, Rev Henry Brougham Bousfield, started a school in his own house in 1879 for his six daughters. He called it St Etheldreda's School for Girls and it has continued operating until today, with two name changes on the way.
In 1902, at the end of the South African War, Lord Alfed Milner, the Governor of the newly formed Transvaal Colony, established the Milner Schools as part of an attempt to Anglicise the population. Two of those new schools would be in Pretoria – a Boys' and a Girls' High – and, seeing there was already a girls'-only school in town – St Ethedlreda – the Education Department decided to take it over and build the new Pretoria Girls' High on it.
The new Bishop of Pretoria Bishop William Marlborough Carter (Bousfield had died by then) refused. Assistance was given by an Anglican Educational order based in Wantage in England, and the school became the DSG Pretoria in 1903.
In 1928 the school moved to its current site and assumed the name St Mary's DSG Pretoria.
I'd come to Pretoria to watch the hockey, so after that fascinating dive into Educational History, I went out to the fields.
What was happening out there, Melinda Vos the school's Director of Sport explained to me, was a celebration, not a competition. It was an excuse for like-mined schools and old friends to meet up over three days and have the girls enjoy themselves in the winter sunshine. "Of course, the girls are competitive during the games, but we aren't concerned with results and we don't keep scores," she said.
It's for under-12 and under-13 teams and the concept is endorsed by the schools that compete every year. They are mainly independent schools, Laerskool Lynwood was there this year, although Vos explained that the local state schools usually do come, but they were having their league playoff at the same time this year.
"Like with everything else, we lost momentum with Covid-19, but we are back to where we were before and can't really accommodate more teams without having to use an Astro field somewhere else," Vos said
There were 26 teams competing, on two fields, so the event had to run like clockwork, and it did. The atmosphere was loud and festive, with hordes of girls milling about, warming up and playing all manner of other games among themselves.
It was breath of fresh air for a jaded old sports hack like me – kids playing sport for the joy of playing. No-one seemed to get cross about anything and a couple of hundred girls went home each night exhausted, but happy.
It all fits in with the school's values-based education that the Executive Head had told me about earlier in the day. May it go on for another 145 years!
