Montrose Girls' High School

From 1971

Also known as Montrose High School, Bulawayo South Girls' High School.

Girls' high school on Dundee and Van Riebeck Drives, opened January 1971 — the first new girls' high school in Bulawayo for twenty-one years — under founding headmistress Miss J. E. Behrmann.

Montrose’s first pupils had to travel to another school. The buildings on the corner of Dundee and Van Riebeck Drives were not ready. So on 19 January 1971, 108 girls boarded two buses in a torrential rainstorm and rode seven miles to Newmansford School, where they would spend their first term. The school’s own history records that they “complained bitterly” the whole way about their muddy new shoes. It also says that sharing the daily bus with their teachers gave the new school a closeness that lasted.

A school that began with a protest

In 1969, parents in Bulawayo’s southern suburbs read in the press that Hamilton, the boys’ high school in Famona, was to become co-educational. A series of meetings followed. The last of them, in the Henry Low School hall, is described in the school’s own history as “a somewhat acrimonious occasion.” Ministry officials were left in no doubt about what parents wanted. The policy changed, and planning began for a separate Bulawayo South Girls’ High School, a sister school for Hamilton that had first been discussed in the Federation years.

Miss J. E. Behrmann, who was lecturing in secondary education at the Teachers’ College, was appointed headmistress on 23 July 1970. She went to see the site that winter afternoon and found “the windswept slope of leafless trees and brown grass” hard to imagine as a school. On 10 August 1970 the Mayor, Councillor Max Logan, and H. E. Pegg each planted a pepper tree at the corner of the grounds.

Naming, badge and opening

At the first PTA meeting, held at Hamilton on 15 February 1971, parents proposed the name Montrose Girls’ High School and chose the plumbago as the emblem. The Ministry approved the name in May. In August it accepted the badge: a Greek cross carrying a sprig of plumbago and the letter M, in blue and white. The school motto, on the front gate in this set, is Integrity, Courtesy, Effort.

In the April–May holidays the school moved into its own administration block and six classrooms. The ground was “unusually rough, stony and uncompromising,” but the caretaker, Mr Hung, his groundsmen and the parents had lawns and rockeries in place by October. The Minister of Education, A. P. Smith, formally opened the school on 23 October 1971 and gave the girls a day’s holiday. The plaque from that day appears in the 2005 photographs.

Until their own facilities were built, Montrose girls did athletics on Hamilton’s fields and swam, played tennis, debated and sang at Henry Low. Their first hockey match was against Northlea’s Form 1A, and Montrose won.

The first decade

• The Business Game. Montrose won the Matabeleland District Society of Chartered Accountants’ Business Game in 1977, its first year, and again in 1979.
• Civic life. Between 1978 and 1982, every Junior Mayoress of Bulawayo came from Montrose except one year, 1979, when a Montrose girl was deputy.
• Gymnastics. The school won the national inter-school competition in 1979, 1980 and 1981. J. MacSephney won a gold medal in South Africa in 1979.
• Stage. The Boyfriend was produced in 1977, and Salad Days with Hamilton in 1981.

In her prize-giving speech of 25 October 1977, Miss Behrmann welcomed the Mayor, Councillor Mrs Sharland, as only the second woman to be mayor of Bulawayo, and called her “an excellent example of what a girl can achieve.”

Miss Behrmann retired in April 1981 after ten years. The library was named the Elizabeth Behrmann Library in her honour on 7 April 1981.

Head girls to 1980

The first head girl appointment was L. Authers, in 1975. The roll printed in the 1980s history continues with C. B. Rivett (1977), A. Brodie (1978), S. Weatherley (1979) and S. McCrindle (1980).

What the photographs show

The 2005 photographs show the front gate with the badge and motto, the commemorative plaque from 23 October 1971, the three-storey classroom block, the library, the science laboratories, the front office, the tuck shop, the staff room and the basketball courts.

What we don’t know yet

The magazines in this collection run from 1977 to 1993, but nothing here yet tells the school’s story after 1982. When did Montrose first admit girls of every race? Who led it through the 1980s and 1990s? If you studied or taught at Montrose, we would like to hear what you remember, and to fill in the head girls from 1981 onwards.

30 photographs of Montrose Girls' High School →