Girls' College
Independent girls' secondary school at 62 Livingstone Road, Suburbs, opened in January 1983 in the converted Queen's Court residential hotel; motto 'Our Hope is Constant in Thee'.
Girls’ College began as a hotel. In October 1982 a newly formed trust took over the Queen’s Court residential hotel in the Suburbs, one of Bulawayo’s oldest neighbourhoods. The contractors moved in the same day, and three months later it was a school. The first magazine has a photograph captioned “The first tree falls,” followed by pages of “Bricks, bricks, bricks and more bricks! Scaffolding, noise, mud, dust and disorder.”
The first year
The school opened in January 1983 with 75 Form One girls, in the headmaster’s words “curious, somewhat bewildered, un-uniformed.” The first-term staff list has six names, headmaster included, and each of them taught several subjects. Mrs Judd, the founding headmaster wrote, covered French, Geography, Needlework and Art, and “sometimes I don’t think she knew whether she should be threading needles, painting posters, pointing compasses or conjugating verbs.” Mrs Wood, a farmer’s daughter, was also “appointed the official truck and bus driver.”
In the second term another 110 girls arrived, in Forms 2, 3 and 4, together with eight more teachers. The new classroom block was finished just in time: “the last concrete on the stairway being poured on the Saturday before we opened on the Monday.” On 20 October 1983 the College held its first Speech Day. The guest of honour was Mr D. Turner, headmaster of Falcon College. The founding headmaster was Mr Ross Fuller, who led the school for twenty years.
According to Wikipedia, the Girls’ College Trust was formed in September 1982 to establish a private, multi-racial, interdenominational girls’ secondary school. The headmaster’s report is open about the difficulties of the time: “good secondary school teachers are something of an endangered species in this country.”
Badge and motto
The badge carries a red crosslet. The magazine explains that the same symbol appears in the Bulawayo coat of arms, “denoting the coming of Christianity and of formal education to this country.” It is also part of the arms of the Macdonald family, who had owned the property for some forty years. The College motto, Our Hope is Constant in Thee, comes from the Macdonald crest. Above the crosslet, three linked gold rings stand for teachers, pupils and parents, among other threes.
What came after
The first Cambridge O-level examinations were written in 1984, and the Sixth Form began in 1985. In 1988 Girls’ College took the inter-schools athletics trophy from Eveline, which had won it five years running. The Ross Fuller Hall opened in 1991. Mr Fuller retired in 2003. According to Wikipedia, his successors were Hazel Vorster (2003–07), Neil Todd (acting, 2007–08), Lesley Ross (2008–25) and Asani Phiri (from 2026). Former pupils include the writer Novuyo Tshuma.
What we don’t know yet
- Queen’s Court. What was the hotel like, who stayed there, and when did the Macdonald family own it? If you have a photograph of Queen’s Court before 1982, we would love to see it.
- The first 75. The first magazine lists every Form One girl of 1983 by name. If you were one of them, tell us what you remember.
Sources
- Girls’ College Magazine, November 1982 – December 1983: editorial; headmaster’s report, 20 October 1983; “Uniform and Badge”; “From inception to maturity” photographs; staff lists.
- Wikipedia, “Girls’ College”: address, Trust, examinations, later heads, alumni.
- For the 1988 athletics trophy: Eveline High School magazine, 1988 (see the Eveline page).
Do you know more about this? Corrections, photographs and your own account are all welcome, and a correction is published on the page with the date it was made. Send something in.