Milton School

From 1910

Also known as Milton High School, Milton Boys' High School, Boys' High School, Bulawayo.

Bulawayo's first government boys' high school, opened by Sir William Milton on 25 July 1910 in Borrow Street; the senior school moved to Selborne Avenue in 1927.

On the morning of 25 July 1910, the pupils of two new Bulawayo schools were told to assemble at the Eveline High School at nine o’clock. At ten, Sir William Milton, the Administrator, and Lady Milton opened both buildings. The Mayor gave each of them a silver key. The Loyal Women’s Guild had given each school a Union Jack, and when the speeches were over, as the school’s own account of the day puts it, “the doors were formally unlocked and the flag hoisted.”

The Jubilee magazine says both schools were named after Sir William and Lady Milton: the boys’ school took the Administrator’s name, and the girls’ school became Eveline.

Before 1910

Milton did not begin from nothing. The Golden Jubilee magazine of 1960 traces it to a small co-educational school started in Bulawayo in 1896, which moved to the building that later became St Gabriel’s Home and then to St John’s, where it was known as St John’s School. When that mixed school outgrew itself, R. A. Fletcher, father of Sir Patrick Fletcher, pressed the British South Africa Company to build a proper government school in Borrow Street. Sir William Milton laid the foundation stone himself.

For a month before the opening, a notice ran every day in the Bulawayo Chronicle: “Boys’ High School, Bulawayo. Headmaster: Ernest de Beer, B.A. (Classical Tripos), late of Jesus College, Cambridge.” Fees were 20 shillings a term for Standard II and 30 shillings above Standard IV, books included. Boarding cost £10 a term, and parents wishing to see the headmaster were told to find him at the Palace Hotel.

The two schools together had 280 pupils on 1 August 1910, 321 a week later and 343 by the end of the first month. Milton itself opened with eighty boys and four masters: de Beer, Shepherd, de Lange and Gregory.

Borrow Street to Selborne Avenue

De Beer was headmaster until 1925. In those first years the school started a Cadet Corps, a Scout troop, a Literary and Debating Society (1914) and, on 23 February 1922, the Old Miltonians’ Association.

More than sixty Old Boys and seven masters served in the First World War, and thirteen were killed. The Prince of Wales unveiled the school’s war memorial on 1 July 1925.

By the mid-1920s Borrow Street was too small. On 5 August 1926 the Earl of Athlone laid the foundation stone of a new senior school on the large site between Selborne Avenue East and Third Avenue. The stone is set in the entrance hall outside the headmaster’s office. The boys moved in during the September holidays of 1927, and the Governor, Sir John Chancellor, formally opened the new school in the Beit Hall on 1 June 1928. The juniors stayed in Borrow Street as Milton Junior School.

The new site was then, in the words of one who was there, “virtually in the bush veldt”, so remote that “small game could still be shot south of Pioneer House.” The original buildings were the classroom block and library, the dining hall, the Beit Hall, and two boarding houses, Pioneer House and Charter House. Both houses still appear in this set.

Fifty years in brief, from the Jubilee magazine

• 1935 — the gymnasium is completed.
• 1938 — “Modern” forms begin alongside the Academic forms; academic boys start writing the Cambridge School Certificate.
• 1940 — the sports pavilion opens, with seating for about 150 and a squash court in the middle.
• 1939–45 — more than 900 Miltonians serve and over 115 die.
• 1946 — a Higher School Certificate course begins.
• 1953 — the swimming bath is finished after four years of fund-raising: 25 metres by 25 yards, thirteen lanes, 256,000 gallons.
• 1955 — a fire in December destroys the junior school’s library and offices, and with them all the junior school’s records.
• 1959–60 — the Beit Hall is rebuilt with a proscenium stage, and a new science block opens for a growing sixth form.

Headmasters to 1960 were E. B. de Beer, Lt-Col. J. B. Brady (from 1925), H. G. Livingstone (1931–41), L. R. Morgan (1941–42), W. Gebbie (1942–46), A. Ball (1947–52), J. H. Downing (1952–56) and C. R. Messiter-Tooze (from 1957). F. G. “Putt” Jackson served under every one of them, for more than thirty-five years.

A boy’s-eye view, 1920

The oldest magazine in this collection is The Miltonian for June 1920. Its editor, B. Baron, opens with news of what he counts among the great deeds of the world: van Ryneveld and Brand’s flight from London to the Cape. Their aircraft, the Silver Queen II, crashed on the Bulawayo racecourse, and Major Brand stayed long enough to lecture the boys about it. The editor also asks everyone to buy more copies, because the magazine had run up “quite a large deficit.”

What the photographs show

The four gallery pages were taken around 2005. They show the main entrance and driveway, the Beit Hall, the administration offices, the Charter House and Pioneer House hostels, the dining hall, the Sixth Form buildings and the tennis and basketball courts. They also show the Diamond Jubilee Pavilion, opened on 31 March 1975, and a mosaic by Lorraine Coates presented for the school’s 75th anniversary. A plaque records that the Hon. R. S. Garfield Todd accepted the mosaic.

What we don’t know yet

The magazines in this collection run from 1920 to 1991, with gaps: nothing from 1928–39 or 1964–71, and only scattered issues after 1980. We know very little about Milton after independence from the inside: who taught there, what changed, what stayed the same. If you were at Milton in any decade, especially the 1980s or after, we would like to hear what you remember and see what you kept.

35 photographs of Milton School →