Hamilton High School

From 1959

Also known as Bulawayo South Boys' High School.

Government boys' high school in Famona, opened January 1959 as Bulawayo South Boys' High School under its founding headmaster Ian Grant.

Hamilton’s own history begins with a cricket match. On the first day of school in January 1959 there was net practice in the afternoon, because a game against Milton had already been fixed for that Saturday. Hamilton’s under-13 side won. The chapter written for the school’s twenty-fifth year asks, with some mischief, whether Milton “deliberately put in a weak side, feeling sorry for the new school?”

A name, a colour and a thistle

The school was planned as Bulawayo South Boys’ High School. Its first headmaster, Ian Grant, was acting head of Churchill School in Salisbury when he heard of the appointment in mid-1958, and he began designing the school’s identity before it had a building.

Its name came from geography and a Scottish streak. The school stood in Famona, a suburb named, as the chapter notes, after one of Lobengula’s daughters. It was bounded by Dundee Drive and Hamilton Road, and its headmaster had strong Scottish connections. The badge is a version of the Scottish thistle. The four houses were named after Highland regiments: Argyll, Cameron, Gordon and Seaforth. The first school magazine, which appeared in December 1959, was called The Thistle.

The motto came from Mrs Grant’s Latin, taken from Virgil’s Aeneid: Possunt quia posse videntur, “they can because they think they can.” The chapter adds that it was “not, as some boys have been tempted to think, something to do with a party of sheriffs men out searching for false teeth.”

Grant also chose a vivid colour. He had heard a radio commentator, during a rugby broadcast, pause to describe St George’s boys in their red uniforms. Here, he reasoned, was a school that got noticed and got free advertising for it. Some parents found his choice “too garish… too loud.” Years later the bougainvillaea along Hamilton Road was said to match the school’s maroon exactly.

The founding families, through the Hamilton Trust and the PTA, levelled stony ground into five playing fields. Each was named after a person: Fox after Harold Fox, the sportsman and earth-moving contractor, who lent money, machines and labour and sent his bills only when the school could pay; Tredgold after Sir Robert Tredgold, the Federal Chief Justice, who opened the school; Logan after Councillor Max Logan, a school parent and Mayor of Bulawayo; and fields for George Hepher, the first PTA chairman, and Bernard Alt, the trust’s treasurer.

The first years

The opening numbers do not agree, and they are worth showing side by side:

• Grant’s report in the first Thistle (December 1959) says the school “opened with 74 boys” and had grown to 93.
• The later chapter says there were “twenty-nine pupils on the books” for the first day, but that fifty-six turned up, all in full uniform.

Sir Robert Tredgold formally opened the school on 14 November 1959, in a downpour. He told the parents the rain was a good omen. Either way, growth was quick. By December 1960 the headmaster reported that numbers “have trebled since the school opened”. The later chapter says the roll reached 398 that year. Those two figures do not quite fit together. In 1960 the school ran nine cricket teams and twelve rugby teams, along with hockey, swimming, water polo, tennis, athletics and softball.

Highlights recorded in the school’s own account:

• Musicals. Mrs Grant started a tradition of school musicals: The Charcoal Burner’s Son, then The Pirates of Penzance (1960), which the Sunday News critic called “the most brilliant production I have seen by a Bulawayo high school” and The King and I. Boys played all the female parts until Montrose Girls’ High School opened “a bare mile away” in 1971. The two schools later staged Salad Days together in 1981.
• The orchestra. It was founded in 1962 and won an Honours award at the Bulawayo Eisteddfod. Graham Johnson played a Beethoven piano concerto with the Bulawayo Orchestra while still in Form 1, in school uniform, and went on to the Royal Academy of Music. The orchestra “finally succumbed” in 1974 as players left and too few joined.
• St John Ambulance. Mrs Doris Smith ran the school’s cadet division for sixteen and a half years after agreeing to keep it going for three months. Her team won the national cadet competition at its first attempt, in Gwelo in 1966. Her account names more than twenty of her cadets and what they went on to do.
• Sport. Roy McLoughlin went from the under-15A cricket side in 1963 to the Rhodesian senior team. David Smith became Hamilton’s first Springbok. Bruce Grobbelaar played football for Rhodesia and later kept goal for Liverpool.
• The school hall was paid for partly by a sponsored walk on Sunday 10 August 1969, when more than 700 people raised three thousand dollars. It opened in 1972.

Ian Grant left in 1966 to become Deputy Secretary of Education. E. C. W. (Colin) Silcock came from Plumtree and led the school until the end of 1975. J. P. B. (Brendan) Armstrong followed from Umtali Boys’ High. The chapter credits Miss Ruth Divine, who had taught for more than fifty years, with “much of this present history.”

What the photographs show

The gallery pages from around 2005 show the front office, the school kombi, the Hamilton Hall with its thistle emblem, and a ship model displayed at the front office.

What we don’t know yet

Everything after about 1983 is missing here: the school’s first years after independence, its changing intake and the teachers who carried it through. The magazines in this collection stop in 1983. If you were at Hamilton, or taught there, in any decade, we would like to hear what you remember.

26 photographs of Hamilton High School →