Plumtree School

Outside the city, about 100 km south-west of Bulawayo at Plumtree, on the border with Botswana. · From 1902

Also known as Plumtree High School, Plumtree.

Boarding school founded in 1902 for the children of railway workers on the line from Mafeking to Bulawayo; shaped for thirty years by its headmaster Robert Hammond.

Plumtree is a hundred kilometres from Bulawayo, on the border with Botswana. For generations, though, many Bulawayo boys boarded there, and most of them arrived and left by the same railway that created the school.

A school for the railway

Plumtree School began in 1902 under the Railway Mission, to educate the children of the men building and running the line from the south. The first classes were held in a rondavel in the garden of Mr and Mrs S. J. Smith, whose nine children were the first pupils. Lessons then moved to the dining room of the Plumtree Hotel and to a room in the customs house before the school had its own site.

“maTambo”

In 1906 the school appointed Robert Hammond as headmaster. He stayed about thirty years, and Plumtree is still described as the school he made. The boys called him maTambo. The school’s main hall is named after him.

The boarding houses, whose names appear on the placards in this set, were built over half a century: Milner (1911), Lloyd (1924), Grey (1926), Gaul (1941), and later Hammond Hall. The school motto is Ad Definitum Finem.

What the photographs show

The photographs in this set show the school gate and front gate, the school’s centenary placard, the office and courtyard, the hall entrance, the school bus, volleyball courts, the houses with their placards (Grey, Lloyd, Gaul and Milner), the headmaster’s house, staff housing, Hammond Hall, and a First World War memorial stone laid by Prince Arthur of Connaught.

What we don’t know yet

What the railway journey from Bulawayo to Plumtree was like at the start and end of every term, and what life as a boarder was like in each decade. If you were at Plumtree, we would like to hear what you remember. Since 2016 the school has also admitted girls, so we would like to hear from them too.

33 photographs of Plumtree School →