Eveline High School

From 1910

Also known as Eveline, Eveline School, Eveline Girls' High School.

Bulawayo's oldest government girls' high school, opened with Milton in July 1910 by Sir William and Lady Milton; motto 'Upright and True'.

On the morning of 26 26 July 1910 when two new Bulawayo schools were opened, the pupils of both were told to assemble at one of them: Eveline. Sir William Milton, the Administrator, and Lady Milton opened both schools that day. The boys’ school took his name. The girls’ school became Eveline. For more than a century since, Eveline has been the girls’ school at the heart of the city.

Upright and True

Eveline’s motto is Upright and True. Its colours have a pioneer story. In a message for the 70th anniversary in 1980, the Mayor of Bulawayo, Councillor M. L. Constandinos, wrote: “The school, being a pioneer high school, adopted for its colours those of the Selous Pioneers.” In 1985 the first-intake visitors were moved to see “the traditional brown and blue uniforms” in the hall.

Generations of girls remember the same things: the six houses, the prefects, the inter-house plays, the Leavers’ Assembly, and above all the marula tree in the quadrangle. An old girl of the 1920s recalled being caught with a friend eating fallen marulas and the matron’s dose of castor oil that followed. Sixty years later, a new Form 1 girl’s first instruction was to “go and stand by the marula tree.” At one garden party, all the fruit was picked from the tree in advance, “lest one should fall on the not-too-well thatched pate of the Governor.”

The Eveline Old Girls’ Association was formed in 1920 and kept going for sixty-four years.

Seventy years on: 1980

The 1980 magazine marked the school’s 70th anniversary, and it had an extra reason to celebrate. The headmistress, Miss E. C. (Liz) Dreyer, had just managed the Zimbabwe women’s hockey team that won the new country’s first Olympic gold medal in Moscow. The team’s top scorer, Pat McKillop, was an old girl, and so was Helen Volk.

The same issue carried memories from three former heads: Miss Penelope Gordon (1940–54), Miss W. M. Powell (1954–68) and Mrs Elizabeth Burke (1968–78).

Becoming a Zimbabwean school

Over the next decade Eveline changed more than in any decade before. The deputy head, Mrs R. Smith, wrote the clearest account in 1985: “The most dramatic alteration in the school took place in 1979 when we became multi-racial; to some of us this seemed a formidable step, but the matter was out of our hands.” The first new arrivals, she wrote, were Indian girls. One of them, Leena Panditji, became head girl in 1983, the same year Ruth Shiri became the school’s first African deputy head girl.

The first writing in isiNdebele and chiShona appeared in the school magazine in 1982. In 1984 Mrs M. Muguti became acting headmistress, the school’s first Black head. She was headmistress by 1985 and still leading the school in 1990. The Old Girls’ Association dissolved the same year. In its own words, “Some have died; some have emigrated.”

At the 75th anniversary assembly in July 1985, before 1,052 pupils, three members of the very first intake of 1910 spoke about the school’s first days: Mrs Bond, Mrs Byerley and Mr Baron.

Read more

The story of Eveline’s first eighty-eight years is told in Eveline High School: A Historic Preview, 1910–1998. A book on Eveline in the 1980s is in preparation. If you were at Eveline in those years, we would especially like to hear from you.

What we don’t know yet

• The 1989 magazine is missing from our collection. Do you have a copy?
• Your Eveline. Your house, your teachers, the marula tree, sports day. Whenever you were there, tell us what you remember.