Hillside School

From 1910

Also known as Hillside Junior School, Leander Avenue School, The Hillsidian.

Government junior school that began in 1909 as a private class in the Hepburns' house in Hillside, became a government school on 1 April 1910, and moved in 1950 to Cecil Avenue and Hillside Road.

Hillside School began with brown paper. In 1909 the nearest schools were four miles away, and there was no regular transport. So Mr and Mrs T. Hepburn, who lived in Hillside, wrote to a teacher in Cape Town, Miss B. Hull, and asked her to come and start a school. She brought what equipment she could. Even so, when she opened the school in a room of the Hepburns’ house, “large sheets of brown paper had to be used as a blackboard.”

This history comes from a remarkable source: a short history of the school written for its Golden Jubilee in 1960 by a teacher, Mr G. McLoughlin. He gathered it, as he put it, “from peoples’ memory,” because “there are very few original records in existence.”

Twelve children, twelve trees

The Hepburns persuaded the British South Africa Company’s Education Department to build a government school. It was meant to open alongside Eveline and Milton in mid-1910. But Miss Hull was leaving to be married, so a new headmistress, Miss Botting, came up from Cape Town and opened it a term early, on 1 April 1910. Mr Foggin of the Education Department met the children and parents on the verandah.

There were twelve pupils, and the history names every one: Dorothy, Charles and Kathleen Duncan; Herbert, Frank, Joseph, Muriel and Frances Sherry; Isobel McCalman; Edwin and Ella Harley; and George Stowes. They ranged from kindergarten to Standard 2, in five divisions, with a single teacher. On Empire Day they planted the first trees around the school: twelve trees, one for each child, given by Mr T. Cook.

An inspector, R. McIntosh, visited in those first months. He wrote that the nature work “is easily the best I have seen in Matabeleland” and that “teachers of Miss Botting’s type are rare.” She left in 1912, and Miss Bishop, a teacher from Eveline, took over.

Growing with the suburb

The history follows the school’s slow early growth: 19 pupils in 1911, 27 in 1914, 50 in 1920, 63 seventeen years after opening, and 96 in 1933. There were rondavels for the headmistress, a rented house for country boarders, and Brownies and Wolf Cubs from 1925. The whole school lined the Matopos Road with Union Jacks for the Prince of Wales in 1925. He “sped past at terrific speed and hardly noticed the children who were very disappointed.” In 1926 they climbed a kopje to watch Sir Alan Cobham’s aeroplane land on the racecourse. At about that time the badge was designed with the help of a neighbour, Mr Lucas. Its hills were meant to be the rounded Matopos, but they came back from the English maker pointed, “and has remained unchanged ever since.”

After the Second World War, Bulawayo grew fast and so did Hillside. Mr S. Pearson became head in 1948. By 1949 there were more than 180 children, and Standard V was taught on the verandah. A new school was built at the corner of Cecil Avenue and Hillside Road. The Education Department wanted to call it Hillcrest School, but parents insisted on keeping the name Hillside. The old building in Leander Avenue became Leander Avenue School. At the start of 1950 the whole school moved: “staff, children, trophies and G.P. funds.” By 1954 it had 840 children.

The Prime Minister, Garfield Todd, opened the school’s £5,000 swimming pool on 14 November 1953. The Assembly Hall was finished in the Golden Jubilee year, 1960. By then the school had about 700 children and 25 staff on 40 acres.

Hillsidians

The 1960 magazine was proud of one old pupil above all: Natalie Steward, who “first showed her prowess at swimming whilst at Hillside” and had just won two Olympic medals in Rome. Among the pupils who gained music-exam distinctions that year was a boy called Graham Johnson, at Grade IV piano. Hamilton’s history tells of a Graham Johnson who played a Beethoven piano concerto with the Bulawayo Orchestra while in Form 1 and went on to the Royal Academy of Music. It may well be the same boy.

The same issue captures a moment of its time. Under the heading “The Wind of Change,” the headmaster described a football match against McKeurtan School. He hoped “the seeds of a better understanding between the partners of this great multi-racial society are being sown in fertile soil.” The school itself was still for white children only.

What we don’t know yet

• Hillside after 1960: when it first admitted children of every race, and how it changed.
• The first twelve. Do any families of the Duncans, Sherrys, McCalmans, Harleys or Stowes know these stories?
• Leander Avenue School. What became of the original building?

If you were at Hillside School, as a child, a teacher or a parent, tell us what you remember.